How to build a sales team? What problems should be paid attention to and what work must be done well?
Building a sales team is a leader's main job. Make sure your team has a clear purpose and sufficient resources to achieve it, and treat all team members with an open and fair attitude. 1. Team Tasks and Objectives Why did you set up this team? This question sounds redundant, but in fact, at the beginning of the plan, the time spent setting goals has a decisive impact on whether the team can successfully achieve the goals. Make sure you have clearly set the problems that the team needs to solve. At different stages of development, enterprises have different requirements for sales teams, which is the task of sales teams. In the early days of enterprise development, the company only had products and almost no customers. At this time, the task of the sales team is to try to find target customers, realize sales and distribute products quickly. Three or five years after the establishment of the enterprise, the company's regional development has been basically completed. At this time, the focus of the sales team is not to develop customers, but to maintain customer relationships and maintain long-term transactions. The goal of the sales team must be based on the company's goals, market characteristics and the company's expected positioning in these markets. You should consider the unique role of personal promotion in marketing mix, which can provide services to consumers more effectively. Personal promotion is the most expensive contact and communication tool for a company, but it is also the most effective tool. ● In the early days of establishing a * * knowledge team, meeting is a good way to enhance team spirit and adapt to team work. Arrange a series of warm-up meetings so that team members can get to know each other and agree on team goals. Make sure that each member has a clear understanding of the tasks delivered by the team and the problems to be faced, evaluate all possibilities, and then decide how to organize the team. Finally, discuss and decide the deadline for completing the tasks in each stage. ● The analysis goal will change with whether the team should choose an action plan and whether it should engage in or promote something. For example, the team that drives the improvement plan can measure its success rate according to the feedback from the organization; A practical team, such as a product team, will strive to reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction; A team responsible for creating sales performance must strictly control the expenditure budget and push forward the work according to the schedule. ● Goal Motivation Ambitious and challenging goals can motivate people more than smaller and clearer goals. For example, achieving the biggest and best goal in microfinance service is far more exciting than shortening the application time of mortgage loan to two days. If possible, set general goals and specific goals at the same time. Although the goals are high, we should still consider the actual situation. Therefore, make sure everyone is involved in setting their own goals and understand the common goals of the team. In addition, any requirements for the team are uncompromising. Need to find the best team combination suitable for team work and excellent professional skills. 2. Members of the sales team How many sales people do you need in your team? The starting point of thinking about this problem is to look at what is happening. First of all, it lists what the salesman actually does at present, including: establishing new accounts, handling and modifying existing accounts, displaying new products, accepting repurchase orders, promoting sales and collecting arrears. The next thing to do is to consider whether there are other ways to accomplish these tasks. For example, compared with personal dating, telemarketing has proved to be a completely desirable method, especially when similar business happens again. This saves the salesman the pain of preaching, which is incomparable by telephone. Can the arrears be collected by letter? Can goods be sold in the exhibition hall of the fair? Only by answering these questions can we never fall into a stereotype: let the company be bound by the decision first, and then look for information and reasons to prove the correctness of the decision. Then, the best way is to collect relevant qualified information and then make this decision based on experience and intuition. The activities of all salesmen can be roughly divided into the following three items: telephone, business trip and management functions, which constitute the workload of salesmen. If we first determine the components of the salesman's workload, then we can estimate the time spent on his current activities and the degree of his current workload by calculating the hours per month. This evaluation activity can be completed by a third party. The salesman had better do it himself. All they have to do is record the distance traveled, the start time of the phone call and the type of promotion. Then, by analyzing these situations, we can get the average time required to make a phone call in each kind of sales, the average distance traveled in one month, and the average speed traveled in different areas (such as cities, suburbs or rural areas). With the help of maps, we can classify existing customer accounts on the basis of trial and error, taking into account the time values related to them and the time values of office work and travel that follow. In this way, a fair and reasonable workload can be calculated for the sales staff, and some necessary space can be added when necessary to facilitate the discovery of talents. Sometimes, the result of this analysis is surprising, because it is often found that the work of star salesmen in the company is less than that of other salesmen. Because of his own knowledge and other factors, the latter often has to work for a long time to complete his sales promotion task. At least, you should know how a salesman spends his time now, and you can also know roughly how much time he actually spends on sales. Based on this, you can take some measures quickly: for example, hold a training program to let business people make plans better and spend more time on sales. 3. Team mode The composition of the team is ever-changing, both formal and informal, each suitable for a specific task. You should have a clear concept of team goals and how to achieve them, so as to assign tasks to the most suitable team. ● Formal team Formal team is the most basic organizational form. They are all fixed units, responsible for repetitive work, with specific and clear expertise: cross-functional teams composed of senior executives bring together high-level professional knowledge; Cross-functional teams at all levels focus on professional knowledge to solve problems and implement plans; A business team composed of all levels, bringing together people with relevant professional knowledge, and implementing specific plans for a long time; Support the team to provide professional logistics services for the organization according to their own professional knowledge. An informal team is a group where members from various departments of the company get together temporarily to deal with emergencies, which is called an informal team. This kind of team can be combined in various ways according to the characteristics of the problem: the existence time of "temporary professional team" depends on the duration of specific tasks; "Contingency team", when there is a specific one-off problem, it is necessary to discuss the strategy or find the problem point; The "golden brain team" is autonomous and spontaneous, and can stimulate creative plans with brain power; Ad hoc working groups deal informally with specific short-term tasks and problems. ● Comparison between formal team and informal team The more formal the team, the more disciplined the team leader must be: he must abide by company regulations and working procedures, make reports, record progress and achieve fixed results. Accordingly, informal teams follow informal procedures, and the methods to solve problems are more free and the working procedures are not too strict. However, it must be remembered that leading a formal or informal team must be result-oriented. For example, just because the "golden brain team" needs temporary, independent and unconstrained work nature to stimulate creativity, it doesn't mean that it doesn't need to abide by discipline. 4. Teamwork The most important feature of successful teamwork is trust. Teams will flourish on the basis of mutual trust, so mutual trust must be established at the early stage of team establishment. Mutual trust can be promoted through authorization, open and transparent behavior and opinions, and allowing the free flow of information. ● There are two forms of authorized representatives: task representatives and authority representatives. In order to cultivate mutual trust and cooperation, the team needs to realize these two kinds of authorization. Break down each plan into multiple tasks or goals and assign them to each team member. Then fully authorize, unless there are signs that the goal will not be achieved, don't interfere. Consult all members and share your power with the team. If your major is involved, you should give them enough power and share your power with them. This is the method of authorization. Let the members keep you informed of the progress, let you grasp the progress, and then let them continue. Before authorization, you should understand various personality characteristics: you can do it and you like to do it. This is an ideal authorized person, willing to accept the task, willing to take full responsibility, and willing to solicit opinions from others and adopt suggestions. Willing to do, lack of ability. Before starting to perform the assigned tasks, such people need to be encouraged and properly trained to make up for their lack of experience. Can do, hate to do. Such people are unwilling to learn or accept other people's opinions. People with this personality are not suitable for the team at all, so they will not be a good representative. I can't do it. I hate doing it. Unless the shortcomings of insufficient will and ability are overcome, such people will be the representatives of failure, and they may need to adjust their affairs. ● Communication, teamwork and keeping secrets can't be balanced, so a leader who can't be honest with team members can't let team members play their greatest potential. "Have something to say" meetings should be arranged regularly and irregularly as communication channels. Members will be relieved and relaxed because they know each other, which will help to cultivate loyalty and cohesion. Try to fully disclose all information related to team tasks in appropriate occasions, such as data, facts, agenda or memos recording members' personal responsibilities for the whole plan. But one thing to remember is that there will be some things that must be kept secret in the future. ● Encourage members to express their opinions. When working in a team, everyone must be far more creative than working alone. Encourage the public to discuss opinions and ensure that every opinion is heard and respected. If you have reservations about an opinion, you should politely say that the reasons for refusing it must be reasonable and justified. Remind members of the professional knowledge in the team and promote open discussion among members about the team goals. 5. Give full play to the best performance. It is extremely important that team members can work together in Qi Xin to achieve the best performance. Let members take full responsibility for their own work, give them the motivation to carry out and improve their work, and induce them to make the greatest contribution to the whole team. ● Setting the same goals and arranging individual roles is only the beginning of a procedure when the responsibility sharing team is initially established. The project will last as long as the team exists. A team must be responsible for implementing policies and controlling progress, and provide constructive and creative feedback to superiors when actions fail to achieve their goals. As a whole, the team has the responsibility to ensure the free and smooth communication among members, and make each member clearly understand the policy changes and work progress. ● Keep the best performance As a team leader, your role is to help the team play the highest efficiency. By taking charge of several different functions, you can do this: make sure that all members understand their responsibilities and their work is challenging; Encourage members to do their best for the team and their own tasks; Look at the work of the team comprehensively to ensure that the efforts of the members are consistent; Evaluate and set team goals to keep them at the best stage to stimulate continuous work motivation; Ensure that the overlapping of team and individual responsibilities will not lead to duplication of tasks. ● Maintain flexibility. Any team has many demands on its members. Although each member has his own role and responsibility, they must be flexible and willing to adapt to changes. Some manufacturing teams even require members to have the ability to complete all aspects of the team. Show flexibility by sharing all aspects of leadership roles and share some of the work of members. As the team moves forward, review everyone's role and make adjustments according to the needs of the task.