Five super simple approaches to keep your sales team moving forward, and you sales numbers on cruise.
Everyone benefits when a sales team is a well-fuelled, organized, and effective machine. No team is perfect, and if you think you are, you should know that there’s always room to get better. It’s also important to note that if you are not in a mind space to effectively lead a team, then that team will never thrive to its fullest capacity.
Ryan Holiday’s Stillness is the Key, speaks to how important it is for you to make sure you aren’t clouding your days with clutter that keeps you from being your best. More specifically, we want consistent focus and wisdom that can be called upon in even the most trying situations, which is an excerpt from the book.
Take care of yourself, make sure you’re the most effective leader you can be and apply the following approaches to increase your dealership’s sales performance.
Be extravagantly ambitious.
Set goals that seem just a little out of reach. Whether it’s a certain number of new leads each week or a number of vehicle sales a month, set goals that your team can work towards and achieve when everyone pulls their weight.
It may seem daunting. After all, why would you want to set yourself up for failure? But the thing is, you won’t fail if you’re still being realistic; and it’ll feel so good when your team accomplishes what they thought they couldn’t. Think of it as a form of performance training, their confidence will go up and so will your sales.
Never miss a win.
Reward your sales team when they achieve the high goals you set. Tell them how impressed you are. Let them know you appreciate their hard work. Your team is a million times more likely to work harder when they feel integral to your bottom line. If you can, incentivize the process. Reward employees with personal time or gift cards or SOMETHING. Show them that hard work reaps rewards.
Too often do people complain about jobs that would “replace them in a heartbeat”. Don’t let your employees be a part of that group.
Keep things measurable.
As well as setting goals for the group, have your salespeople set up their own individual goals. Have set KPIs in place that everyone understands. Have a board somewhere with everyone’s, including yours, metrics are on display. Humans are prone to peacocking every now and then; use that to your (and your team’s) advantage.
It’s important that your team is aware of the give and take that comes with the job. A team without the acknowledgment of possible consequence is not a smart team.
Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines.
Everyone’s guilty of it. When there’s no deadline, you never reeeally know when to start, and since you don’t know when to start, well, you usually end up never doing it.
This isn’t about setting deadlines on your offers or events (but you should definitely put deadlines on those), this is about aligning a timeline to your set goals. Implementing deadlines goes hand in hand with being ambitious and holding your team accountable.
Set up touch points for every step of every process and be sure that your sales team is trained adequately on each one.
Think you know everything? Think again.
Read books about how to sell. Share articles with your team. Start a small library of relevant materials in the back of your staffroom. Book as many “lunch and learn” meetings as you can and encourage your team to attend. The second you decide you know everything you need you know is the second your career in sales is over.