3 min read
Last Updated: 1 February 2023
The global pandemic made two major impacts on Sales Teams: crowded the market with lofty expectations, and drove buyers’ budgets down. As a result, selling in a B2B market is harder than ever. According to a Salesforce report, 79% of sales reps say they’ve had to quickly adapt to new ways of selling. Your sales people are having to evolve rapidly and if you’re not looking after them, you’re losing money and losing good talent.
And let’s just admit that even though a career in sales looks glorious, it’s not easy to sustain one. With 8 out of 10 deals falling through, constant rejection and a barrage of unanswered calls, the profession can take a toll on salespeople’s productivity and performance. It’s high time that organizations and CXOs take stock of the challenges faced by the backbone of their company, and resolve them in real time.
However, these challenges can be overcome if CEOs implement employee engagement strategy - crafted keeping Sales teams in mind.
Enterprise engagement has become a sales-marketing buzzword of sorts, that you’ll hear almost everywhere. Enterprise engagement is a holistic approach to include all stakeholders while making profit strategies. But do you know the key stakeholders that add weight to enterprise engagement? That’s correct, they’re your employees. Engaged employees relate to your brand, and they’re more than willing to contribute to and actively participate in the growth of your organization.
1. Understanding Sales people’s roles
To survive this fiercely competitive age, sales people need every help they can get from their organizations - especially the ones working remotely. Disengaged workers take less ownership of their attitude and overall responsibility, and drain productivity from the tea, costing companies in the US up to $500 billion annually.
On the other hand, a Gallup analysis reported that teams that scored the highest on employee engagement were 21% more profitable than teams that scored the lowest. Now these are stats you can’t debate.
Amber, the HR bot powered by Artificial Intelligence, talks to 5 lakh employees globally. Here are top few reasons she identified why top sales performers feel disengaged and then start looking for new jobs:
- Lack of recognition
- Lack of mentorship
- Unrealistic Targets. (Sales it self is a high pressure job and adding on to it with giving unrealistic targets is setting the sales person for failure)
- No proper plan for achieving those numbers.
- Improper Onboarding
To improve your chances of performing well in a superbly competitive landscape, you should understand what your sales teams need in order to successfully pitch and close.
2. Set reasonable goals
Setting reasonable goals for employee engagement are important to know if you’re making progress - much like it is for profits and revenues.
Use the ROI methodology to identify how much your employee engagement initiatives actually contribute to increased sales numbers. Take a look at some of our clients that successfully realise as much as 33x ROI after implementing employee engagement strategies.
And as for engagement initiatives, here’s some you can readily adopt:
- Hire Amber - powered by AI - as your Chief Listening Officer. She engages with employees to predict disengagement and helps organizations control attrition.
- Do a feelings check once in a while with all your folks
- Communicate all important and less-than-important company updates
- Try and get everyone on video while on calls
- Expand the responsibilities of your SDRs - IF they have time and want to take up more
3. Incentivise for being engaged
The fact that you hold your SDRs accountable for adopting engagement strategy and expect certain results implies that they qualify for an incentive for a job well done. Amiright or amiright? Rewards and recognition - that go beyond their work OKRs will increase the morale and satisfaction of all your sales folks.
No matter how enthusiastic your team is about implementing engagement strategies, they won’t be able to relate to it unless they’re properly recognized and rewarded for their hard work and dedication.
4. Train better
It’s unfair to throw your best sales folks in the fire and expect them to be engaged high-performers on their own. Professionals need to keep learning to stay sharp and on top of the latest market trends. While hiring great sales reps might be half the job done, they need proper onboarding and consistent training in order to reach their full potential.
One of the tactics might be developing training that will help them build awareness regarding the importance of employee engagement as well as provide them with better skills for goal setting, coaching, offering feedback, and recognition. This will allow your sales reps to close more deals.
Wrap up
Think your team is actually your family? Think again, but this time with a hand on your heart. In order to build the camaraderie that really drives team results, your team members need to feel engaged. So whether yours is a remote sales team or the one that goes to office, make team engagement an integral part of your company culture. Your team (and your bottom line) will thank you for it.
Hire your Chief Listening Officer to engage your employees and control attrition
