Building A Top Notch Sales Team

As any company grows, there's a need to build up the different departments in the organizational chart. You need these various functions to get more specialized, more organized and focused. One of the main areas that you will need to concentrate on for your business to grow even more is sales. You won't just need a sales person, you need a team. And this team will have to function according to a few guidelines which have been set down. These will typically have to take into account your company's policy, its short-term and long-term sales projections and the image you want your brand and the company to convey.

The first thing to do is to get yourself a sales team. Then, you have to evaluate them. It's only after they've been with you for a while that you will be able to evaluate their performance and see if anything needs changing. This is especially important when you are poised on the threshold of growth. Can your existing team fuel future growth? Or do you need to add to the team? Do you perhaps need to change the team? Or the direction the team is heading in? As a precursor to this step, you will need to sit down and be clear about your objectives for the company. What do you expect from it? Is your business such that you expect them to just follow up on your direct mail or email campaigns? Or do you need a more aggressive, path-breaking approach? Are they going to be the face of your company as far as the outside world is concerned? Is the image of your company resting on their shoulders? Depending on what they are expected to do comes their training. From this also flows what they can do and cannot do. If they are making a lot of personal house calls, it stands to reason that they cannot manage 100 calls a day as they would perhaps if they were doing telemarketing.

Finally, there has to be some criteria set up to measure productivity. Does it matter how much work they do or how productive they are? Productivity has to be measured not in terms of volume of work or number of hours but in terms of conversion. It all boils down to the bottom line and how much money they bring in to the company at the end of the day. Once you set the sales ball rolling in your company, you will be able to calculate the average productivity. You would do this by taking the total sales in a month and dividing it by the number of people you have on your sales team. You will then be able to see, month wise, how many are overachievers and how many are not. Depending on how much of an under-achiever a person is, it would be up to you as to when to take the call of asking him to go so as not to pull your sales team down because of lack of performance. Make sure that you do give the person some leeway however. Sometimes, the most profitable clients will come to you only after a sales person has worked on him for a long time. So you will have to carry him with you till he makes the sale. Then it's gravy days ahead for him and you!

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