7 Tips to Keep Your Sales Team Happy and Productive

It is a top priority of successful sales managers, directors and VPs to make sure their sales teams are happy.

Why is that? Because a happy sales team is a productive sales team, and the success of your business often hinges on your team’s productivity.

With that in mind, let’s go over a few tips that will help you keep your salespeople happy and ready to crush their sales goals.

How to Ensure Your Sales Team is Happy

1. Use an effective onboarding process

A salesperson’s first impression of your company often becomes their lasting impression. In other words, if they see that your onboarding process is disorganized and makes them feel unwelcomed or stressed out, they may have negative feelings towards their job.

Thus, it is critical to create an onboarding process that makes every new salesperson feel like they are becoming part of a positive environment where they have plenty of opportunity to grow their career and skillset.

Here are a few ways to create a better onboarding process:

• Introduce new salespeople to the team so they feel like part of the group
• Provide guides to any necessary software and/or the sales process used at your business
• Make sure the new salesperson can get any of their questions answered promptly

Not only does effective onboarding help keep your salespeople happy and productive at work – it can also help with employee retention, which can save your company a lot of money.

2. Have an open door policy

When you have an open door policy, you leave your door “open” for feedback from your salespeople. In other words, you encourage them to be transparent with you – about both good and bad things happening at your business.

This is helpful because it allows you to build trust with your salespeople, and salespeople who trust their manager are more likely to be happy at work.

On top of that, an open door policy allows you to gain valuable insight on what is happening in your sales department. If something goes wrong, your salespeople will let you know and you can take quick action to solve the problem.

While this policy is often beneficial, it can backfire if your salespeople begin to use it as an excuse to needlessly complain about other employees. So, make sure you set the right expectations and focus on problem-solving rather than fielding constant complaints.

3. Relieve your team of time-consuming administrative tasks

Research shows that 20% of reps’ time is spent on reporting, administrative and CRM-related tasks.

Can you imagine how much your team’s sales results could improve if you cut that time down significantly?

Chances are the results would improve quite a bit. Your salespeople would be able to focus on what they do best – selling – and avoid wasting time handling tedious tasks that do not directly produce new customers.

To help cut down the time your sales team spends on administrative tasks, you can:

• Hire an administrative assistant to help with the workload
• Provide your sales team with the tools necessary to finish admin tasks as fast as possible
• Automate any administrative tasks you can

All of these actions can make your sales team far more productive, and they will also be much happier when they are relieved of this kind of work.

4. Keep meetings to a minimum

How many meetings do you have just for the sake of having a meeting?

At first, you may not think you are guilty of doing this. But really stop and think – out of the last several meetings you held, were all of them 100% necessary?

Chances are at least one of them could have been handled as an email sent out to your team or via some other, more efficient method.

While meetings can be important, many of them end up wasting time. So next time you think you need to hold a meeting, ask yourself:

Is this important enough to take time that could be spent selling away from my team?

If the answer is “no,” then consider cancelling the meeting and relaying the necessary information to your team a different way. If you do need to hold the meeting, make sure it is set up in a way that will allow you to deliver the information as efficiently as possible.

5. Get to know your sales team

While you do not need to become deeply involved in the personal lives of your salespeople, you should get to know their strengths and weaknesses.

By doing so, you will be better equipped to help them achieve better sales results.

For example, if you know that one of your salespeople is great at building rapport but struggles to close sales, you can work with that salesperson to help improve their closing techniques.

6. Set reasonable but challenging goals

Top salespeople are highly competitive, so they appreciate challenging goals that push them to achieve the best results possible.

However, if the goals you set are so challenging that they are nearly impossible to meet, even your most competitive salespeople may start to feel discouraged. No one likes feeling as if they are being set up for failure.

Thus, you must set goals that are both realistic and challenging. These goals can be related to sales results, professional development, skill improvement and more. Make an effort to tailor the goals to each salesperson’s strengths and weaknesses, and monitor everyone’s progress so you can see what is improving and what needs to be changed.

7. Prioritize work-life balance

Salespeople are known for working long hours. While they may love their job, they will likely experience burn out if they do not have enough work-life balance.

Make sure your salespeople have plenty of personal time where they do not have to be preoccupied by work. For example, you may want to advise salespeople who work extremely long hours to take extra breaks.

Sure, there may still be times when your salespeople trade personal time for work time. However, you should make sure this does not become a common habit. Your salespeople will be more productive if they are well rested and happy in all areas of their life.

Final Thoughts

Remember to focus on the growth of your company inside and out, and you will find that your team will respond positively.

Because in the end, happy salespeople are productive salespeople.

That is why it is so important to do what you can as a sales manager, director or VP to help improve your sales team’s quality of life at work.