Every manager wants their team to be the best ever. But not every manager is capable of building a seamlessly working group of professionals and subsequently leading their team to excellence.
What I’m going to tell you today is no rocket science, and neither is it a magical trick to turn your average sales team into a quota-busting machine. What I will give you though is an overview of the most vital roles that have their place in a sales team, and their importance for the functioning of a team as a living breathing and prospering organism. Here’s the anatomy of a super sales team.
The Brain
You. The executive organ that gives out orders, comes up with strategy, reviews and corrects the functioning of all the other organs, and constantly motivates them to action and improvement.
The brain is where all the input from the other parts meets and gets analyzed for result measurements, strategy adjustments and sales process tweaks.
Unless you have a dedicated sales trainer at hand, you are also responsible for integrating newcomers into the system.
The Eyes
Your HR. Looking out for new talent to complement your team is vital to keep the organism growing and active. Fresh blood brings new insights, new energy and more hands to contribute to the team’s results, so keeping a constant eye out for professionals is a must.
The Mouth
The sales reps. The mouth is where the business happens. The hands (discussed later) feed it with leads, and the mouth makes sure that the leads get chewed up well enough to become clients. Strategy and coaching to keep the mouth in a great shape is provided by the brain.
With all due respect to all the other vital parts of the sales organism, the mouth is definitely the most important part; without its contribution of closing deals, all the other parts would be useless.
The Hands
The sales development team. They play the vital part of feeding the salespeople with approved prospects and leads. They’re very important contributors mainly thanks to saving the sales reps time, so that they can spend more time closing deals instead of prospecting, but also by pre-approving the single leads, so that the final list of prospects has a high chance of success.
The Spine
Account managers, customer service, or salespeople doing CRM themselves are the spine of the sales body. Just as the spine of a body holds all the other parts upright and in place, so do the account managers and customer service representatives make sure that the whole team’s work doesn’t fall apart by a) not responding to the client’s inquiries, complaints and requests, and b) by not maintaining a post-closing relationship and follow-up routine.
Like I said though, this is no magic recipe. Each sales team is different, and so is its functional anatomy. Some brains are also the eyes, some mouths are also the hands and the spine, in other teams some parts may be missing, or there may be other parts I haven’t named that keep the sales process going.
The important part of the sales team’s anatomy, and the point I’m trying to make today, is that you as the sales manager must see your team as an organism with various parts and functions, and distinguish between them while hiring, reviewing the results or dividing the work.
Promising sales teams often fail because the mouth has to do too much of the spine’s job. Or because the brain gets too busy doing all the other jobs, that it forgets its main one: supervision and training. Don’t let that be your case.
