18 Critical Insights for Driving High Sales Performance

As the new year begins and the proverbial odometer resets to zero, the key question remains: Will maintaining the status quo be enough for your team to hit their sales targets in the new year?

For many business leaders, the answer is clear: stronger, more consistent sales performance is a must-and that requires change.

  • It may mean reassessing and redeploying underperforming team members.
  • It may mean holding sales leaders accountable for driving consistent, high-impact activity.
  • It may mean adopting a new approach to pipeline management, advancing opportunities more effectively, and eliminating dead deals. As reported, 39% of deals slipped in 2023!
  • It may mean enhancing coaching efforts to develop the sales and leadership skills your team needs.
  • It may mean committing to a structured, milestone-driven sales process that ensures consistency and predictability. Research shows that your sales teams will increase making quota by 18%-31% if a milestone centric process is consistently followed.
  • It may mean requiring your team to leverage simple and easy CRM tools effectively as the backbone of customer and sales management.

The bottom line? Your team cannot rely solely on yesterday’s methods. To win in today’s competitive landscape, you need to focus both on acquiring new business and retaining your current customers. Otherwise, your organization is left vulnerable to competitors, customer decisions, and external economic forces.

To win in today’s competitive landscape, you need to focus both on acquiring new business and retaining your current customers.

– Jennifer Hines

18 Essential Questions to Evaluate Your Sales Team’s Readiness

To ensure your sales team is ready to meet the demands of the new year, consider these critical questions:

  • How strong is your team’s prospecting ability – both for new accounts and expanding relationships and opportunities with existing customers?
  • How effective is your team at reaching true decision-makers? With research showing that buying decisions often involve up to 8 stakeholders, is your team too reliant on just one contact?
  • What is the depth of your team’s relationships across key accounts? Are they taking a consultative approach that uncovers compelling, time-sensitive reasons for customers to buy now?
  • Can your team effectively sell value over price, or are they vulnerable to discounting to win business?
  • Are they delivering the right content to the right stakeholders at the right stage of the buying journey? Research shows 85% of salespeople present at the wrong time.
  • How well do they manage sales cycles? Are they closing deals at the right time, or are they succumbing to unnecessary delays, put-offs and objections? Do you have a custom, milestone-driven sales process, and is it being consistently followed?
  • Is your team disciplined and consistent in their use of CRM? Is it the central hub of their activity?
  • Are they asking insightful, probing questions that challenge conventional thinking, or is the need to be liked hindering their effectiveness?
  • How strong are their active listening skills?
  • Are they holding themselves back with limiting beliefs, and are managers proactively addressing and redirecting these?
  • Does your team have a genuine hunger for success, or are complacency and comfort undermining their potential?
  • Are they committed to doing whatever it takes (ethically, of course) to achieve their goals?
  • What is the current morale across your sales team? 54% of salespeople report being burnt out.
  • Do you hear more excuses or ownership when discussing underperformance?
  • How motivated is your team to meet and exceed their sales quotas? In the first half of 2023, ONLY 27% of reps were achieving quota
  • How effective are your sales leaders in proactively coaching the team for improvement? 74% of salespeople FAIL but 75% can be trained to be competent at sales.

 

Effective sales teams build deep relationships, sell value over price, manage sales cycles strategically, and remain motivated to exceed their quotas.

– Jennifer Hines

The High-Performance Formula: Clarity + Will/Motivation + Skill

Success requires a clear understanding of your team’s current strengths, areas for improvement, and their commitment to achieving greater results. Imagine the value of knowing exactly how effective your team can be and what it will take to get them there.

New results demand new actions, behaviors, and mindsets. Without outside perspective, it’s nearly impossible to identify blind spots-because, as the saying goes, none of us can see our own swing.

New results demand new actions, behaviors, and mindsets.

– Jennifer Hines

At Accelerated Sales & Leadership, We Can Help

We specialize in helping organizations achieve transformative results through a proven, scientific approach. With our guidance, you’ll gain clarity and actionable insights on:

  • How effective is your existing team?
  • How much more effective can they be?
  • What will it take to make them more effective?
  • How long will it take?

Don’t settle for “good enough” This year, take the steps to ensure your sales team is performing at their highest potential- every week, every month, every quarter, and with every opportunity.

Give us 30 minutes and we’ll show you how we do this!

Contact: Jeff Hines @ 312-213-3010 or jeff@asliinc.com.

At Accelerated Sales & Leadership, we use proven systems and data-backed strategies to help organizations build high-performing sales teams. Our expertise lies in diagnosing underperformance, designing tailored solutions, and driving real results.

Contact us at jeff@asliinc.com to explore how we can partner with you to optimize your sales process, transform your team, and achieve predictable growth.

Let’s create a winning strategy-one that ensures your sales performance isn’t just good, but exceptional.

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