Four tips for driving sales

Docurated recently compiled the results of 34 interviews with top efficiency experts to hear what they had to say about improving the performance of their sales teams. While the experts mentioned everything from creating a process that doesn’t hinder sales, to providing reps with the right tools to sell, more than half of the experts surveyed talked about influencing sales behaviors.

Here are four key tips that came out of Cobhan Phillipson’s research in All Things Productivity:

Hire the right people – it may sound obvious, but determining who’s really going to succeed before you hire them is harder than you might think. You need to understand what type of person will thrive at your organization and in this role, and what behaviors are required, not just skills.
Get to know them – the better you know your salespeople, the better you can motivate them, help them overcome obstacles and become successful. You need to know their strengths, where they struggle and what makes them really shine.
Motivate and inspire them – motivation is critical for salespeople since they face rejection so often. While many reps are driven by money, more are motivated by success and recognition. Unless you know their hot buttons and provide constant positive feedback, figuring out how to keep them pounding the pavement can be a challenge.
Get them to work as a team – although salespeople are naturally competitive, getting them to work together can help drive sales – but not all reps are likely to be collaborators so be sure to find that out before you hire them.

BAO is a market-leading appointment setting, account intelligence, and lead generation service provider. Sales is in their DNA, and their performance-based model means they a need full bench of exceptional salespeople. But they don’t necessarily hire candidates with sales backgrounds. As the careers page on their website attests, “Before we look for experience, we look for character, determination and passion.”

So how have they been able to build one of the strongest sales organizations in the industry?

Behavioral profiling.

Jessica Pilat, VP of Marketing at BAO, explains: “We know the behaviors that drive successful sales teams. Identifying people who exhibit those behaviors opens up the candidate pool beyond the traditional resume-check and enables us to hire a high-performing team from diverse backgrounds.”