Building a B2B sales team that consistently hits targets, builds lasting customer relationships, and thrives in a competitive landscape is a goal for every sales leader. However, leading a B2B sales team is a challenging balancing act of honing the right skills, having a data-driven mindset, and fostering a positive work culture. This article reveals five essential strategies to build a high-performing B2B sales team.
1. Rethink traditional sales training programs
Sales training programs must never be seen as a one-off, mandatory activity for your sales team to check off. As a sales leader, your role is to help your team get as much as possible out of each training program. Time is precious for a sales professional, so training must be valuable and personalized. Good sales training programs can sharpen your team’s skills, boost morale, and help them close deals. 80% of high-performing sales teams rate their training as very good or outstanding (Salesforce).
When building an internal training program, it’s important to:
- Assess your team’s current skill set and knowledge gaps: This can be done via surveys, assessments, or reviews of past performance.
- Develop a comprehensive training plan: This needs to be tailored to the assessment results. It’s also important to make the training fun, engaging, and accessible.
- Explore virtual training tools: Other than in-person training, teams may benefit from online sales simulations, interactive training modules, and virtual reality simulations.
- Measure and monitor the effectiveness of training: After a training session is over, measure its effectiveness through regular conversations, coaching, feedback, and evaluations with each sales professional. That way, each sales professional reaps the maximum benefits from the training.
- Touch base with each team member: Everyone in the group training session will benefit from the same training; however, each may struggle with different parts of that lesson. Therefore, one-on-one training is beneficial so you can give more personalized insights and guidance to each team member.
Another way to motivate sales professionals to participate in training programs is to offer incentives such as bonuses, promotions, recognition, or other rewards that align with the company’s goals and values. Non-monetary incentives such as additional time off, flexible work schedules, or access to special resources or projects, could also be motivating factors.
2. Foster a positive sales culture
A positive sales culture is more than just offering training and development opportunities to sales professionals. You need to continually foster a culture of teamwork, collaboration, and open communication. Sales will always be a challenging and competitive industry and can be stressful and demanding for each team member. A healthy work environment can ease the pressure significantly, promote engagement, and give team members a reason to stay. Highly engaged teams experience 59% lower turnover rates compared to teams with low engagement (Gallup).
Characteristics of a positive sales culture include:
- Communicating clearly and frequently about expectations, goals, feedback, and recognition. You also need to listen and respond to your team’s concerns, suggestions, and feedback. Set valuable themes and agendas for every meeting to ensure everyone is prepared and the time is used efficiently.
- Recognizing and rewarding your team’s efforts fosters morale, motivation, and loyalty. This can be achieved through various means, like genuine verbal praise, personalized thank-you notes, offering attractive incentives, celebrating key milestones, and sharing success stories company-wide. Remember, timely, specific, and meaningful recognition and rewards have the most impact.
- Encouraging collaboration and teamwork can foster a positive work environment where your team members share ideas, insights, resources, and best practices. You can encourage collaboration and teamwork by setting common goals, creating cross-functional teams, facilitating peer feedback, organizing team-building activities, and promoting a culture of trust and respect.
- Supporting work-life balance can help your team avoid burnout, improve their well-being, and increase their productivity and satisfaction. You can support work-life balance by offering flexible work arrangements, setting realistic expectations, respecting boundaries, providing wellness programs, and modeling healthy habits.
3. Leverage data to measure your sales team’s performance
In the fast-paced environment of B2B sales, data is abundant but often gets lost in dusty spreadsheets and forgotten dashboards. This data is a goldmine of opportunities if analyzed effectively and provides insights into a sales team’s performance. Gartner predicts that 65% of B2B sales organizations will transition from intuition-based to data-driven by 2026. By investing in modern CRM systems, improving data collection, and embracing data-driven analysis, you can unlock insights that empower your team, optimize processes, and achieve sustainable sales success.
Here is a list of essential questions that data has the answers to:
- Who are the top performers? Track metrics like conversion rates, average deal size, and sales cycle length for each member. This not only recognizes high performers but also uncovers best practices others can learn from.
- Who are the weak performers? Data exposes areas where individual team members might be struggling. Metrics like call-to-meeting rates, proposal win rates, and customer satisfaction scores can highlight areas needing improvement.
- Where can the sales process improve? Data reveals hidden patterns within your sales funnel. Analyze metrics at each stage, like lead generation sources, qualification rates, and rejection reasons. This pinpoints bottlenecks and inefficiencies, allowing you to streamline the sales process efficiently.
- How am I doing compared to my competitors? Compare your team’s performance against industry benchmarks to understand where you stand. This data-driven insight helps you identify areas for improvement and set realistic, achievable goals for your team.
4. Encourage your team to use B2B lead generation tools
Effective use of time is crucial for sales professionals, especially with generating high-quality leads in B2B sales. Therefore, working with lead generation tools can help your sales team focus on tasks that matter and spend less time on time-consuming processes like researching, prospecting, and cold calling. Plenty of affordable lead generation tools on the market provide basic contact information of prospects and nothing else.
However, Aurora Live by Management Events’ offerings not only generate high-quality leads but also arrange 1-to-1 virtual meetings with the leads of your choice.
Virtual sales meetings:
- Enable your sales team to connect with decision-makers in their target group all year round and build trusting, long-term business relationships.
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Allow sales professionals to create personalized and engaging purchasing experiences that align with the expectations of today’s decision-makers. 72% of decision-makers expect vendors to personalize the sales process to their needs (Salesforce).
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Offers prospects the flexibility to join from anywhere, anytime. There is also a higher chance that the conversation turns into a purchase discussion.
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Pushes sales professionals to dive into the pain points of decision-makers right away and present their product or service, and decision-makers are more open to it since it doesn’t overwhelm their schedules.
Virtual meetings have proved to be more productive and efficient and have become the preferred way of communicating among C-levels. 85% of decision-makers are more eager to join a 30-minute virtual meeting than an in-person meeting (LinkedIn). In addition, today’s B2B customers are less susceptible to sales gimmicks and empty promises. The customer holds more power as they are smarter and savvier with the accessibility to information and reviews online.
5. Send your team to business networking events
Closing deals shouldn’t be the only priority for a sales professional. Building long-term business relationships with prospects must also be a focus area. Therefore, set aside resources and time to allow team members to join relevant in-person business networking events. At in-person events, sales professionals can connect with prospects casually and organically and have meaningful conversations about the prospects’ challenges. In addition, prospects can also put a face to a company when they interact with sales professionals in real life.
Networking at in-person events also presents numerous opportunities for sales professionals to reignite connections with cold leads and nurture them into deals. The Demand Generation Report noted that events are the most effective lead generation strategy, at 68%.
You need to know which attendees are within your target market so you can focus on networking with the right people. In sales, a buyer persona is your biggest asset and can lead to a 171% increase in sales for companies as they understand who their target market is (Zipdo).
