WEBINAR: BUILDING THE SALES TEAM YOU NEED

The start of production season is upon us, which usually means sales are top of mind. When you think about your sales team, do you have the right players and processes in place for success, or are you still carrying much of the weight on your shoulders?

Whether in the very early grassroots stage of your business or already on the journey to establish standard operating processes and sustainability, usually sales is the last hat any entrepreneur takes off. Understanding and making the right steps in the growth stage is crucial to obtain enterprise level.

Our CEO, Ryan Groth, alongside Benji Carlson, Assessment Specialist at Breakthrough Academy, Curt Janzen CEO of Beyond Group, and Toby Woodiwiss, owner of Woodiwiss Painting, discussed building a contractor’s dream business fueled by systemizing to scale.

BIGGEST CHALLENGES FOR A SALES TEAM

While each person will find different facets of this process more daunting than others, the most common challenges faced by a sales team are:

• The lack of team buy-in to a sales process.

When there is a lack of strategy and the team isn’t running the same plays, the process becomes ununified and dilutes your brand. By getting your team to buy in, you provide them the opportunity to see themselves in a different light and achieve a level of success they might not have thought was possible. At Woodiwiss Painting, after adopting STG’s proven processes, the highest sales performer sold $745,000 in Q4 with an average job size of $12,000.

• The owner is still doing the lion’s share of sales.

It’s hard to hand over the vision and story of the business you created. By having a clear understanding of who you are, what you want to be and your specific value-add to clients, you can make a robust sales process that will allow you to train your sales force and scale properly.

• Trying to land 100% of jobs that come in.

Understand and stick to your sweet spot. Identify your best clients and the best margins and go after those; don’t just hunt for everything and anything. Hunting for the right clients allows you to produce more work with less.

• Inconsistent sales throughout the year.

The ability to train and have a system in place allows sales team members to come in and hit the ground running, ultimately leading the production team to produce as much as possible. Leveraging this process while introducing friendly competition allowed Woodiwiss Painting to produce 3x more this January than any other year, completely selling out a historically lower cycle time.

PROFILE OF AN EXCELLENT SALESPERSON

The most common myth is that excellent salespeople are great talkers. While strong communication skills are necessary, it’s all for not if they cannot learn emotional intelligence and build true connections with prospects and clients.

Questions do the selling. Great salespeople ask great questions. Real selling happens in those moments when you ask specific questions in a certain way that connects with the customer. Salespeople need to take the emotional energy away from the customer and carry it themselves to prove your company can truly solve their pain points.

Emotional intelligence as the driving force, social awareness, true motivation from a positive place, and matching your company’s values round out the best profile for an excellent salesperson.

BUILD A SUCCESS-BREEDING SALES CULTURE

To ensure a consistently successful sales culture, it must start at the top. Transform the way you lead sales with a strong system such as STG’s that enables better coaching to create a high-performing sales culture. Form an environment that fosters teamwork, growth and change.

Talent matters. Invest in your people to help them grow by systemizing your approach and celebrating your successes, leading to open and honest expectations and communication, more motivation and drive, and better performance from your current team. Bring in good people willing to follow the process with clearly defined visible metrics. Layout who you are and what metrics matter and review them regularly, so the team knows how they are performing and what needs adjusting to ensure they are achieving the expected goals.

We enable a supportive culture where you can scale quickly and produce more with the team you have in place. Following these steps with our help, Beyond Group noticed substantial gains from their sales team. One team member was able to turn 1.3 million in sales in 2020 to 2.9 million the following year. Another turned $916K to 1.48 million, and a new team member who joined with zero experience in the industry but learned through the STG process closed 44% in their first year.

MUST-HAVES TO BUILD A GREAT SALES TEAM

If you want to build a great sales team, you need to identify what GREAT looks like and means for you. After making that determination, reserve engineer your approach, creating a sales system that achieves your definition of great. This sales system will act as your lifeline, allowing you to train, measure success, identify gaps, track performance and provide coaching to develop your team continually.

In addition to your system, hold your team accountable and build real relationships with your salespeople. Besides understanding their forecast’s depth, leveraging our boot camps allows you to drive and invest in these deeper relationships. Now when holding your team accountable, they will know this comes from a place of caring and not fear.

Contact Sales Transformation Group today to bring your sales dream team to life.