Sales is a dog eat dog world and no one knows that better than the manager of a crack sales team. Not only do you need to keep the team from turning their competitive nature on each other, you need to find ways to make sure they exceed all expectations to the guys upstairs.
Luckily there are some technology tools out there that not only can give your team the competitive edge, they can make it easier for your team to work together. While you never want to discourage those rock stars on your sales team from wanting to push a bit further and make those numbers just a bit bigger, you do want every member of the team pulling in the same direction. Here are some great ways you can use the tools you already have to make that happen.
Internet Technology Tools
If your team works in the realm of IT, you know that keeping that client serviced and running smoothly is a big part of your team’s efforts. It helps when you use software like Microsoft’s Provance ITSM program to keep the bugs to a minimum and troubleshooting error free. These revolutionary new programs have made the outsourced IT departments of many companies more efficient with an out of the box functionality and easy configuration.
Because these types of tools can allow increased productivity as a whole across the board, many businesses are demanding them as part of their IT contract. Let’s face it, if your employees don’t spend a portion of each week idle because the net is down or their computer can’t interface with the rest of the company, they are free to do what they do best, solve problems. An IT department that can keep everyone up and running is never going to have problems gaining new contracts for their sales team.
Collaboration Tools
One of the biggest obstacles for many sales team members has been that they are always out in the field making sales. While this is great, it means that they don’t always work as a team since they are seldom in the same room together.
But today we all have video conferencing ability on our smartphones and a constant flow of text and email to stay connected. This allows sales staff to collaborate on landing that big contract or solving that thorny problem.
While your rock star salesperson may be in Manitoba, sealing the deal with a Canadian distributor, the rest of your team can be learning about lacrosse and giving them leads on other fine points of Canadian culture. True collaboration makes a stronger team.
Financial Tools
While sales may be a numbers game, it doesn’t mean that sales staff are any lovers of spreadsheets and all the crunching that goes with them. But with modern technology aimed at handling bigger and bigger chunks of data, we only really need to know how to read what it kicks back out at the end of the day. These financial tools can help a team to forecast goals, show how to meet them and even exceed them and in the end, make rock stars of every member of your team.
