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If we told you you could improve your “sales excellence,” you’d say yes immediately. After all, who doesn’t want to improve their team’s performance and strive for excellence? It sounds like a great way to begin boosting your revenue. The term “sales excellence” sounds great… but what does it really mean? Below, we’re unpacking precisely what sales excellence is, why you need to strive for it, and (most importantly) how you can achieve it. 

What is Sales Excellence and Why is it Important? 

In short, sales excellence means that your team consistently exceeds your targeted goals through strategic improvements in your sales process. For instance, if you implement a new tech stack that makes it easier for reps to research leads, you’ll start seeing stronger win rates across your team. These improvements maximize sales performance by giving your reps everything they need for continued improvement, including tools, training, and more. When 81% of sales and marketing teams don’t take the time to review and correct their sales processes, achieving sales excellence and this continuous improvement can be tough. 

Working on your processes and maintaining sales excellence directly results in growth. When your sales team outperforms their goals every quarter, you can celebrate more than just improved performance — you can celebrate more and more new customers. So, what can you implement to accomplish stronger sales excellence within your team?

Two employees celebrating a win with a high five in front of a laptop

How to Achieve Sales Excellence in 3 steps

Achieving sales excellence results from streamlining your processes. By evaluating your current sales processes and making a few key improvements, you make it that much easier for your sales team to achieve and maintain sales excellence. With these three steps, you can make an impact on your team’s overall sales excellence: 

1. Build a Robust Tech Stack

By providing your team with the right CRM and sales enablement tech, like Salesforce, you enable reps with the tools they need to streamline sales operations and sell effectively. A tech stack should provide your reps with enhanced content management, buyer intent data, and more, allowing them to better tailor their content to each unique buyer. In fact, 84% of reps achieve their quotas when their company employs a sales enablement tech strategy. Sales enablement tech is designed to let your reps perform their jobs more efficiently, allowing them to accelerate your sales process. 

Take buyer intent data, for example: it allows reps to know which leads are most interested in the product, and which features of the product interest them most. With this information, reps can locate the sales collateral that addresses these features and share it with the buyer. 

For instance, your rep is assigned a new lead that, based on buyer intent data, seems incredibly interested in your product’s ability to cut down time spent on menial, repetitive tasks. With the data insights in mind, your rep locates an eBook detailing precisely how much time your product can save per week. This pushes the buyer closer towards a purchasing decision by appealing to the precise pain points they’re looking to solve.

2. Train Sales Reps on a Continuous Basis

While you’ve likely got an onboarding training program in place, it’s important to treat training as an ongoing process rather than a once-off program. After 90 days, reps forget roughly 85% of the sales training they receive. This impacts performance, as reps slowly forget sales best practices. And as practices change over time, without additional training, your reps won’t be fully up-to-date on the most effective sales processes . And by personalizing individual training, you allow your reps to build upon those skills that need the most work, increasing sales excellence. 

Let’s say that you notice three of your sales reps have slightly lower win rates than the rest of your team. As you evaluate this further, you realize each are losing prospects at different times during the sales pipeline. In order to combat this, you create personalized, shorter sales training sessions to target each of these areas directly. With personalized training, your reps win rates slowly improve. 

3. Develop an Adaptable and Personalized Sales Approach

One of the biggest keys to maintaining sales excellence lies in remaining adaptable. Each of your buyers is as unique as the businesses they represent — which is why it’s important to adapt your sales approach to each buyer. In fact, marketers report a 56% increase in sales when they personalize buying experiences. Adjusting sales strategies to each buyer helps them reach an informed purchasing decision sooner. 

Consider this: your rep is speaking with a buyer who wants to purchase your product to speed up the amount of time it takes their IT engineers to complete a menial task required for cybersecurity. As the rep knows the buyer is most focused on the timesaving capability of the product, your rep tailors the experience and shares more content surrounding the time-saving features of the product. They share a case study with the buyer, showing how much time per month IT engineers at a similar company saved. This appeals to the buyer’s pain points, and instills confidence in your product or solution. 

Final Thoughts

Improving sales excellence sounds nebulous and complicated, but it really comes down to a few simple steps that streamline your sales processes. Better sales excellence means a team that not only meets your targeted goals, but consistently outperforms them. With the right tech, training, and flexibility, your team can deliver delightful, unique buying experiences that help your team push buyers to a purchasing decision sooner. 

Begin adjusting your processes and improving your team’s sales excellence with the help of expert consultants at SFE Partners. Get in touch with us today.

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SFE Partners is a Boston sales consultancy focused on driving sales efficiency for SaaS, technology, and private equity firms. Effective and efficient sales solutions are at the root of everything we do, from launch to scale. We assess, build, and deliver high-impact sales solutions for expanding organizations, designed to optimize teams and strengthen your vision. Your sales goals are waiting on the other side of thoughtful, data-driven solutions.