Three Key Sales Activities Managers Need to Implement Today

As top of the funnel business development becomes increasingly important, efficiency, accountability and retention are three key factors to the success of any sales team. As a manager, there are a few activities you should be doing on a weekly basis to keep your reps engaged, hungry, accountable and ultimately on the path to success.

Pipe Reviews and Planning

Regardless of what your team’s daily, weekly and monthly goals are from a metrics standpoint, pipe reviews are a great way to be extremely transparent with your team and understand where they stand against their goals. It also creates a natural sense of accountability for what they are going to do both individually and collectively to hit that goal each week.

Every Thursday afternoon, bring your team into a room and simply write out each rep’s conversation/appointment number and compare it to what their goal is for the week. By this point in the week, the team should have reached their goal (or are within one or two appointments, which they can tackle as a team). This is where small spiffs can be a huge motivator. If your team hits their number before your pipe review on Thursday, reward them with a lunch out, beers on Friday afternoon, early escape for the weekend…be creative here!

Now it’s time to plan and set expectations for the upcoming week. This can be done by posing two simple questions to your team: How many appointments are you going to set as a team next week? What are each of you going to commit to in order to hit that number? By asking these simple questions, you are allowing the team to set their own expectations and holding them accountable to their teammates to deliver. Going into the next week, the team should clearly understand what needs to be done in order to hit their goal.

One-on-Ones

When it comes to understanding your reps’ needs, career goals, impediments and overall mindset, a weekly fifteen minute one-on-one can give you access to all of that information and more. Set up time with each individual on your team (mid-week is best) and depending on the size of your team, you can extend it to thirty minutes. Have each rep email you the topics they would like to discuss with you by a certain time either the day of or the night prior, that way you can prepare anything necessary for the discussion. This is an open forum so topics can be anything from a problem they are having on the phones, product questions, team concerns and so forth.

Warning: Don’t let this turn into ten minutes of you asking questions and having to pry answers out of the individual. This is their no BS, 100% open access to you so if they show up without anything to discuss…their loss, cancel the one-on-one! These meetings keep you connected to your reps individually and allow you to understand where they may need help, where they want their career to go and what you can be doing to ultimately help them be successful.

Daily Updates

Having your reps write daily updates is key to having 100% visibility across your team’s activities and is also a great source for your reps to share key insights from any conversations or meetings they may have had that day. At the end of each day, have your reps send around an update email to you, your VP of sales, a member of the marketing team and any other members of the leadership team that make sense. Updates should contain the following:

• Number of Calls
• Number of Emails
• Number of Conversations
• Number of Appointments/Meetings booked
• 3-4 key insights from conversations

Every Friday, have your team recap their week in the same format along with a plan for next week’s prospecting efforts. This practice allows you to have another source other than just your CRM data and dashboards to track your team’s progress while also holding all of your reps accountable for their daily activities.

With these activities in place, your team will be humming along in no time.