7 Steps to Build High-Performance Sales Teams in 2022

As the global market recovers from never before seen disruption, companies must bounce back stronger than ever to survive and thrive.

Heading into 2022, sales plays a pivotal role in how companies claim market share and make impressions on customer bases. Businesses that fail to prioritize building a high-performing sales team may find themselves losing ground to the competition.

Understanding how to build a high-performing sales team will be the key to success for companies hoping to enjoy rapid growth and expanded profits in 2022.

What are the Characteristics of High Performing Sales Teams?

Despite market, product, and company differences, the mindsets and behaviors of high-performing sales teams follow distinct patterns. 

We’ve compiled a quick overview of five key characteristics to keep in mind when building a strong sales team. 

Five Characteristics of High-Performance Sales Teams

• Diverse- A team that draws from diverse perspectives and backgrounds opens the door to well-rounded strategies and approaches for success.

• Team Players- A rising tide lifts all boats. High-performing sales teams internalize this mentality and routinely make efforts to support and receive support as a sales team to drive productive sales activities.

• Goal and Quota-Oriented- Strong sales teams are composed of individual sales reps that are highly motivated by pursuing and surpassing established sales targets and quotas. 

• Trainable- Ego is the enemy of improving sales skills. Sales teams that commit to perpetual improvement benefit from emerging strategies and sales methods and maintain a leg up on competitors.

• Flexible- High-performing sales teams consist of versatile reps who are comfortable thinking on their feet. Sales reps on outstanding teams adapt to new sales strategies and other productivity-boosting developments that continuously improve performance.

Seven Essential Steps to Build a High-Performance Sales Team

Building a high-performance sales team isn’t easy. 

However, this blueprint for success can guide your company to build the foundation of a consistently high-performing sales culture and a cohesive team.

We’ve outlined seven essential steps to construct a high-performance sales team, but don’t stop here when it’s time to develop a talent acquisition strategy that consistently secures top-performing hires.

Step One: Identify Culture Drivers and Hire for Those Attributes

Look around your sales office. Identify attributes that drive the success of your top-performers, and look for those traits in potential hires. 

Hiring and sales managers who develop a keen eye for qualities that support achievement in your company can improve hiring efforts’ efficiency and outcomes. 

By creating a shortlist of desired qualities, companies empower quick, confident decisions on the suitability of a candidate for the team and the role.

Step Two: Collaboration Over Competition

Healthy competition may effectively boost short-term sales goals, but collaboration is the secret behind balanced sales team performance.

Sales managers should prioritize the development of a supportive and synergistic sales environment to unlock their sales team’s true potential. Screening for collaborative sales philosophies and personality traits with tools like Performance Fingerprints by PerceptionPredict can supercharge your sales efforts.

Step Three: Identify Long-Term Sales Team Goals and Hire Accordingly

You can’t gain ground if you don’t know where you’re going. 

Identify the primary goals of your sales team over various timelines, then create a list of desirable skills, experience, and characteristics for new sales hires that directly support your essential goals.

Step Four: Prioritize Coachability 

Strong experience can be a boon for sales teams. But a sales newbie committed to coachability can quickly outpace veteran sales reps who are stuck in their old ways. 

The sales field continually evolves, so stock your sales staff with reps that understand and accept regular feedback and coaching to maintain an edge on conventionally-minded competitors.

Step Five: Involve Your Team in Hiring Decisions

Top performers' participation in the hiring process has a host of benefits.

Broadening your hiring panel invites deeper discussion, multidimensional analysis, diverse and potentially conflicting perspectives to the candidate consideration process. 

This range can lead to more strategic hiring processes and minimize the impact of unconscious biases that leak into the hiring process.

Step Six: Take Advantage of Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics is a rapidly advancing field of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and statistical and computational modeling.

In the hiring process, predictive analysis creates data-driven forecasts of candidate performance, professional values and motivations, length of tenure, and more pre-hire. 

This emerging field gives hiring managers around the globe reliable data for hiring decisions, leading to increased performance and productivity and significantly decreased turnover rates.

Step Seven: Commit to Ongoing Improvement

Even Michael Jordan showed up to training camp.

Periodic high-performance sales training is crucial for building a strong sales team. Top-performing sales reps understand that staying current with industry best practices and emerging sales strategies is vital for success. They welcome opportunities to expand their knowledge and skill set.

Build a High-Performance Sales Team With PerceptionPredict

PerceptionPredict harnesses the power of advanced predictive analytics to build high-performance sales teams for international business leaders like Mercedes-Benz and CrowdStrike. 

Performance Fingerprints is our proprietary, data-driven forecasting tool that reveals top performers pre-hire so companies can rapidly fill their ranks with candidates who align perfectly with their dynamics, goals, and culture.

If you’re interested in learning how your company can supercharge sales with predictive analysis, book a demo today to speak with an expert.