As a sales manager, you are managing a team with everyone operating at different levels of performance, spaced out across a wide geography, all working on developments which have different identities and issues.
You will have high flying team members and fast-selling sites, mixed in with plodders, under-performers and developments that just haven’t yet found their feet in terms of a steady sales rate. We understand!
How often do you find yourself thinking, “this job would be a doddle if everyone was like [my best sales person] and all my developments were selling as well as !?!??!” Let us help you.
This part of the Driving Sales Programme is dedicated to help you to better Manage the Intelligent Selling of your sales force.
We’ll take you through the different performance levels you are likely to recognise in your own sales people and you can jump around the order to suit your reality.
We don’t always get the opportunity to recruit an entire team from scratch with the chance for you to set the bar high from the get go.
In most cases, you will have inherited some longer serving members of the team that you will need to transform and mould to your own high standards.
When you do get the opportunity for fresh blood in the team, it is vital that you select to the standards you are aiming for, and not the lowest common denominator of the existing team.
You have such an opportunity to make a significant contribution towards your business becoming a 5* developer by employing a high calibre of sales staff and polishing them to shine bright.
Remember when you are recruiting new team members, that skills and knowledge can be taught to the person with an excellent attitude and aptitude. We will help you to:
- Understand what makes a 5* Sales Consultant
- Create a selection process or assessment event which allows candidates to demonstrate a full range of capabilities.
- Consider using existing strong role models from within the Sales Consultant group to assist at the event.
- Do not be tempted to lower the standards for the sake of expediency. Hold out for the right person
- Use the selection criteria as a benchmark for your existing team and develop strong coaching plans to drive up performance towards 5* benchmark.
And when you have successfully recruited a new star player and you have talked up the opportunity for success to them during the interview process, you know that once they settle in they will make a fantastic contribution to the results of your team. First though, you need to invest protected time for them to learn your ways and standards without picking up existing bad habits that you are simultaneously working hard to coach out of your team.
In this part of the Driving Sales Programme, we share with you the elements that make up a winning Induction Programme, one that sets the bar high from the outset and also reassures the new sales person that they have indeed arrived at the place you promised they were coming to!
It can be really tempting to throw them in at the deep end and dress it up by saying that you can’t beat on the job training. Desist! If ever there was a place to practice delayed gratification and patience, this is it! This front-loaded investment of time will pay greater dividends in the future.
Let us help you with successful selection and on boarding. We have it all laid out for you to plug in to!
Intelligent Selling
A key area of the Ellare platform, Intelligent Selling, is where we make our expertise available to all new home professionals and share our Intelligent Selling standards. Explore the New Customer Journey that we base our Successful Selling Standards on. Download it now here: New Customer Journey or from the Materials tab above.
We can help you engage your sales team in live as well as eLearning modules that will help them to improve their approach to selling and therefore their sales rate.
Even high performing Sales Executives can be coached and stretched.
Here are some of the tools we will share with you to develop relevant and challenging development plans for everyone:
- Free Intelligent Selling resources and paid eLearning through our essential eLearning modules
- We can help you to highlight common areas to improve and set your team off on that journey; with our expert support.
Setting a plan of learning for each person means you use your time in observation. We will share the elements of our sales performance dashboard that helps you and your individual sales people to see their performance, celebrate their successes and improve their performance all the time.
We will help you to confirm the standards you expect from your team, we will fine tune the input that will help you and your team achieve the output that gets you commercial success. Just ask, we know how to help you!
Driving sales has as much to do with how you create motivation and how you inspire your team. Once you have invested a lot of time and effort in creating a high performing team, we want to be sure you keep them!
Low turnover and high retention rates are always linked to teams who work for leaders who motivate and inspire them.
A highly motived and informed sales team will deliver great results for you. You should work hard to create an inspirational and exciting environment for them to operate in. So, in this lesson we will look at ways to:
- Deliver regular team talks using a positive dialogue and real time examples. Consider different ways of reaching the team
- Use conference calls, Face Time, Zoom, WhatsApp which demonstrates your creativity and keeps the message fresh
- Use daily texts and emails to say thank you for reservations or good team work. Include the whole team so that the praise is public
- Set up a shared ideas forum on the shared drive for the team to contribute. Make sure you give regular feedback and try implementing some of the ideas swiftly
- Appoint a custodian for the day/week/month in key result areas. Strive to find the strength of each member of the team and celebrate it within the wider group
- Group Sales Consultants into geographical clusters and set them challenges that are relevant to their situation.
Engage, empower and excite your team, your success is measured on how well your team achieve greater results because they are inspired to deliver the initiatives you discuss with them.
Your team are the driving force of the sales department, create mechanisms and habits to help them feel valued and instrumental in the success of the region. Ways that go beyond earning commission. Practice ways to create energy and momentum in your team. Some good habits to adopt:
- Always acknowledge their daily updates
- Give swift replies to questions or a time scale if there is a delay
- Give them permission to badger you! Set a service level agreement for response times in your team
- Always speak to everyone at least once a day including weekends
- Promote no secrets, share and you will be supported!
Showing up and being visible
We will help you with the challenges of managing a well dispersed team from a remote location and the need for you to be visible in your patch, even when you are not physically present! We will share and help you to find creative ways to coach and manage even when you are not always actually there to observe everything. We will help you to hold your people accountable.
We will help you to focus on building layers of understanding and shared examples about the overall performance of each team member. There should be absolutely no surprises at the annual review, it should be a celebration of success and a stretch to the future.
Have a good look around how we can help you sales team through our Intelligent Selling area. There’s lots for you and for your sales team so have feel free to download helpful resources from there too.
We are here to help you. We’ll give you individual attention so please speak to us and tell us how we can help.
Our offer, like us, is genuine and honest, we’re here to share what we know so email us on hello@ellare.co.uk or call us on 0333 305 7525 to talk about how we can help you with where you are in your career/role.
Module Includes
- 1 Lesson
