Your sales team is in good shape. Your new client base is growing steadily and so are your reorder rates. Shirking modesty, you have to admit that you’re doing something right.
Now is a good time to strategize on how to build on your success. Whether you’re aware of potential improvement to be made in business development or a need to strengthen your relationship with long-term accounts, you know that all sales teams—no matter how effective they may be—benefit from a degree of fine-tuning.
Re-evaluating Sales Roles:
Successful sales organizations are comprised of many highly adaptable individuals. High adaptability is one of the marks of a great salesperson. Yet, it is nevertheless vital that management ensure that each salesperson’s role is optimally suited to their unique set of soft skills and personality type, in order to utilize each individual’s strengths most effectively and efficiently.
There may be average-performing prospectors on your team whose greatest aptitude is for detail-oriented, structured and collaborative work. As such, they may inherently be best suited for a role in client relations. Or client relations personnel whose tremendous unexploited potential for prospecting and acquisitions may be obscured by an adequate execution of their current role.
Misalignment of an individual with their sales role is an under utilization of both the individual salesperson’s,and the organization’s,potential.
Tools for Revealing Untapped Potential:
An effective method for revealing the best role for each person on your team is sales personality assessment testing. Organizations often use these tests as a valuable pre-interview screening tool to create the most promising pool of candidates. However, sales personality tests are also a useful tool for uncovering the individual strengths and weaknesses of your existing personnel. The test can be used to uncover the potential for optimum lateral movement of individuals across roles within your team. These tests are quick to administer and provide clear, concise and reliable assessment reports. Providers like Sales Test Online have even streamlined the testing process by providing an easy online testing format.
Sales assessment reports give management a clear understanding of a specific individual’s strengths and weaknesses, personality traits and work tendencies. The report will even suggest the most suitable sales role for the individual, based on their sales personality type. This allows management to play to the strengths of each person on their sales team, and ensure that their talent is being utilized most productively.
A sales personality test is also an invaluable guide to understanding the most effective method for motivating each individual salesperson. Know that when it comes to motivating your salespeople, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all coaching technique. This is why it’s essential to adapt your coaching style to suit each salesperson. Keeping the pathway of communication open will allow you to understand the specific challenges each of your team members is facing, and enable you to take measured actions to provide your team with the support they need.
Remember that recognizing and rewarding potential is always tremendously beneficial for both the organization and its team members. Allowing for lateral movement is just as important as providing your salespeople with opportunities for professional growth. Engaging and challenging each member of your team is a good way of keeping turnover low and boosting the effectiveness of your team.