For your sales team to be successful, every team member must know exactly what defines “success” in your organization.
It’s critical for sales leaders to establish and communicate expectations with their sellers as soon as they join the company—and to enforce them on a continual basis.
Categories of Expectations
The specific expectations you set will vary depending on the unique needs of your organization but typically will fall into one of three categories.
1. Sales Performance Standards
What is the seller’s target? What is the ideal conversion rate through the sales process? How many sales meetings are they expected to make per week? Set clear performance metrics so your sellers know what to work toward.
2. Administrative Compliance
Sales professionals must know what you expect from them when it comes to updating your CRM, attending sales meetings, reporting, etc.
3. Personal Development
Top performing sales organizations prioritize sales coaching and help each seller develop personally and professionally.
A comprehensive sales assessment is a great tool to use both for selecting candidates and throughout the lifecycle of the employee, including sales hiring, onboarding, sales training, and coaching.
Setting Expectations with Your Sales Team
Begin setting expectations for new hires during the onboarding process, ideally in the employee’s first few days on the job.
Resist the urge to simply hand new employees a book of company guidelines and performance expectations. Instead, work with your sellers to establish short- and long-term goals together.
Collaborative goal setting between seller and manager will help keep your team members motivated to reach their goals. That’s because we, as humans, support what we help create.
Just be sure you’re setting realistic expectations with measurable milestones. That way, you can break the goals down into specific responsibilities and tasks and track seller progress.
Managing Sales Team Expectations: 5 Principles
As you develop your own set of expectations for your sales organization, keep in mind the following five principles to improve accountability and performance.
1. Follow “Less Is More”
It’s important for your team to know their performance will be held to a high standard. But get carried away with too many metrics and your most important expectations will lose priority.
If you want your demands to be taken seriously, try keeping concrete expectations to a minimum. Aim for five (10 at the most) to keep sellers focused and to increase the likelihood of adherence.
2. Balance Activities and Results
Sales leaders can’t always control the outcome of a deal—that’s part of the game. What they can do, however, is influence the outcome by choosing what to focus on during the sales process.
The biggest mistake many sales managers make is to assess numbers at the end of the month instead of identifying opportunities to influence those numbers along the way. Once your numbers are out, it’s too late.
You want to track a mix of leading (activities) and lagging indicators (results). Inputs such as the number of discovery meetings and the number of proactive ideas provided to accounts should be where 75% of your attention lies.
The remaining 25% should be on outputs (total sales, number of new accounts won, percentage of goal met, etc.).
3. Deliver with Clarity
If you want sellers to meet your expectations, you need to make sure your team knows exactly what they’re responsible for.
Telling sellers clearly and specifically what is expected of them will increase adherence and accountability. Describe in detail what success looks like, as well as what is completely unacceptable.
Collaborating with your sellers (when possible) and creating a written document detailing the expectations in your sales organization is the best way to gain agreement from your team members. Have your sellers sign the agreement so they understand their commitment.
4. Establish a Formal Cadence
All the work you put into setting and communicating expectations may never see fruition if you don’t establish regular meetings to evaluate compliance.
Whether your sessions are weekly, monthly, quarterly—or all of the above—it’s crucial that you dedicate a time to review, measure, and coach to performance standards.
Don’t just analyze sales performance. Include reporting standards and whether your sellers have taken any individual actions toward self-improvement (courses, seminars, etc.). Without follow-up, expectations will not be taken seriously.
5. Involve Your Team
Setting performance expectations should involve not only your criteria, but input from your sales professionals as well.
Involve your sellers as much as possible in the process. At the very minimum, have them contribute to the follow-up process. That can be by letting you know which short-term goals have been achieved and what they’re doing to work toward the long-term goals you’ve agreed upon.
Seller involvement helps establish a sense of ownership of expectations as well as a commitment to meeting them.
Performance Standards for Sales Professionals
Establishing clear expectations and performance standards will help set your sales professionals up for success in the long run.
See how sales leadership training from The Brooks Group can help you build a sales culture of accountability and lead a winning sales team.
