5 Mistakes to Avoid When Building an Inside Sales Team

Obviously there's lots of factors and each company is different, but there's five common mistakes I regularly encounter whenever I work with companies who are struggling to consistently make their revenue goals. In the event you can avoid these mistakes from the beginning - or correct them now - you can immediately start to get better results, and that means you can start to make your revenue numbers.

According to CSOinsights.com less than half of inside sales teams make their revenue goals each month. If you are a business owner or sales manager of an inside sales team, then I'll bet you can relate. So what differentiates the half that makes their numbers from the half that doesn't?




Here are the five mistakes to keep away from when building or developing your inside sales team:


1) Not having these benchmarks - & so not being able to identify, confirm & teach each step successfully - leads to plenty of of the issues inside sales teams have. In case you haven't taken the time to identify your DSP, then this is job #1 for you.

2) Not having a training program that teaches your sales reps exactly how to succeed in the selling situations they encounter day in & day out. Think for a moment about your Top 20% sales reps. Is not it true that they appear to intuitively know what to say & what to do to close sales faster & more effectively than the other 80% of your team?

Job #2 for you is to script out your best practices & make definite every member of your team has the core selling skills needed to succeed in the selling situations they face every day.

Plenty of sales teams I work with may have a structured training program in place (& I say 'may have' because some don't) but most of them don't have a sales training program that teaches their sales reps exactly what to say & what to do in every selling situation to be successful (think scripts here). In other works, the best practices of their DSP are not the focus of their sales training, & this is why their teams struggle to win sales.

3) Measuring the wrong metrics of your sales team. While most managers & business owners can tell me how plenty of calls their reps are making, how plenty of opportunities they are getting, what their close rates are, etc., what they can not tell me is what matters: What their reps are saying in the coursework of their calls. Don't get me wrong, those other metrics are important to know & track, but they do not drive sales! How your reps are qualifying their prospects, how they handle objections & what they are doing & saying to move a sale forward is what drives sales. & that leads me to number:


4) Not recording calls. This is perhaps the most important thing a sales manager can do - record all sales calls & listen to both sides of the conversation. Knowing exactly what is happening in the work of a call is the only way to know what is wrong & to know how to fix it. This is the first thing I ask for from a company who hires me to help them. In case you are not recording your calls, then you need to start today. Trust me, you'll learn more in an hour of listening to calls than you will in a year of trying to figure it out without doing this.


5) Not hiring the right sales reps to start with. Not everyone is cut out for inside sales, & that includes reps with inside sales experience. You absolutely must have criteria in place that will help you identify who is likely to succeed in your sales surroundings. That includes profiling your top producers, but it also includes assessing the level of sales skills your hiring candidates have.


Also, of the largest determinates of future sales performance is past sales performance. That is why it is often a more sensible choice to hire reps without experience & put them in to a structured program (see items through above) & training these new reps to succeed in your surroundings. Also, get in the habit of slow hiring & fast firing - most companies do exactly the opposite!