Managing a successful sales team is no easy task. Management mistakes can affect productivity, motivation, and sales results. In this guide, we explore the 5 most common mistakes and provide practical solutions to avoid them.
1. Lack of feedback
❌ Mistake: not providing constant feedback or only reviewing results without analyzing the causes.
📌 Consequence: demotivation and decreased performance.
Solution:
✔ You need to offer regular feedback to your team. Have weekly one-on-one meetings with feedback that reinforces what they do well and constructive feedback to correct mistakes.
✔ Feedback should be continuous and weekly. You can’t just give feedback once a year during a performance review. Your team learns, improves, and stays motivated with your feedback, it’s your primary management tool..
✔ Learn to give quality feedback, it’s a simple process, but it has a technique that you need to know. If you’d like, Game Strategies offers a free course on how to give feedback in the form of a video game. Want to learn while having fun? [click here]
✔ Teach your team how to receive feedback.
✔ Build a feedback culture within your team and your company, it’s the best tool for boosting productivity.
2. Not training or updating team skills
❌ Mistake: believing experience is enough and not investing in training.
📌 Consequence: low performance, lack of adaptability, and decreasing competitiveness.
Solution:
✔ A salesperson who isn’t learning is becoming obsolete. Ensure you offer ongoing training to your team, on personal skills such as negotiation, closing, influence, persuasion, prospecting, presentations, communication, active listening, etc., on technical skills like new digital tools, CRM, sales intelligence, databases of prospects, and, of course, on product and internal sales processes.
✔ Set an example. As the team manager, you should lead by example, showing a spirit of continuous learning that they can see and replicate. Read, study, listen to podcasts, watch videos, take courses… and share interesting things with your team.
✔ Repeat, repeat, repeat. Even when they’re in front of you in a face-to-face session, the sales profile has the incredible ability to ignore your messages. You need to repeat each message as many times as necessary for it to stick with the team.
✔ To overcome boredom, use new training formats that are more interactive, fun, and engaging. Group dynamics, role-playing with AI [learn more], simulators, or training video games [learn more].
Not leveraging technology and automation
❌ Mistake: using Excel sheets or manual methods instead of a CRM. Doing everything manually instead of automating repetitive sales processes.
📌 Consecquence: loss of information, less control over the sales process, and low productivity.
Solution:
✔ If you don’t have one already, implement a professional CRM. Don’t skimp on your CRM.
✔ Analyze all the new tools available to improve sales processes, especially those with artificial intelligence. Check out the quick guide: how to increase your sales with artificial intelligence.
✔ Automate lead follow-ups.
✔ Automate repetitive tasks.
✔ Automate capturing notes and information from your meetings.
✔ Automate data interpretation and insight generation.
✔ Automate everything that can be automated.
4. Not properly incentivizing or motivating
❌ Mistake: thinking money is the only motivator.
📌 Consequence: high turnover and low productivity.
Solution:
✔ Discover what motivates each team member, it’s often as simple as asking.
✔ Use those motivational factors as management levers.
✔ Constantly vary your incentive systems. Variety and freshness will help avoid burnout and routine.
✔ Design a mixed incentive system that combines bonuses, recognition, and growth opportunities.
✔ Use gamification to mobilize your sales team’s efforts. For example, this incentive video game helped a major European bank increase its hires by 17% and boosted its sales visits by 39% [learn more].
5. Lack of clarity in goals and metrics
❌ Mistake: not defining clear goals or setting unattainable objectives.
📌 Consequence: lack of direction or demotivation.
Solution:
✔ Clearly define quantitative goals from day one that can be measured objectively.
✔ Before setting goals, try asking your team members to suggest the goals themselves, you’ll be surprised at how often they will set higher goals than you.
✔ Use their proposals as valuable input for the final objectives.
✔Make sure your goals are challenging but achievable, and, above all, that they are backed by historical data and strong reasoning.
🔄 Conclusion
Avoiding these mistakes will help you improve your sales team’s performance and motivation visit our website to discover how we can assist you.
👉 You might also be interested in: 7 Steps to optimize your sales process.
