This sales leadership article looks at how global teams can improve sales performance. An article on Harvard Business Review stated that to circumvent poor revenue performance, sales forces have to collaborate with each other and pursue new customer opportunities. One thing to note at the moment is how sales have been negatively impacted by digitally-savvy consumers and shrinking markets.
A report on successful global teams posted on LHH reveals that in 8 out of 10 sectors, global companies observed how aggregate sales are growing slower than their domestic peers.
Source: How Global Teams Can Improve Sales Performance – The Digital Sales Institute
Global teams are struggling amidst complex supply chains and larger and more diverse work forces. As such, a critical examination of your company becomes imperative. To start, ask yourself if the right workers are in the right jobs. If not, determine whether a talent or skills gap exists across your employees. This information will help you address the issues within your global team.
By evaluating your workforce regularly and understanding the changes that have to be implemented, competing globally becomes possible. In this article, we’ve provided three ways your global team can improve their sales performance:
1. Nurture current salespeople and high performers
This first point is related to protecting the existing strengths of your organization, which can be seen in your current salespeople. The referenced Harvard Business Review article showed that while incentives can boost your global teams productivity, they can lead to unfair situations. Take, for example, when your current salespeople have to give up accounts to make way for new employees. Losing sales opportunities and, subsequently, familiar relationships can lessen the morale of your more experienced workers. As such, you should offer quota-based incentive compensation plans. This allows quotas to be adjusted based on account reassignments. You can even offer your salespeople half the commissions on lost accounts for six months. This way, older employees can actively assist with the transition of the accounts they’re losing. With better mentoring opportunities, new workers can generate more informed sales proposals that can increase profits for your business.
2. Connect expansion plans to customer coverage needs
To compete globally — especially in the age of e-commerce platforms — your business naturally has to scale its sales presence and sales training capabilities. However, expansion plans should correspond to your sales results and customer coverage needs. This helps you avoid profit loss when your labor force is much larger than the demand for your goods and services. You’ll need to base expansion plans according to your customer needs, channel preference, and self-sufficiency. As a global sales team, you should also monitor the results of your product and customer segment. By doing so, you can apply these insights to make the necessary adjustments. For instance, if your product is performing roughly in a new market, you can task several salespeople to mitigate customer concerns. As it stands, 30% of the products sold through online channels get returned, which can prove detrimental to your sales performance.
3. Collect experience from across the whole global team
The LHH feature above stressed the importance of over-communicating. Each sales employee should be transparent about the obstacles they encounter. They should also recount the strategies they found effective while conducting market research. When your team shares feedback amongst themselves, they can avoid similar mistakes in the future. This practice is undeniably valuable to global teams when navigating through new software or sales tools. In our previous post ‘Sales Tools To Help Your Business Boost Sales’, we explained how sales tools can help your team cut back on time for repetitive tasks. However, new technologies always require a learning curve. A bid proposal software, for instance, prevents your employees from entering the same data into multiple systems. If one person is unfamiliar with the software, it can cause them to create a double entry, thus reducing efficiency. As such, your team should meet often and revisit their everyday sales processes. This opens up their time for other important matters (like focusing on existing sales accounts or creating strategies to increase customer satisfaction levels).
For more business insights, do read our posts on The Digital Sales Institute.
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