Your Guide to Sales Team Management

The business market is more competitive than ever, and competition breeds excellence, right? Well, maybe! We believe that a skilled sales team leader does have the power and position to drive an organization's growth and success - if they are equipped with the right tools and the right team.

Enter the Fireberry Guide to Sales Team Management. Assembled by a team of sales management leaders with decades of combined experience, it is designed to grant you insights and strategies for building and managing a leading, thriving sales team. Whether you are a seasoned team manager aiming to enhance your existing skills, or a newcomer seeking a strong starting point - we guarantee that there is something in here for you.

The first section of this guide will focus on building a strong foundation for your team. We'll discuss the importance of setting clear goals and objectives and of course, how to achieve them. Understanding and perfecting the recruitment process will give you the skills to structure the ideal team for your needs, and we will delve deeply into that as well. 

After laying the groundwork, we'll move onto kick-starting operations where you will learn how to propel your team towards effective and productive work. We will shed light on your day-to-day responsibilities as a manager and outline the regular tasks you will need to undertake during the workweek. Nurturing your team's skills is crucial to continued success. The final part of this section will teach you to foster both professional and personal skills among your team members as well as how to groom them for managerial roles (when relevant).

Once your team is operating smoothly, it's time to monitor their performance. The final chapter of this guide will discuss tactics for monitoring performance and making data-driven decisions. We'll also touch upon major challenges you may encounter as a manager and suggest actionable approaches to tackle them.

Managing a sales team demands not only leadership skills and strategic thinking, but also a thorough understanding of sales processes themselves. The goal of this guide is to arm you with practical insights into sales processes and team management that are ready for day-to-day implementation, to aid you in constructing and leading an exemplary team.

Let's explore how to sculpt a winning team together.

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Building a Strong Team Infrastructure

A solid and strong foundation is the key factor in determining the success of a team, so It stands to reason that the first step in managing a successful sales team is building a healthy operational infrastructure. This infrastructure is constructed of four building blocks: objectives and goals, team structure, employee recruitment, and tool selection. Let's dive into each one.

Objectives and Goals

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Having clearly defined objectives and goals is the. only. way. to ensure that the team's efforts are always correctly directed and prioritized. In order to do this, the overarching organizational objectives need to be determined and of course, once they are determined, you need to determine how you will measure the team’s progress and success towards reaching these objectives by selecting metrics.

These metrics must be measurable and achievable. 

Selecting your metrics and orienting them with your objectives can be difficult as there are many forms that the metrics can take. You can choose to measure success by sales volume, number of new clients, client retention, transaction volume, conversion rate, the duration of a sale, and more. Which of these metrics truly reflects your progress in reaching your goals? 

Once you determine the metrics, you can assign objectives and tasks. Every task should be oriented towards an objective. Allocate resources only to objectives. If there is no clear connection between a task and an objective… For example, your main objective might be increasing your online customer base by 20%, and a relevant task for your team can be to increase SDR efforts by volume. 

Create S.M.A.R.T objectives:

Specific: Make sure each goal is clear, detailed, and has a specified outcome.

Measurable: Use objectives with numeric goals so you can measure their success.

Attainable: Create achievable and realistic goals, so you can accomplish them.

Relevant: Choose objectives which achieve the overarching company goals.

Time-Bound: Set deadlines for each part of your goal to ensure its completion.

Source: Harvard Health Publishing

Sales Team Structure 

Once there are set goals and objectives, planning the ideal team structure that addresses these targets becomes the next step. When designing the structure of your team, consider the following factors:  

• Sales Process: Understand the sales process, its complexity, and the stages it includes. For example, is the SDR role considered a part of the marketing department, or is it an element of the sales process?  
• Customer Segmentation: Categorize your customer base into segments based on customer types, preferences, behaviors, location, and more.  
• Expertise Needed: Identify the professional specializations you need, such as deal closures, account management, presales, business development, etc.  
• Team Size: How many team members are needed to achieve the set objectives?  

After determining the structure, define clear roles and responsibilities for each team member, establish jurisdiction boundaries, collaborations, and metrics.  

Employee Recruitment

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Finding and successfully recruiting the right employees for the organization is the true key to success. 

When do you think the recruitment process starts?

Contrary to what most people believe, the process actually begins with crafting the job description itself. Simply speaking, you need to define the job right to attract the right people with the right skills. If you’re unsure of where to start, look at networking sites, job boards, and job listing aggregators for inspiration. Identify repeating terminology and descriptions. Search for the roles that you’re hiring for, and make sure the job descriptions are consistent with the skills and experience you need. 

When crafting your job description, consider factors like familiarity with specific products or industries, interpersonal relationships, and problem solving abilities. Describe  the work style and company culture. 

An important and often overlooked step of the recruitment process is marketing the role itself. Once the job is published on your site, share it! Most companies today share job posts using social media channels, paid campaigns, or by collaborating with online job boards. Many companies encourage their current employees to share job listings as well, and offer bonuses for successful hires. Remember, you might have a great company and an incredible job offer, but it won’t matter if you can’t get the word out far enough. 

Once you reach the interview process, make sure that the candidates fit the professional requirements and your organization's culture. Sales teams tend to see high turnover, so it's crucial to identify red flags during the recruitment phase. Once you come across the right candidate, secure their commitment before someone else does.  

Recruit the right people. On average, 10% of salespeople account for 80% of sales. 

Source: BDN

Sales Tools and Sales Solution Selection

Choose the right tools; sales team tools are a crucial factor for success. The primary tools that sales teams use include:

CRM: A centralized system where you manage all existing customers, opportunities, leads, and customer information. Some common CRM examples are Salesforce, Pipedrive, and Fireberry. Choosing a flexible CRM that's user-friendly, allows customization, and integrates well with many other tools will help your organization to scale and grow.
 

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Sales Engagement: These are tools that allow monitoring and managing outreach to prospects via email or phone. For instance, Outreach or Salesloft. For outreach on LinkedIn, there's Sales Navigator. 

Data Enrichment: These are tools for enriching information about customers and prospects, like ZoomInfo or Lusha.

Proposal Management: These are tools for managing documentation, like DocuSign or PandaDoc.

There are many more tools that can enhance and upgrade the sales team's work. The more you facilitate the team's work with helpful tools, the quicker and better results you'll see. A CRM also comes in handy as a useful tool to connect the data from all of these other tools, giving your team a true 36-degree view of their operations.

Source: CRM.org

Sales Strategies and Techniques

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You've successfully set goals and successfully recruited a team. Now what? To get the team running smoothly, the next step is to communicate your sales strategies and techniques. 

Prepare a sales strategy. The strategy should include a characterization of the target market, an explanation of the unique added value your product or service provides, positioning of the company and product versus the competition, sales objectives, and working tactics. 

Once you have a strategy, break it down into content pieces that are easy for the team to read and use daily, such as work guides, playbooks, presentations, etc. Make sure that these materials are distributed and accessible to all members of the team and encourage the team to continuously update the playbooks and guides with real examples. Meet regularly to share experiences and keep the resources fresh. If you provide a safe space for lively discussion, knowledge-sharing, collaboration, and question-asking; your team will never stop growing and learning. 

Parallel to the holistic view of the team as a whole, it's important to take the time to invest in each team member individually. Clearly delegate tasks to each member while tying them to the team's overarching goals. When assigning tasks, consider the type of role, workload, and each team member's skill set. Find ways to make each team-member shine. 

Most importantly, ensure every team member knows their performance metrics. 

Allow your employees freedom in task management. Leading salespeople spend an average of 6 hours a week researching their prospects.

Source: HubSpot

Daily Management of your Sales Team

The team is operating according to the strategy and plans that you constructed. Excellent! But your work here is not done yet. Your role as the team leader is to provide support, motivation, and momentum. Having a CRM in place can help you stay up to date and even give you early warning signs. To achieve this, consider the following steps:

• Monitor the team's performance as a whole
• Track the pipeline, including revenue assessment, conversion rates, transaction volumes, and monthly and quarterly statuses.

• Hold 1:1 meetings with each team member to track their progress, provide feedback, address concerns, and offer guidance.
• Conduct team meetings to discuss team-related matters, share updates, and allow team members to raise issues.
• Collaborate with other departments, especially the marketing department, to ensure there are sufficient quality leads for the team.
• Monitor sales processes to identify issues and bottlenecks, and find solutions.
• Publicize the team's achievements within the organization, including awarding prizes and complimenting team members to boost motivation.
• Create opportunities for the personal and professional development of team members.
• Engage in conversations with prospects and clients to ensure you are familiar with the market and the experiences of your team.
• Conduct ongoing market and trend research to recognize changes that might impact your team.
• Research competitors to identify areas of improvement and ensure you have a competitive edge.
• Design and manage reward and commission plans for employees.

Source: Spotio

Building Skills within the Sales Team

As managers, it's crucial that you invest time and energy in the professional and personal development of your team members. This means both targeted training and encouraging individual professional learning. To decide what content to teach, look at the performance data of the team and identify where improvement is needed. A way to optimize the team’s buy-in is to ask them directly about which areas they would like to strengthen. If you feel there's a need for alignment on a certain topic, or if there are new areas that you want the team to explore, include it in the training as well.

There are so many ways to make team training sessions fun and interesting today. If you have the budget, bring in external consultants to run workshops. If you want to encourage team-building, have your team members create and share presentations. Promote stronger organization connections by having other teams present to your team. And of course, you can present as well. 

While there’s no magical threshold to achieve optimum skilling-up and training, It's beneficial to establish a routine where there is training taking place at least once a quarter. You can even fit it into already scheduled meetings like a QBR or SKO.

Self-learning should also be encouraged. Emphasize the importance of professional development to foster a culture of learning. Cultivate this by giving employees access to learning resources, such as courses, e-books, podcasts, etc., by promoting knowledge sharing in team meetings, and by encouraging employees to attend sales-related conferences. Create a safe space in which team members can make mistakes and emphasize the importance of learning from them.

Throughout your work with the team, you will identify standout members who have the potential to grow into managerial roles. These are individuals with exceptional decision-making, communication, planning, strategic thinking, leadership, and problem-solving skills. It's worthwhile to nurture these employees to realize their potential through mentoring, development programs, and extra responsibilities.

Source: Brevet

Team Performance Monitoring

Organizations as a whole are no strangers to performance based evaluation. Sales teams, however, are held to rigorous performance based standards. As a manager, it's crucial to conduct continuous and ongoing monitoring of the sales results and the team performance. Provide immediate and continuous feedback to enhance work and morale. Always know the numbers. The most vital tool for performance monitoring across the entire organization is the CRM. 

The CRM will give you access to the entire sales process and pipeline. You can view individual opportunities and accounts, and you can generate specific reports to give you the data for the specific metrics you’re tracking. How many calls were made this month? How is the MOM? How long are deals being stalled in the pipeline? What are this quarter’s closure forecasts? To name a few. 

It's essential to pay special attention to the sales funnels and leads at every stage to make sure that leads are progressing to opportunities and deal closures. The quicker that you can Identify bottlenecks, the sooner you can develop strategies to enhance conversion rates and accelerate the lead's movement through the funnel.

It might take some time to create these custom dashboards, but the automation feature will assist you in streamlining the process and ensure you always have access to the information you need. Once the dashboards are set up, you’re good to go (at least until you discover some new metric you want to track!)

Observing your team’s efforts in approaching their unique and joint goals is wonderful, but the greatest value of the data collection through the CRM is its use in the identification of trends and patterns. With these insights you can discern which sales strategies are more successful, which geographical regions are underperforming, trends and seasonality, etc. You can pinpoint what is hurting and what is helping, fast.

The data you monitor should inform your decisions regarding plans and strategies, the tools in use, and improving the performance of team members. Always be open to trying innovative and fresh ideas, optimizing based on what succeeds and what doesn't.

Overview and Future Perspectives

Sales teams differ from one another in the markets they target, the type of customers they focus on, the types of organizations they operate within, and the products they sell. However, there are also many commonalities among sales teams across all organizations. We have tried to capture these shared elements in this guide. From building a strong infrastructure to daily management, from skill development to performance monitoring, from team formation to addressing challenges, this guide covers strategies and insights that will help you lead your team to excellent results.

As team leaders, we encourage you to continue learning about the management and development of sales teams from a variety of sources. Many resources (like the Fireberry Blog) are available online, in addition to the multiple online communities, conferences, thought leaders, and more. Continuous learning and sharing your findings with other team leaders are key to the growth and success of your team and yourself. Never stop moving forward. 

We'd love to hear from you about which tips worked for you and what you would recommend for us to include in the next version of this guide. Please write to us.

The business market is more competitive than ever, and competition breeds excellence, right? Well, maybe! We believe that a skilled sales team leader does have the power and position to drive an organization's growth and success - if they are equipped with the right tools and the right team.