How To Build A High-Performance Sales Engine: What You Need To Know

Sales performance has been a topic of conversation for the past few years. In fact, it’s been one of the hottest topics in sales since CRM became common practice. With all this discussion around selling, you may be wondering — what is sales performance? How do we improve our sales performance? And how do we build a high-performance sales engine to achieve that goal?

Let’s take a look at what makes up a high-performance sales engine, and how you can implement your own. The truth is that there isn’t just one way to build a high-performance sales engine. There are many ways, depending on your company and its unique needs. However, there are some universal best practices and ideas that can help you establish an effective sales strategy for boosting your performance across the board and creating an engine that continues to grow with your company.

What is a high-performance sales engine?

A high-performance sales engine is the culmination of all the best practices, strategies, and tactics for selling. It’s everything you do to boost sales, and it’s an important part of the sales process. In short, a high-performance sales engine is when your sales organization is at its best. It’s when your team is performing at the highest level, and your organization is at the most efficient level possible. A high-performance sales engine is something many companies strive to build, but it’s not always easy to do.

Sales is not a static process. It is ever-changing and adapting to a variety of factors in different industries, companies, and markets. Therefore, it’s important to make sure that you are constantly evolving your sales strategies and improving your performance to make sure that your sales engine is always running at peak efficiency.

Know your metrics and measure everything

The first step towards improving your sales performance and building a high-performance sales engine is to have some way of measuring your numbers. This can be both qualitative and quantitative metrics, depending on which ones are most important to you and your organization. These metrics can help you track your sales efforts, as well as make changes to your strategy when necessary. Some metrics to consider include:

• Lead generation
• Lead conversion
• Close rates
• Deal sizes
• Average deal value
• Buyer journey metrics
• Customer satisfaction

There’s others, but what’s important is that you find and use those that matter for your business.

Establish a cadence and routine to your selling process

Understanding what your sales process looks like will help you to more effectively track your numbers and determine how your sales efforts are impacting your sales performance. It can also help you identify when there is a problem that is impeding your ability to sell effectively. As you start to get a better understanding of your sales process and what it looks like in your company, you can begin to make adjustments or add new tools or strategies to help improve your overall sales efforts. Some ways to establish a routine and cadence to your sales process include:

• Defining the ideal sales process for your organization
• Setting sales targets and goals for your team
• Determining what metrics are most important for your organization
• Understanding where your sales process breaks down

Create a specialization strategy for your sales team

A specialization strategy is when you decide on certain verticals or industries that your sales team will sell in, as well as a particular type of customer that they will be selling to. This can be both an internal strategy, where you focus on selling to your current customers, or an external strategy, where you focus on acquiring new customers. Whether you choose to focus on internal or external sales, there are a few things to keep in mind when creating a specialization strategy for your sales team:

• Identify what verticals or industries you want to specialize in
• identify which type of customer you want to sell to
• Decide how you will go about selling to those customers

Implement an effective onboarding process for new hires

When it comes to improving your sales performance and building a high-performance sales engine, one of the most important things to do is make sure that you have a strong onboarding process, so that you have a consistent method of bringing new sales hires on board as quickly and effectively as possible.

With a standardized onboarding process, you can make sure that every new hire is brought up to speed as quickly as possible, and is able to hit the ground running. This will help them to hit the ground running, and is an important part of growing your sales numbers and performance. A good onboarding process will help to ensure that new hires get the training and support they need to be successful, understand their role and what is expected of them, and feel welcome and supported in the organization.

Get rid of the garbage and only focus on key initiatives

When you are trying to improve your sales performance and build a high-performance sales engine, it’s important to get rid of anything that is dragging you down or taking up unnecessary time. This can include anything from unhelpful productivity apps to inefficient communication strategies. By getting rid of the garbage and only focusing on the key initiatives that are most important to your growth, you will have more time and resources to put towards growing your sales. Here are some areas that you may want to focus on:

• Communication
• Sales process
• Sales tools
• Team structure

Bottom line

When you put all of these strategies and tactics together, you can begin to see how they come together to build a high-performance sales engine. With a strong understanding of your current sales process, numbers, and an effective onboarding process, you can implement strategies and tactics to improve your overall sales performance.

When you do so, you will be able to see results that go beyond just a number in a report. You will be able to see the impact your sales team is making on the organization and its customers.