15 Ways to Improve Sales Performance

Entering the field of technical sales is a career pathway for many. As you begin your career in sales, it is natural to want to improve your sales performance each quarter. We sell things all the time. If you think about it, we sell ourselves to get new opportunities, friends, apartments, and the list can go on. So how come some people are better at sales than others? Truly, it comes down to your skills but also daily habits that can make a big difference. Not all products are easy sells, some require a skillset that is thoughtful and very intertwined with your pitch and process. This is especially true when selling complicated high-tech products such as those found on FindLight Marketplace. It often requires not only mastering the art of technical sales but also intimate know-how of the products that you are selling.

Sales Team Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash

In this blog post, we will break into intentional ways to help you improve your sales performance personally, professionally, and in company culture. You can adopt all or some of the following 15 ways to start increasing your sales today. We have divided those into three major groups as follows:

You – the Salesperson

• 1. Your Attitude: Perseverance
• 2. Empathy
• 3. Self Confidence
• 4. Work Space Habits
• 5. Finding your measuring tools

The Customer

• 6. Active Listening
• 7.  Understanding Buyer Persona
• 8.  Product Knowledge
• 9.  Personalize your Message
• 10.  Closing vs. Relationship building

The Company

• 11.  Healthy Competition
• 12.  Less Turnover
• 13.  Collaboration
• 14.  Trust and Communication
• 15.  Continued Learning

You – the Salesperson

Everything starts with you. Your vantage point is critical in building a success in whatever you do. This is especially true in your career of selling highly technical products. Independent of your customer base, your company and product reputation there is a lot in your hands.

1.  Your Attitude: Perseverance 

Perseverance: one concept that you will need to keep in the back of your mind, all the time. Being in sales is usually not about quick and easy work. This requires someone who can roll with the various waves each quarter and keep his head up. Some key attributes are being enthusiastic, resilient, and attentive. You put in the work and remain passionate despite anything that might appear as though it is holding you back. Numbers and metrics will be important to show how great of a worker you are, but don’t let one quarter deter your game plan. Friendliness and a high spirit can get you far, but being attentive and coming into every meeting prepared will help instill confidence in every customer. It shows you are dependable and delivering to the customer, which is reassuring.

2.  Empathy

Empathy for yourself and your customers will help keep your wheels spinning. Within customer relationships, you’ll be able to tell what their emotions mean within the sale. What do they want? What appeals to them? Is there something the client might be missing? This helps you meet their needs. Empathy for yourself will help you continue work even through a bad day or bad meeting. 

3.  Self Confidence

Despite this being obvious, it is incredibly important to remind yourself to work on your outward confidence. This can be confidence in your product or service, but let’s focus more on yourself. When self-confidence is flowing through you, it most likely will flow in your work, pitches, and potential customer meetings. In martial art, this is similar to visualizing the wood board broken before you strike. 

4.  Work Space Habits

Having a healthy work system (remote or in-person) is important for helping prevent burnout and boost productivity. This goes hand in hand with perseverance we discussed first. Keeping your workspace tidy and in order will help you look and feel organized. Putting breaks into your scheduling tool will also help you refresh your mind before meetings. Putting thought and care into your workspace and workday schedule will help keep you high energy for the day and improve your sales. 

5.  Finding your measuring tools 

As much as we wish intuition was the route in sales, it is not. Finding a process that helps create a more optimized way to connect and close deals often creates a better performance. Creating measuring tools helps organize your deals and where they are in the pipeline to best initiate the next action step. HubSpot has a free Key Performance Indicator template if you want somewhere to begin.

Chart Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash

The Customer

Outside of building your best self at work, there is also a list of ways to prospecting. These rely on the building you are doing as a person, and go hand-in-hand to build the best outcome. Combining these goals will help you improve your sales performance. 

6.  Active Listening 

Be present with new prospects. This means being engaged. Care more about what they have to say instead of your own words. Active Listening will help you build relationships during your sales meetings. Also save emails, text messages and notes for afterward and time block to go over them and organize later in the day. This is harder than it sounds, but is crucially important. After a long and intense day of sales visit the last thing you want to do is to organize your notes, but that is what will stand you out among your competitors. Being a good partner for your customer will shine through the next time you meet with them. 

7.  Understanding Buyer Persona 

Your company might have already outlined this for you but if they have not, make sure to define it yourself. To actively practice this, you will need to have defined your archetypical customer for each product you sell. What are their attributes? What are they looking for in the products (quality, reliability, price, etc.)? How do they make a decision? Actively, practicing this habit, will help you generate more sales and find truly interested prospects. This is also related to the next point we discuss. 

8.  Product Knowledge 

Know what you are selling. This is under-appreciated often and a very important part of your job. If you are new to your gig, taking the time to invest in the nooks and crannies of your business will elevate your sales pitches. This especially cannot be overstated for selling technical products. Quite often you might run into prospects who might look down on you as another salesman. But you can easily reverse this by becoming a resource for them for product knowledge and they will definitely look up to you for their procurement needs.

9.  Personalize your Message 

We all have access to the same high-performance scripts you can find online with a google search. Find a way to make these scripts your own and a more personal communication message tailored to the client as much as possible. It helps continue to foster a relationship while pushing sales. Recommendations are vital to sales funnels. 

10.  Closing vs. Relationship building 

A lot of times the sales funnel creates a tunnel vision to closing the deal instead of the in-between. Find ways to build relationships with customers to push yourself further as a salesperson but also so that the customer feels comfortable enough to recommend a friend or colleague back to you. It works for you even when the phones aren’t ringing. Value each customer on life longevity rather than on each transaction. You can extract more value from each relationship that far outweighs any particular transaction.

The Company

Working Together Photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash

We explored ways that you as an individual can become your best salesperson with high-performance metrics. What is also heavily applicable in the workforce is how your company builds its sales culture on your team. You might not have as much control over this section, so this section is for the leaders of sales teams that want to improve sales performance overall. These are the ways you can build out a sales team that not only meets their goals but extends them further. 

11.  Healthy Competition 

In teams, it is great to challenge each other and work towards quotas with some incentive from internal competition. However, creating too much internal competition can lead to gaps in sales departments when fellow team members work against each other more than they work together. So as a leader you should find that health balance that fosters competitive performance. 

12.  Less Turnover 

A lot of turnover on sales teams can hurt quarterly quotes because new team members need time to acclimate. If you are having high internal turnover rate, check in to see why your turnover rate might be high and how you can create more growth opportunities internally to keep your sales team on. It is estimated that each turnover can cost you up to 6 months of sales for the replaced account manager. Make sure you work hard upfront to hire the very best and then treat them like the stars they are to go turn the mountains for you.

13.  Collaboration 

Our teammates are our go-to people to learn how to be better salespeople. When you can collaborate and help each other with pitches, every win feels like a team win and boosts morale. So, encourage collaboration among team members. If a junior sales person takes along a more experienced team member to a sales call or a meeting, that might just make the sales process stick. Or if a salesperson who is expert in some technical area can help drive sales for another team member that has to be acknowledged and rewarded.

14.  Trust and Communication

Creating high-performance sales culture involves having trust in your organization and team. Having trust, respect, and open communication within your organization can help prevent toxic competition and feeling like the hierarchy is judgmental or overly strict. With the same token, create a culture where bad news are shared and resolved quickly.

15.  Continued Learning (like right now!)

Giving your sales teams moments to learn more skills can help them grow as an individual and as an employee at your organization. 

There are a lot of ways to improve yourself as a salesperson and improve sales performance as an employee at work. If you are in a tech sphere, working on these skills can help boost your sales and help make you feel happier and healthier within your role. Did you find this article helpful? If so, please share and subscribe.