In every kind of industry— a winning sales team is one of the core factors of success. In addition to having an excellent offering and investing in marketing, sales is one of the critical pillars to your home improvement company’s success. So if you’re a home improvement pro, how do you build a strong sales team that can take your business to the next level?
Spoiler: it isn’t easy. But here are a few ways you can ensure it’s the best it can be:
1. Figure out what your business needs now
Before working on your sales team process, assess your business’s current sales needs.
Do you have a large enough sales team? Or is it too small? Are your sales reps knocking it out of the park— or do they need more support?
Before you diagnose your company’s sales position, take a look inward first. It will help you determine where your next investment should be: in your current sales employees or in scaling your sales team to meet demand. Whatever the case is, be sure to take a look at the numbers carefully and observe your current sales team members’ success closely.
2. Create an accurate description of the sales role
Once you’ve determined what your home improvement business needs for its current sales process, you know how to treat where it’s lacking.
If your business will benefit from recruiting more sales members, you need to determine your sales team’s end goal. Is their focus customer-centricity (retention), or is it aggressive cold-calling?
When you recruit new sales professionals, you want to be sure you’re conveying the nature of the role as accurately as possible.
Don’t be afraid to go into detail about what your sales team’s day-to-day looks like, how the workflow is managed, and the type of energy your sales employees are expected to have.
Sometimes, your current sales reps might thrive in different sales positions. Don’t be afraid to experiment with this either until your talent is thriving. When your sales team does what they’re best at, your company growth will mirror that.
3. Measure sales performance
An important tenet of assessing your sales team is being able to do so with facts and figures. If you want a strong sales team, you need to know exactly what it means for your company to thrive.
What does winning look like to your home improvement business? Is it a higher closing rate? Is it more phone calls? Is it higher client retention?
Balance focusing on numbers and behavior. Your reinforcement tactics shouldn’t all be about results (this can discourage productivity), just as it shouldn’t all be about attitude (this can do the same).
Observe what reinforcement method optimizes productivity for your sales team so that you know what levers to push during a sales slump.
4. Invest time into creating a winning hiring process
First off, ensure you’re investing in ways to recruit good talent to your business. There are many ways to do this:
- Recruiting events: These are helpful because they can expose you to many good and eager candidates without costing too much money or time. However, it forces you to compete with many other companies, so you’ll need to be able to communicate why talent should work for you and not the next company.
- Referrals: Old-fashioned but effective, referrals are an excellent way to find good talent. Encourage your current sales team, business partners, or even friends to let you know about candidates or tell candidates about you. You can even incentivize this with bonuses.
- Advertising: If you market to advertise your business, you should certainly consider marketing to develop your business. A home improvement business is only as good as its employees.
- Hire a recruiter: Don’t have the time but have the money? Hire a recruiter! But be sure to vet them first so they understand what your company is looking for in a hire.
5. Offer base-pay if you can
It’s no secret that financial security is one of the biggest motivators in the modern economy and job market.
Though salary isn’t the only way to motivate your sales team, you’ll likely have an easier time retaining and recruiting good sales talent if your home improvement business offers a base pay.
If this doesn’t work for your company, try engineering a more inventive commission scheme that rewards employees.
6. Keep your sales team focused on the vision
Outside of comfort and financial stability, people like to feel like they are making a difference in their jobs. It is one of the most critical intrinsic factors to worker satisfaction. This is why you should encourage your sales team to uphold your company’s vision.
What does that mean for your company? It means your sales employees aren’t just employees, they’re ambassadors! If your company walks the talk, this will be all the more valuable for business success and growth.
Clients and consumers are very intuitive and they can tell if your company has integrity or doesn’t. And that starts from within.
To keep them focused on your vision, have regular meetings reminding them of these goals. Reward adherence to those values. Lead by example. Your sales team will enjoy winning if it means upholding a vision or a purpose.
All in all, building a strong sales team requires the following: assessment, recruitment, and encouragement. For home improvement pros, sales teams aren’t just nice-to-haves, they are critical success factors, so you should be sure to treat them as such.
Keeping these 6 tips in mind will certainly help you create a winning sales team, but ultimately, only you can uncover what works best for your company through trial and error.
For more helpful tips on all things home improvement sales, check out our podcast and sales tip center!