Tips To Improve Sales Performance With DISC

The principal focus of almost all businesses is on increasing and improving sales performance and revenue. It doesn't matter what industry you're in or even what you're selling. The need for more sales is universal. Increased sales and profits result from good sales performance. In this article, we outline sales performance, tips to improve sales performance and how you can measure sales performance.

What is Sales Performance?

Sales performance refers to how well your sales force performs in a specific time frame. Monthly, quarterly, or annually, for example. Some companies track sales success across all three. One of the most prevalent ways to measure and manage salespeople's activity during the sales process is to use sales performance management.

Businesses' sales performance measurements may differ depending on your industry and business goals. However, typical metrics often include sales revenue, customer acquisition, and retention rate. You can monitor your sales teams' productivity and ensure they regularly meet sales objectives by tracking and assessing sales performance.

Take a look at the benefits and how to improve sales performance with DISC.

Why is Sales Performance Important?

Before we discuss how to improve sales performance, we need to understand why sales performance is important. Understanding how a sales team performs and how they bring in sales is just as vital as the product. Sales performance is important for three main reasons:

  • Impacts the bottom line
  • Creates healthy competition
  • Assists in strategy creation

Impacts the Bottom Line

The better your sales performance, the more successful your business will be. Focusing on your sales performance is one way to ensure that you're providing a positive sales experience. Tracking your sales performance also positions you to meet or exceed your organisation's revenue targets. Essentially, the more sales your salespeople close, the more revenue your business generates.

Creates Healthy Competition

Outlining what top sales performance looks like in your company gives your sales reps something to aim for. It also creates goals that work as a measure of success and develops healthy and productive competition among sales reps. 

Assists in Strategy Creation

Sales performance management is important as it allows sales leaders to create sales strategies that cover all stages of the sales cycle and impact all sales process stages. Sales leaders can then implement these new strategies and techniques. Ultimately this strategy creation will help sales teams succeed by properly managing the various aspects of sales performance (incentives, insights, forecasting, and so on).

How to Improve Sales Performance

Getting the most out of your sales team is critical for business growth, and sales can always be improved. But how do you boost your sales performance? Here are some simple tips to improve sales performance:

  • Clarify Your Sales Strategy and Goals
  • Refine Your Sales Process
  • Boost Your Customer Experience
  • Make Resources Available to Your Team
  • Engage in Sales Coaching and Training

Clarify Your Sales Strategy and Goals

Reassess your business niche and what you excel at. Ask yourself some critical questions, such as whether your business mission is the same as the last time you evaluated it, your target market, and what challenges your clients face that your product or service could help solve. The answers to these questions form the basis of your sales strategy and ensure that it is on track with your sales goals and objectives. If this strategy is off, your answers to how to increase sales and gain more leads will also be off. Modern markets require organisations to be agile and responsive to changing consumer needs. Don't shy away from examining your sales strategy bi-annually

Refine Your Sales Process

As your business grows and evolves, it's essential to revisit and refine your sales process. Refining your sales process is a great strategy to improve sales performance as B2B companies that implement a formal sales process experience 18% more revenue growth than companies that don't. Having a formalised and current sales process is an excellent way to drive sales performance.

Boost Your Customer Experience

Understanding your customers' and prospects' needs is critical to establishing trust, developing rapport, and retaining loyalty. Customers who are happy with a company are satisfied. That means your customers have a significant impact on improving sales performance. According to Acquia, 78 per cent of consumers remain loyal to brands that understand their objectives.

While sales used to be all about emphasising the value that solves a problem, today's buyer audience wants an experience that solves a problem and provides long-term solutions to complex business challenges. This begins with truly understanding the customers' needs and how your solutions will provide a proactive approach to customer needs that they may not even be aware of. Understanding each company's needs strengthens relationships and boosts sales performance.

Make Resources Available to Your Team

Once you have the right team, it's critical to provide them with the right resources to facilitate their ongoing success. This includes marketing and sales materials to support their customer interactions, such as a list of qualifying questions or positioning statements. 

A user-friendly sales CRM will also allow them to manage customer data and provide them with good leads.

Engage in Sales Coaching and Training

It's not surprising or controversial to say that sales isn't always intuitive. To truly establish your success in the field, sales reps may require some guidance or expert insight. As a result, engaging in sales coaching or training will improve sales performance.

After you've implemented or refined your sales strategy and process, you'll need a comprehensive sales training programme to guide salespeople on putting your methodology into action and allowing managers to coach and inspect behaviour.

Sales training also greatly impacts a salesperson's motivation and attitude. When sellers believe their organisation is a strong partner and is investing in them to improve sales performance, they are more confident in their abilities and motivated to achieve top performance.

Tips Improve Sales Performance with DISC

 Extended DISC assessments help increase sales performance and uncover your team's opportunities for development. DISC profile assessments:

  • Identify your team's natural hard-wired DISC behavioural styles allowing you to understand their natural comfort areas and areas in which they may need extra training and coaching.
  • Identify gaps in your current sales performance allowing you to restructure or recruit another sales rep to fill these gaps.
  • Adjust team members' responsibilities to enhance sales performance and motivation by ensuring they are largely working to their strengths.
  • Measure the attitude of your sales team toward crucial behaviours in the sales process to overcome obstacles to success.
  • Understand how your team currently view their level of sales competence and identify where they believe they need extra support.

Our DISC Sales IQ test does what no other sales assessment can and connect a salespersons sales competence level to their DISC behavioural style. The combination of the two technologies gives recruiters compelling insight into whether a candidate can quickly develop specific skills or if they are working against their natural behavioural style. The DISC Sales IQ test provides sales coaches and managers with opportunities to develop the performance of salespeople.

How to Measure Sales Performance

There are several ways to measure sales performance. One of the most common ways to track sales performance is through sales performance metrics. 

Sales performance metrics provide sales leaders with critical insights into individual sales reps' and the organisation's overall performance and whether this aligns with the goals they set at the start of the year, quarter, or month. Examples of sales metrics include total revenue, revenue by product or customer, new vs returning customers, win rate, and average deal size. Today, data drives decisions. A sales manager will be on the back foot if they do not have the proper metrics to measure their teams' productivity and performance.

Other ways to measure sales performance include:

  • Sales Performance Metrics
  • Sales Performance Dashboards 
  • Sales Performance Appraisals 
  • Sales Performance Coaching 
  • Sales Performance Training
  • Sales Performance Evaluations

What Drives Sales Performance

Consistency is one of the secrets to good sales performance. Any team or rep can have a great sales month. However, a high-performing salesperson and team consistently meets or exceed expectations despite changing economic and competitive circumstances.

To help you drive sales performance better, we have compiled 5 essential tips for you to follow to create and maintain long-term client relationships.

  • Tip #1 - Set a Strategy
  • Tip #2 - Use the Right Tools and Processes
  • Tip #3 - Define the Ideal Skills and Behaviours
  • Tip #4 - Hire the Right Talent
  • Tip #5 - Understand Your Customers Needs

Set a Strategy

To drive sales performance, it's essential to set a strategy. The strategy will outline what success looks like, the company goals and what is required to achieve those goals. 

Use the Right Tools and Processes

Processes and tools help to drive efficiency and productivity, resulting in more predictable and replicable sales. Having the right tools and processes in place will allow your sales teams to be as effective as possible while not compromising administration. 

Define the Ideal Skills and Behaviours

What skills and behaviours should your ideal sales force have to successfully sell your products and services? What skills should they have, and what behaviours should they exhibit when guiding prospects through the sales process? What competencies will drive salespeople to top performance? After defining the desired skills and behaviours, build a sales training solution to get your team there. 

Hire the Right Talent

When hiring new sales reps, it's crucial to define the expectations and nuances of the sales role. The more you can refine and explain each position, the more likely you will hire the ideal fit. Think about what it takes to be successful in that role? For example, a "hunter" role is different from a "farmer." The behavioural profile differs for each, meaning should assess your preferred candidates to determine who possesses the innate competencies to fit the role. A great way to start is to evaluate your top performers to identify the traits a new hire needs to succeed. Our Sales Recruitment Assessment is a great way to help you measure the skills and behaviours that drive sales performance when recruiting new sales reps.

Understand Your Customers Needs

Before you can meet your customers' needs, you must first identify them. Send out a survey and ask your customers some questions about what they require from you, your product and your organisation. Determine their pain points and devise solutions to alleviate those pain points.

How to Manage Poor Sales Performance

It is difficult to predict a rep's future sales performance during the recruitment process. You may believe you've hired the right people only to wonder why they aren't exceeding their quotas further down the line? Sometimes it's the employees' fault, but more often than not, it's something beyond their control. If a member of your sales team is underperforming, there are several things you can do to help them improve sales performance.

  1. Complete a 360 Feedback Review. A 360 assessment is a great addition to a sales performance evaluation. It allows managers to gather feedback from the people who work most closely with the sales rep, including customers, peers and reports. The results provide insights into discrepancies between the self-rating and feedback from others, illuminating any development areas and blind spots.
  2. Invest in Coaching and Training. Some people are natural salespeople. They have the right personality and tone, and they understand how to collaborate and communicate with a lead to get them to the finish line. Others on your team have the same ability to close, but they may struggle in certain areas. Sales training is an effective method of dealing with poor sales performance. This provides underperforming employees with more ammunition, tools, and resources to help them close more sales. Regular training keeps them updated on sales psychology, communication techniques, actionable phrases, time management skills, trends, and other topics.
  3. Use Sales Assessment Tools. A sales assessment test saves managers and consultants time when analysing behaviour and developing a sales development plan. The FinxS Sales Competence Assessment is a validated tool used to measure a person's ability in 18 sales skills. It will reveal an individual's selling strengths and find areas that need developing. When your salespeople develop the identified sales skills, your sales team will move the sale forward more quickly and increase the bottom line. The sales development tool transforms the way organisations understand their salesforce. It is a great way to uncover the obstacles holding back your existing sales team, illuminates areas causing poor performance, and provides powerful insights to develop sales performance.

Sales Performance Tools

At HR Profiling Solutions, we provide tailored sales assessments designed to transform sales hiring and development to make an impact where it counts. We utilise a combination of the most intelligent and innovative assessment solutions that empower you to hire the right people and make science-supported decisions to improve sales performance.

Sales Competence Assessment

Complement your sales training with an assessment, such as the sales competence assessment. A sales assessment will boost your salespeople's success by incorporating behavioural science into their performance. This self-assessment will help you understand your rep's strongest sales competencies and identify any underlying mindsets that are impeding their sales success.

DISC Sales Profile

Successful salespeople can effectively relate, communicate and influence. These are critical characteristics in selling and building connections with clients and prospects. DISC sales assessments empower managers to recruit the right people with the necessary characteristics to exceed in selling. Enabling them to build a winning team from the get go!

The power of DISC reaches far beyond recruitment and empowers salespeople to alter their sales pitch to improve the sales process and motivate a buying decision. These abilities enable salespeople to successfully support customer-centric interactions, that boost sales performance.

Leverage the intelligence of DISC sales assessments to improve your strategies from hiring to development. 

Engaging in DISC based sales training will equip your team with the knowledge they need to build rapport and improve interactions with prospects, leading to an increase in sales team productivity

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