How to standardise your sales team performance in 10 steps

As a sales leader, you know just how important it is to get your sales team performing at the highest level possible.

But with all the different personalities and varying levels of experience on your team, this can seem like an overwhelming task.

Fortunately, there are some concrete steps you can take to standardise performance across your whole organisation so that everyone meets their forecast and exceeds quota.

In this blog post, we’ll outline 10 simple strategies for improving sales team performance that will make sure every member is fully functioning and productive— leveraging these Sales enablement steps should set up any organisation for long-term success. Read on to learn more!

The realities of a sales team

Across every endeavour there are key stats that are predictors for success and failure. Understanding these data points within the context of the situation allows you to begin to model successful behaviours. “It’s about winning the games, within games”.

The only way to make incremental improvements is to build an assumptive process and then iteratively refine this with core data points. The best performing companies have done this so that they have a team of performers and less “Unicorns”.

Sales team structure WITHOUT RevOps

• One big hitter who consistently carries the rest of the team
• A couple of mid-performers
• Several salespeople not hitting targets
  
  

A recent analysis by Boston Consulting Group showed in 2022 only 29% of reps actually hit quota. 

That’s a lot of risk for the company.

Most of the time a company can still hit targets and grow revenue with this scenario. But it strains the manager and the big hitter causing imbalances across the team.

To put it bluntly, what happens if the star performer leaves or gets burnt out? You’re left with a massive gap in your team. Too much reliance on a single person creates a big problem for the company.

So, how do you move from an over reliance on individuals to a team of high-performers?

You need to model and replicate the behaviours of the performer across the wider team.

Sales team structure WITH RevOps

The aim of RevOps is to move your team away from reliance on individuals and build a team of performers backed up by relevant actionable data. 

How to build a team of consistent, high-performers

1. Pull all of your data and understand who your top performer is

To analyse the performance of your sales reps, there are a few reports you can build:

• Pipeline generated by Rep and Segment: The report reveals whether particular sales representatives excel in specific segments and showcases their impact on the overall volume of deals in the pipeline.
  
  
• Average Number of stakeholders involved, broken down by deal volume and rep: Understand how your sales team build relationships with stakeholders and how many should be included in opportunities to help convert deals to closed won.
  
  
• Activity by Rep: Analysing reps’ activity in your CRM - such as calls, meetings, tasks and emails - can provide insights into their overall productivity, enabling you to better understand the impact on the movement of opportunities.
  
  
• Deal Conversion Rate: identify how many deals sales reps have closed compared to the goal set out. Through detailed analysis of how each rep works, insights into their productivity and the influence of their activities on opportunities, you can hone in on those underperforming and decide who could benefit from further training or coaching.
  
  
• Call Outcome by Rep: Capture insights about the quality of leads entering your team’s pipeline and identify if reps are most successful at performing calls and review their strategy.
  
  
• Meetings Booked by Rep: Measure the productivity of your sales team by understanding which reps are booking the most meetings.

2. Spend some time with the star performer and understand what they look for across a deal.

Whether it’s useful questions to ask prospects or the process they use to increase likelihood of closing a deal, take notes and replicate what works. Have them lead training sessions for the rest of your team and demonstrate their individual approach. 

3. Fit this into a qualification matrix that works for your team (BANT, SCOTSMAN, MEDDPICC®)

With enhanced insights into your team behaviours you can begin to model best practice across the team based on insights taken directly from the sales teams activity. The key to predictable and efficient revenue growth starts with a repeatable and scalable process.

In 2022, the number of businesses adopting a sales methodology doubled and MEDDPICC® was the most popular. 

Companies that adopted MEDDPICC® saw win rates increased by 311% (Ebsta, 2023 B2B Sales benchmark report)

High-performers were 437% more likely to complete the qualification criteria. 

4. Build the qualification matrix into properties in your CRM and score them using a shared definition of what “Good” looks like

Once you build out these properties in HubSpot, as reps speak to prospects they can fill in the information on the MEDDPICC®  section in the deal screen to ensure they are qualifying correctly

5. Watch back some recordings of the star performer and look for core patterns in the call, things they say and how they address the core pain points with the prospect.

This can be done manually, by the sales rep leader or during weekly training calls. Conversely, your best best may be to use a call coaching AI platform such as Allego, or Gong to automatically pull key insights. 

6. Build them into a HubSpot playbook and train the team using the playbook as a base

Create a playbook that should be used when qualifying a deal as part of the discovery process.

By first identifying the key questions your top performing reps ask when compiling data for MEDDPICC® , you can then create those into a playbook for your remaining team to follow. 

For example, the first data point you need to collect for MEDDPICC®  is metrics. you may ask, 

• What are your overall goals?
• What is the most critical metric for the company?
• How are you doing against your overall goals?
  
  

7. Have the team follow this playbook for a quarter

Even if you're reps are experienced, it's best practice to have the team consistently follow the playbook so that it comes naturally, and you can outline where changes are necessary.

8. Review the data to see how closely the team have been following the process and if it is impacting the funnel

As your team adopts and utilised the new sales methodology, you should be actively reviewing progress and watching if your funnel has been positively impacted. Depending on your sales cycle, Reps may not be closing deals yet, but you should be looking for leading indicators such as pipeline generation. 

9. Continue each month to review your deals, change the process if required and build collateral around the requirements of the team

10. Repeat each month until all of your team begin to level out in terms of performance

Yes, some people are going to have that natural charm, and charisma (and luck does come into it too) but beneath that, strategic salespeople will have a process for qualification, a cadence for communication and an understanding of the key leverage points for maximum uptake.

With Rev Ops, Sales Managers can get visibility into every one of your team's deals within seconds. You can spot individualised trends and begin to model the correct behaviours built on good data.

This means that you can maximise the performers at the same time as bringing the underperformers up to speed.

This means you can focus on target but also keep the team functioning effectively.