10 tips to improve sales efficiency

Modjo is in continuous contact with Sales, Customer Success or Account Managers.

We took the month of August to ask them about their best practices, and here are the top 10 things that make them top managers.

Here they are:

Ongoing recruitment

Part of a sales manager's role is to separate themselves from poor performers.

Maintaining a perpetual pool of candidates minimizes the impact of turnover on the team's bottom line and gives you more freedom to make the right decisions. Even more expensive, recruiting the best salespeople is also critical.

A team of average salespeople will perform at best as well as you do; whereas a team of top guns will develop skills beyond your imagination.

Knowing how to sell & Sell

As an exception to the rule, a manager must be a good salesperson. Spending a small part of his time selling allows him to keep his expertise and stay in direct contact with his customer base.

This expertise is put to direct use at two moments: customer crisis situations, and mid-funnel opportunities.

In the first case, the best managers intervene to control the situation.
In the second case, to maximize the conversion rate of opportunities, and to help their team when they can still influence the deal.

Coaching based on re-listening to customer conversations

The best sales managers spend more than half their time viewing customer meetings and coaching their team.

Beyond the pitch, they pay attention to the details of the sale or post-sale: the customer's posture, the words used by the collaborator in the visios and e-mails, the energy level of the participants.

On each interaction reviewed, they discuss with the person concerned what went well or could be improved.

Any moment is a good moment for coaching, and every coaching done is a confidence and productivity booster for the team.

Motivate & Inspire to Success

The best managers are also leaders. Motivating teams is based on 3 pillars: providing clarity, projecting a common success and creating energy on a daily basis.

It may seem obvious, but few managers understand that everyone has different motivational drivers.

The best managers invest time in understanding each of their employees, and depending on their introverted or extroverted personality, act on the right levers (private or public attention).

Follow "leading" metrics

It is well known that the quality of a strategy is seen in its execution.

The best managers only follow a few metrics, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

Instead of focusing on lagging KPIs, such as revenue, the best managers focus on developing healthy behaviors in their teams, through leading KPIs:

Number of customer appointments per week.
Number of hours of re-listening and training.

Plan an accurate pipeline

The best managers achieve their objectives because they know how to extract the right visibility on their opportunities, thanks to a rigorous hygiene of their forecast.

Because of this, they have a critical view of their team's conversion rate, can support them to convert more or faster, and challenge the need for new opportunities.

They spend at least an hour a week with each of their team members, discussing the actions of each critical opportunity.

Imposing a business rhythm

Good managers know how to build an accurate forecast, but the best know how to control it, by influencing the pace of the business.

A sales team performs best in an environment with a weekly routine, such as Monday morning business reviews or Friday training sessions.

The best managers use the tools at their disposal to track weekly performance and progress, so that employees don't become unfocused.

Balancing rules and exceptions

Sales teams need a framework to approach, qualify and sign with a customer.

The best managers know how to impose standard processes on teams. They know how to handle highly competitive profiles, taking regular feedback and clearing up issues before they get backed into a corner.

They also know that too many rules, or rules that are too sophisticated, defocus teams: they fight internally to keep processes and compensation plans simple and limited in number.

Collaborate with other functions

A sales manager must be able to spend 5% of his time giving and receiving visibility internally. He knows that at some point he will need the support of cross-functional teams, and needs to engage them in their customer reality as frequently as possible, in order to activate them quickly when needed.