Sales team feedback can help you improve sales processes and boost retention rates
A top-down approach isn't always the best strategy for developing and training your sales team. To optimize your sales processes, you need to find out about your sales team's experiences. They are the ones who actively deal with prospective and existing clients, and they have a strong sense of what's working and what needs improvement.
To boost sales and strengthen your organization, solicit their feedback. You can utilize sales-team feedback to find out how they feel about their jobs, sales scripts, workflow, and more. Check out these tips on how to gather feedback and efficiently incorporate it.
1. Encourage sales-team feedback
If you want feedback from your sales team, you have to foster it. People are often innately afraid to speak up to their employers. They worry criticism may generate punishment or prevent opportunities.
To sidestep this risk, ensure that you emphasize their feedback’s importance. Create a corporate culture where people aren't afraid to speak truth to power. Ideally, your managers should have an open-door policy and be willing to listen to salespeople's ideas and concerns.
2. Develop processes to collect sales team feedback
Encourage your sales team to provide feedback as desired, but to ensure that you get enough responses, develop processes to collect their replies.
Consider having new employees complete a survey after their first 90 days. Their feedback will help you improve onboarding and training. Collect this information promptly; if you wait too long, your salespeople may forget about their early company experiences.
Use annual engagement surveys to solicit detailed information about your sales team's satisfaction and how they think processes can be improved. Then, use brief follow-up surveys throughout the year to gather ongoing feedback.
3. Gather feedback from all levels of performers
Sit down regularly with your top performers to learn what drives their success. Use this information to train and develop the rest of your sales team. While soliciting your stars’ feedback, talk about their pain points and find ways to correct those issues.
However, you can't ignore your salespeople who struggle. They have potential — after all, that's why you hired them. What prevents them from hitting their goals? How can you help develop their potential? Ask their feedback to help them improve their sales numbers.
4. Leverage sales-team feedback to improve processes
Your sales team is in the trenches following up on leads, onboarding new clients, and taking care of existing customers. They have firsthand experience with what clients want and need.
Talk with your sales team about sales-cycle pain points. Ask about onboarding obstacles, questions clients ask, and the customer journey. Leverage this information to improve your sales script, training, and the tools you provide them.
5. Establish a culture of trust
Your sales team will only provide useful feedback if they trust you. Create a culture of trust in your organization. To build sales-team trust, model following through with promises, honesty, and respect.
6. Make sure you're not missing anything
Even in a culture of trust, your sales team may not want to share all feedback openly. Create channels for anonymously providing feedback through a suggestion box or online surveys that mask identities.
7. Monitor public-review sites
Remember that current and former employees may share feedback on public review sites. Monitor sites that collect employee feedback, such as Glassdoor and Indeed, and sign up for alerts that let you know when someone has posted about your company.
8. Model feedback best practices
Corporate culture develops from the top down. If you want your team to do something, you and your managers must model that behavior. Your team will do as you do, not as you say. To improve employee feedback, you and your managers must model best practices for giving and receiving feedback.
Business leaders often think they should conceal negative feedback within praise to make it more palatable. This sounds sensible, but in practice, your team will recognize positive feedback is only there to cushion the blow. This will negate the value of the positive comments. Instead, deliver positive and negative feedback separately. Your team should know that your praise is deserved. And they must realize that you're going to provide meaningful and specific constructive criticism as needed.
9. Embrace a growth mindset
While modeling effective feedback practices to your employees, make sure that you embrace a growth mindset. People with a fixed mindset tend to talent alone drives their efforts. They treat criticism as an attack on their core being.
In contrast, when someone has a growth mindset, they want to grow and improve. They accept constructive criticism as an invitation to improvement. You need this mindset to maximize sales-team feedback. If employees see you modeling this behavior, they will follow your lead and become more open to constructive feedback.
Your sales team drives your business's success. To optimize your organization, you must enhance your sales team's potential; gathering feedback is critical. Establishing trust and communication with your sales team improves sales, boosts retention, and increases employee engagement.
Develop your sales team with MetaGrowth
MetaGrowth helps you recruit, develop, and manage a world-class sales team without the traditional costs. We bring years of experience in sales-team training, and our recruiting, coaching, and consulting processes can help improve or transform your sales team. To learn more, contact us today.
Written by
Joe Arioto