Career Development: Foster the Ambition of your Sales Team

In France, 4 out of 10 active workers state that their professional ambition has decreased over the past 5 years (1). Supporting your teams, especially sales teams, in their development is essential for their well-being, which is itself crucial for their motivation. So how can you help your sales force upskill? Here are 4 key points to remember to support and develop the ambition of your sales team.

Develop Their Skills

According to an IPSOS study (2), only 6 out of 10 active workers believe their management is concerned with their skill development and training. To avoid this perception, it’s essential to listen to the expectations and needs of your sales teams regarding skills, whether for acquisition or renewal. The company must therefore provide its sales representatives with all the means to learn and train themselves daily, at any time.

To do this, offer them more control over their environment. For example, why not give them access to content they can consult at any time about their activity and sector? Or provide your sales representatives with training so they can train themselves daily through micro-learning modules?

These modules are indeed an effective way to train your sales force daily, especially on specialization topics. Today, most consumers, especially in B2B, gather as much information as possible before making a purchase. It is therefore crucial that your sales representatives always stay one step ahead. They must be able to advise and support the client, and for that, they need to reactivate their skills daily. Support your sales representatives so they, in turn, can support their clients.

Empower Them

Beyond the possibility of self-training, it is necessary to offer them autonomy in managing their objectives and performance. Indeed, supporting the professional development of your teams goes hand in hand with empowering them with more responsibilities. Sales representatives must be able to self-manage, based on the principle of the “inverted management pyramid”: it is the sales representative who contacts and seeks advice from their manager when they feel the need or encounter difficulties in their tasks. The manager then plays more of an advisory role and less of a hierarchical superior, to encourage initiative and responsibility among their teams.

This autonomy can be materialized through a clear, more engaging real-time performance tracking platform, far from uninspiring Excel spreadsheets. This type of ergonomic interface allows for combining performance management with sales engagement. It is indeed about evolving traditional hierarchical barriers so that the sales representative becomes the manager of their own performance. Thus, with clear signals, they can formulate their own strategies and solutions to optimize their activity.

All of this with the aim of allowing them to focus their attention on what is important to them and let them draw their own conclusions.

Restore Their Confidence

To grow and develop one’s ambition, one must gain confidence and self-esteem. For your sales representative to gain assurance, for example, give them the opportunity to share their best practices and experience with their colleagues. The exchange of best practices is an essential element of sales engagement and sales representative improvement. This also helps foster communication and good morale within your teams by focusing messages on successes and positive aspects.

Thus, the sales representative will feel recognized for their work and skills. A rewarding system that will encourage them to grow and excel.

Sales challenges, provided they address all profiles within your sales team (from the least performing to the “top performers”), can be an excellent way to instill confidence in sales representatives. For example, one can imagine a “tiered” challenge that rewards achieving a specific objective, by setting several types of objectives in advance. To ensure this confidence and challenge are sustained over time for all sales representatives, a sub-challenge system can be envisioned where counters are reset to 0 each week or month.

Provide Them with Supportive Coaching

And you, sales director, what role should you adopt in all of this? In addition to providing them with tools to gain skills, autonomy, and confidence, the manager’s support in coaching and encouraging the sales representative’s development within the company is paramount. By adopting open, flexible, and reassuring communication, you enable your employee to build self-confidence while supporting them in their professional development.

For example, it is advisable to encourage the expression of your sales representatives’ personal feelings: “How do you feel after this meeting?” they might be asked. It is also important to explain the organization’s challenges and overall strategy to foster team involvement. Thus, the sales representative can project themselves to envision their development and strive towards a common strategic objective, rather than just a personal one.

To foster the professional ambition of your sales representatives, you will need to find a daily balance between all these key points. So how do you find this balance? Today, there are innovative digital platforms that combine performance management and sales engagement through a fun and comfortable user experience. This is what Incenteev offers, a platform that brings together managers and sales representatives within your company for a modern sales engagement experience. Incenteev extracts data from your CRM to present it in a more digestible and effective format, allowing you to accurately measure your achievements against your objectives.

(1) The Ambition of French Women at Work – McKinsey

(2) Edenred-Ipsos Barometer 2016