The confidence of your sales team directly impact your bottom line. If they aren’t able to pitch customers with confidence and showcase their trust in the product or service they are selling, it will reflect negatively on the results.
On the other hand, a confident and self-assured sales team will perform better, be more engaged and more productive, and achieve noticeably better results.
If you have noticed your staff are lacking in confidence and could benefit from a pep talk - here are 5 steps for internally addressing the issue.
Step 1. Focus on Their Strengths
The first step you can take to improve the confidence of your sales team is to identify what each member of the team is best at. Some will find it very easy to remember all the different features of a product or service, while others will find it easy to casually chat to a customer.
Once you have pinpointed each individual’s strongest point, you should work on improving it even further. This may seem counterintuitive, and you may believe that taking the time to work on someone’s weaknesses may be more beneficial, but confidence actually stems from our strongest traits.
Whether you arrange one-on-one training, ask another employee to present their own experiences, or hold sales team workshops will depend on the skills you are trying to enhance.
As you continually shine a light on the positives, rather than the negatives, you will also be boosting the general mood of your sales team - helping them strengthen their belief in themselves.
Step 2. Provide all the Answers
In order for anyone working in sales to feel confident, they need to know the absolute ins and outs of the product or service they are offering. They need to be able to deliver presentations, answer every question, assuage every doubt, and leave no room for error or confusion.
A salesperson who has to check their facts or consult a colleague while on a call with a customer will naturally start to doubt their skills, and this chink in their armor can quickly eat up their confidence.
Have you been asking yourself what can a business do to improve its productivity? As it happens, providing very detailed product and service descriptions to your sales team will not only make them feel more ready to handle a call, but more productive as well.
Their calls will take less time, as they will be able to impart information more succinctly, which means they will be able to handle more calls per day.
Here’s what you can do to help your sales team out:
- Provide detail-written and easy-to access documentation on any device and location. Update it regularly, and send out a company-wide blast that the new data has been added.
- Hold regular in-house meetings and training sessions, where your staff is able to test out and lay a finger on a product, experience service, and ask any questions.
- Compile an internal list of questions frequently asked by customers, and turn answering them into a team exercise. You’ll be surprised how much better they sound when they are turned into a collaborative effort.
- Establish a channel for sales-related questions where everyone is able to pitch in: from the people who have developed a product, to top-level management and everyone in between.
Step 3. Work on the Human Connection
A lot of sales confidence comes from establishing a good rapport with a customer. Without it, they often feel like they are just “being sold to”, which is not the emotion you are striving for.
Train your sales staff to see the people they are communicating with as humans, and not just another sale they need to close, or a conversion they need to achieve. Eliminate figures from the equation as much as possible, and focus on improving the human connection.
Encourage sales staff to chat with each other as much as possible, and practice different scenarios. Teach the art of small talk and applaud all genuine connections established with customers, as opposed to the mere number of sales achieved.
Step 4. Learn from the Best
Internal training is both cost-effective, and already tailor-made for your business. Have the best sales reps hold internal sessions at regular intervals, focusing on specific skills or specific situations.
Situational role play is a great way to learn as a team, and come up with solutions together. The more scenarios you are able to cover, the more confident your sales team will be, as they will no longer experience a first-time situations while speaking to a customer.
Make sure not to judge anyone’s initial reactions or responses, and to foster a community spirit during these sessions. Don’t shy away from enacting especially uncomfortable situations either, as these tend to be the ones that can significantly impact someone’s confidence, so it’s good to understand the beat way to handle them, at least in theory.
Step 5. Stop Holding Their Hand
To truly gain confidence, sales reps need to do things on their own, and score their own wins. Constantly micromanaging them and getting involved in every decision they make will only make them feel less capable.
Let them test out their own tactics and solutions. Even if they backfire the first time, they will learn from their mistakes and think of something better. Trust them to come up with the right answers and the right approach to each individual customer.
The more independent sales reps are, the more engaged they will become, and individuals who are truly invested in their work tend to have the best results.
Final Thoughts
A confident salesperson is always more likely to close a deal. Simply by investing some time in boosting your team’s confidence, you are able to significantly improve their results.
Remember that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for anything in sales and that every rep, client, and situation will require its own approach and a unique perspective.
Give your sales team the right training for them to create opportunities and close that deal!
About the author
Samantha Clark is a Warrington College of Business graduate and she works for the professional accounting firm - ThePayStubs. She handles all client relations with top-tier partners and found her passion in writing articles on various finance and business-related topics.
