There's no better time than the start of a year to work on improving performance.
It's natural to feel extra ambitious at the beginning of the year. When you use that ambition correctly, it's excellent fuel to boost your sales numbers.
Ready to hit the ground running and make some sales? Here's how you can put yourself and your team in position to blow last year's numbers out of the water.
1. Get Your Team Ready
Start by taking an honest look at your current sales team. Be objective as you consider their strengths and weaknesses.
Now is the time to decide if you need to recruit more people to expand your operation.
While it isn't easy, this is also when you should consider what to do with salespeople who aren't performing up to par. Depending on what they bring to the table, that may mean providing additional training for them or finding new talent.
Just remember that a weak link holds your entire team back.
2. Solve Inefficient Processes
Quality conversations are the currency of sales growth.
Unfortunately, sales and lead management processes involves busywork and repetitive tasks of all kinds.
Now is the perfect time to take a good look at these processes and figure out where the inefficiencies are.
Is it taking too many emails to schedule a meeting or demo? Are sales reps spending too much time researching contacts on LinkedIn and Google, and not enough time on outreach? Are they wasting time manually dialing or emailing? Is communication among the sales team, or between sales and other departments inefficient?
Ask your team what they feel they are wasting time on. Ask when they feel most and least efficient. Get a handle on where processes can be fixed, or where technology and tools can automate time-consuming tasks.
3. Set Short and Long-Term Goals
Here's one of the biggest problems people have with reaching their goals – they set one huge long-term goal with nothing smaller along the way.
This makes it hard to stay on track or motivated, because there aren't any milestones to check off.
For better results, you should set both long-term sales goals, such as a goal for six months or a year down the road, as well as weekly or monthly goals that keep your team focused on a daily basis.
When you and your team have targets to aim for every week, there's always a goal right around the corner serving as motivation.
4. Use a KPI Dashboard
Having goals is important, but it's just as important to track your progress. That's where a key performance indicator (KPI) dashboard comes in.
There are all kinds of programs available that can help you monitor your team's KPIs every day.
You just set up the metrics that you want to track, and you can view them every day from the dashboard.
5. De-Clutter Your Work Space
Don't wait for spring cleaning. Clean up that clutter now. It will improve your productivity and frame of mind.
Clutter causes stress, and clutter is one of the main barriers of productivity. - Charisse Ward
So clear off that desk. Organize the notes, files, and scraps of paper that are strewn everywhere. Organize your desk drawer. And add a nice family photo or a desk plant for extra zen.
There. Now you're ready...
Wrapping Up How to Start Out the Sales Year Strong…
Getting off to a strong start can put you and your sales team on the right track for the entire year. To recap, here are a few effective ways to get more sales this year:
- Build a great sales team through recruiting, training and potentially cutting those who don't perform.
- Identify and fix inefficiencies in sales and organization processes with tecchnology or better processes.
- Figure out your long-term goals, and then decide on smaller goals to check off along the way.
- Keep track of all the important metrics on a KPI dashboard.
- Get rid of mental clutter by getting rid of work space clutter.
