Phil Jones, Managing Director of Brother UK, shares his top ten sales management tips to consider when running a large national sales team:
1. Don’t overburden salespeople with unnecessary processes. Keep them simple and well defined.
2. Bring the team together face to face regularly, formally and informally. Salespeople are naturally social beings.
3. Allow teams to self-serve data as much as possible. Nothing more frustrating than not knowing where you are up to against your targets.
4. Surround your external team with good administrators at HQ. Salespeople can be slow at admin, recognise that and solve it by taking the bulk of the burden off of their desk.
5. Make sure that internal people understand what it’s like to be an external person and expectations for service delivery. Send out your operational people to walk in the shoes of a salesperson for a day regularly.
6. It’s easy for an external salesperson to feel disenfranchised and out on the edge. Provide platforms for the sales team to feedback to the business and network with each other, I now regularly hold webinars for example.
7. Regularly provide good quality training so the teams feel “invested” in. Sharpening tools allow improved overall performance.
8. Find ways to celebrate success across distances and share good practice. There’s nothing worse than a salesperson having a great win and having minor visibility for it.
9. Provide good tools which allow the team to work smarter, optimising their customer face time.
10. Have a great car policy. A car is a second home to many field salespeople, give them the flexibility to choose whichever car (within budget) that they feel their best in.