Don’t be afraid to get to know your staff. Check out these five simple steps to unlock your teams’ potential and make the most of the talent they hold!

Each manager has the ability to see the potential in their sales team but how many actually have the skills to ensure each team member’s potential is realised?

Having the necessary skills to ensure your team is working to its highest possible standard is essential in gaining maximum results in a sales environment. In an industry focused on targets, budgets and key performance indicators managers and individual staff members cannot afford to be running at half pace.

Sales and marketing director of Prosell Barry Porter says managers shouldn’t be afraid to know their team members inside out.

“Knowing as much as you can, within reason, about your team members means you know how to get the best from them,” he said. “Too often managers don’t see the benefits of running a team with a hands-on approach and this is when we see team performance plateau or even decrease.”

“Sales managers need to get their team members to think of performance as a constant journey for two reasons.  Firstly because most performance development is about having the right mind set and the moment you think that you’re arrived at your maximum potential then you have.  Secondly, in my experience, every year targets get increased, competition gets tougher and customers expect more so people need to develop their performance just to stand still.

The most successful managers build a performance culture within their teams.  This means that everyone looks that their pervious performance as a ‘personal best’ to be beaten.  As any elite athlete will tell you, beating yourself is the real competition and you improve by evaluating every aspect of your performance and identifying what changes you can make.”

To give your team the best start for 2007 there are five small steps you can take to begin unlocking the potential your team holds:

1. Ability – constantly strive to develop your team’s skills; spend time every month evaluating people’s strengths and development needs.
2. Knowledge – build people’s understanding of your company and products, the market they operate in and the challenges that your customers and prospects face.
3. Work-rate – people who are successful in work and life rarely do so by not working hard; set clear standards for activity and measure everyone against them. If there are no standards and benchmarks how do you expect people to know what’s expected of them?
4. Attitude – encourage your team to hope for the best and expect the worst. This means that they should anticipate what could go wrong with sales campaigns rather than expecting the best case scenario will happen.
5. Planning – create a strategy for how you and your team will achieve your goals, implement it and then continuously evaluate if its meeting your objectives.