It’s no secret that sales reps have it tough, and their jobs are only getting tougher. A 2018 State of Sales Enablement report shows that nearly 70% of respondents reported that their company’s sales process were becoming more complex. In addition, 55% reported that the increasing level of sales process complexity impacted their sales performance. With all of these extra challenges, on top of the demand to meet high sales productivity numbers and their company’s sales effectiveness expectations, sellers sometimes need something extra to stay motivated.
Luckily, sales reps are often competitive by nature. Something about the “win” invigorates and excites them. When harnessed and enabled properly, internal sales competition can drive big wins for the entire business overall. Sales management dashboards like LevelEleven provide a way to tailor the delivery of performance metrics to your sales team. To get the most out of the information, companies can use these numbers to enable a competitive spirit.
Here are some creative ways you can use performance visibility to drive positive competition among your reps that will help boost sales team performance and make your business the biggest winner of all.
Enable Reps to Promote Tradeshows and Events
Your business invests heavily in marketing events, so you might as well make the most of them. To ensure you get the highest return on those investments, spin up competitions to get your reps promoting your business’ involvement in the event. Sellers can compete over how many leads they can generate or how many deals they can close. By arming your reps with email templates and the ability to dynamically personalize their email, they will be well-equipped to spread the word about the event and challenge each other to drive the most engagement.
Support Social Media and Social Selling
When done right, social selling can be one of the most powerful tools at your reps’ fingertips, greatly increasing sales productivity and overall sales effectiveness. Studies show that 91% of B2B buyers are active and involved in social media. On top of that, 84% of senior executives use social media to support their purchase decisions and 75% of buyers say they are significantly influenced by social media. The number don’t lie, and with numbers like that, sellers should utilize their social platforms to the fullest potential.
Sadly, many reps haven’t mastered social selling and have yet to figure out the power of the tool they possess in the palm of their hand. Even if they know the value of social selling, they may not have the right material to make it happen. Successful social selling can only happen when reps have access to relevant, curated content that they can easily share through social post templates. Marketers should make it easy for them to pitch to prospects via social networks like LinkedIn in a personalized manner by providing premade messaging templates that reps can customize.
Challenge Sellers to Provide Market Insights
Your business relies heavily on being able to read the market and understand the shifting requirements of potential buyers. Sellers are often closest to this information on the front lines, but they lack the proper means or incentives to circulate that knowledge back into the rest of the business. By making it competitive, sellers will naturally strive to succeed, and your business will benefit from their intel. To start, you could challenge sellers to identify which leads, contacts, and accounts your business’ competitors are also targeting.
Inspire Improvement by Providing Best Practices
Not all of your reps are top performers, and they know it. Those in the middle of the pack are the ones that are most likely to significantly improve their efforts — and most of them really want to, but they just don’t know what high-performers are doing differently. By providing more performance visibility across the sales team, sellers will be able to see where they stand and get motivated to move up!
Take some time to watch your top sellers and note what they do throughout the day. There is often a connection between a seller’s productivity and their sales effectiveness. By doing this sort of observation and studying the data provided by sales management dashboards and sales enablement platforms, companies can find patterns that lead to sales productivity for their highest performing reps.
Once you’ve gathered some best practices, hand it over to the mid-pack sellers so that they can use it to up their game. Give your sellers a few months to implement these best practices and then compare their sales productivity to see whose numbers increased the most.
Implement Solutions to Continue Improving Performance
To make these competitions easier, you can also consider implementing a strong sales enablement plan. The ongoing process of sales enablement makes it easy to align sales and marketing teams and provides a place for both teams to work together. With a sales enablement solution, content from marketing will no longer get lost in the sea of communication channels, and reps can access it all in one place. Plus, sales enablement, along with a great sales management dashboard, can provide sellers and marketers with a wealth of analytics that can help measure overall effectiveness.
Having this kind of data can help improve sales team performance in a way that gives the company concrete numbers to see what’s working and what’s not. With sales enablement, sales leaders can easily pinpoint troublesome parts of sales processes and sellers can see where they rank and how they can improve. In this way, a strong sales enablement solution provides all the tools that a rep needs to boost their productivity and performance — and the visibility that feeds a little healthy competition to motivate them to do it going forward.
Author: Shawnna Sumaoang, Director of Marketing, Highspot
Shawnna is Director of Marketing at Highspot. Her background is in strategic development and execution of marketing and communications programs in the technology industry. Shawnna’s current mission is to elevate the role of the sales enablement to a critical business function charged with driving radical improvement in sales effectiveness.
