Daily Sales Tips: How To Take Care Of Your Sales Team In 2022 And Beyond

"Taking care of your team members always provides a great ROI and prioritizing the team member experience can go a long way to retaining top talent, driving engagement, and ultimately driving sales." - Maria Pardee in today's Tip 1040

How do you take care of your sales team?

Join the conversation below and learn more about Maria!

TELUS International
Maria Pardee on LinkedIn

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Transcript

Scott Ingram: You're listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I'm your host, Scott Ingram. Today's tip comes from Maria Pardee. Maria is the Chief Commercial Officer at TELUS International and brings to the role more than 25 years of leadership experience in technology and transformation, specializing in global integration and infrastructure managed services. Here she is:

Maria Pardee: How to take care of your sales team in 2022 and beyond. The tip I'd like to share today is to ensure your sales team is cared for and well supported in the coming year. Ensuring this will not only create a better work environment but better enable your sales team to focus on creating lasting and meaningful connections with customers and thereby leading to greater loyalty and larger deals.

There are two aspects of team member support I'd like to explore today.

First, according to HubSpot, sales representatives spend only 39% of their time selling, meaning that the remaining 61% of their time is spent on administrative tasks, including data entry and quote generation. As such, I believe today's sales organizations must embrace and leverage automation. By implementing bots and automation to complete these simple and repetitive administrative tasks, sales teams can focus their time on relationship building and business development with clients and prospects.

In a recent survey by my company, TELUS International, we found that 88% of US employees believed that bots were helpful and made their jobs easier. 84% expected companies to integrate even more bots in the next 5 years. Automation allows companies to cut down on monotonous tasks, thereby enabling sales team to focus more on adding value to the sale cycle by investing time back into conducting research and having more meaningful conversations about their clients, business, and the challenges that they face.

Not only does automation help sales teams be more productive, it also improves the overall employee experience through minimizing administrative tasks. At the end of the day, investing in a better employee experience means your team members will stay longer at the company. In fact, a 2018 report by Bridge Group showed the average sales rep tenure sitting at one and a half years, but according to exactly insights, top-performing sales rep hit their peak quota attainment between 2 and 3 years in their roles.

Today's sales leaders must be actively investing back in their team members, making their job and overall experience with the company as positive as possible. This leads well into the second part of my tip, focusing on supporting team member mental health. Over the last 20 months, we've seen a much-needed shift from don't ask, don't tell to do ask, do tell, and let's talk about mental health. Sales team members have had to adapt to this extreme shift in the before times. They were always on the road, having face-to-face meetings and socializing with their customers. As most salespeople are social in nature, the shift to remote meetings and collaboration can provide challenging and at times lonely.

As sales leaders, we must help our sales teams navigate this change and ensure that we are having thoughtful one on one check-ins, meaningful conversations, impactful team meetings, and sharing resources that others have found helpful to continue to drive meaningful interactions with our customers. It's more important than ever to ensure sales teams feel supported at work and that includes their mental health.

Another recent TELUS International survey found that 57% of employees today say they would quit their job for another company that better prioritizes their mental health. Don't underestimate the value of taking care of your team members from a practical and mental health perspective. Give them access to leading technologies and tools to make their jobs more efficient. And stay in touch. Lead with empathy and offer support alongside flexible work policies to make their lives easier. Taking care of your team members always provides a great ROI and prioritizing the team member experience can go a long way to retaining top talent, driving engagement, and ultimately driving sales.

Scott Ingram: For links to connect with Maria and TELUS International, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1040.

Once you've done that. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!