When revenue numbers turn out to be below expectations, Founders & Sales heads often complain about lack of activity in their sales team. We’ve heard them speak about how the sales team is ‘slacking’, ‘not putting in enough effort’ or other things along similar lines.

Whether what they are saying is true or not is contentious. As a sales leader or a founder however,  it is important to have the belief that your sales team is not lacking in efforts. We have seen people use various methods to drive ‘rigor’ often creating stress more than activity in the sales team. 

Here are a few simple things to maintain activity levels in your sales team.

Communicate Targets Early & Clearly

This is the easiest, yet the most important thing that early stage organizations miss out on. Sales teams need targets. Hard, individual, measurable targets.

Make sure team leaders are sending targets over email. Targets are acknowledged by the team.

Achievements are closed out at the end of the period.

Set stretch Yet Achievable Targets

If more than 50% of your team is missing targets, it probably isn’t because of a lack of effort. We’ve come across sales teams where no one has met targets for months together. 

Belief is the single most important thing for a sales team. A sales team that starts believing a) targets are not achievable and b) it is ok to miss targets is a recipe for poor performance.

Review your target setting every couple of months. Check what percentage of the sales team is hitting targets. Once your sales team starts hitting targets, you’ll be surprised with what you can achieve with them and the possibilities that open up.

Publish a Leaderboard

Competition is innate to sales people. Your good sales people take pride in being on the top amongst peers. 

Publish a live leaderboard if possible. If a live leaderboard is not possible, publish one based on your sales velocity.  For example, If your entire team makes > 10 sales a month, publish a weekly leaderboard.

Run Sales Competitions

This is an underutilized tool in sales management. While targets do a great job of setting goals, they do tend to get monotonous. 

Having a sales contest keeps salespeople engaged. The reward need not be extravagant, it need not be monetary even. A dinner with the founder, amazon voucher etc. all work great.

Plan of Action, Daily Sales Report & Reviews

Most organizations have their teams send out a DSR ( daily sales report). Add a plan of action at the beginning of the day. Even if you are not able to go through all of them, the sales person gets a good understanding of where they ended up with respect to their plans.

Keep the report short though. It shouldn’t take more than 5 min of a salesperson’s day to send them.

These things might seem very basic, simplistic, even routine. The trick however is to do them consistently over a sustained period of time.