4 Habits of High-Performing B2B Sales Teams

[jrineakter]

Smartbound has worked alongside hundreds of B2B organizations over the past decade, observing and implementing winning sales habits that drive performance and enable a repeatable and scalable sales process . Despite some variability based on industry, person, and individual sales teams, we’ve found that the majority of successful salespeople share four very key traits.

In this blog, we’re going to explore these habits and, more importantly, how you can hope to instill them in your own B2B sales team.

01. Interest in understanding data
Gut instincts only get you so far in sales. Over the years, we’ve interacted with countless B2B sales teams that operate with a very vague understanding of goals, where those goals come from, and what the sales funnel actually looks like . Very rarely do these goals reflect concrete financial realities, or do goals change as conversion rates change in the funnel.

There’s no question that the most successful salespeople are data-driven. This is something that needs to be taught and likely takes months to master. Salespeople need to canada telegram data be able to crunch numbers and tell you their conversion rates at each step of the funnel and how that translates into ROI . From

an operational perspective, the best B2B sales teams find ways to control how much time they spend on a sale. If you’re spending hours and hours trying to set up meetings and getting nowhere, you need to rethink that. Understanding the relationship between your efforts and the results they generate, and turning this into data, can be a tremendous tool to help your sales team.

02. Organization and communication
It’s critically important that your sales team has a central hub for organization and communication. Too many B2B organizations allow their best salespeople to operate in a silo, without logging any conversations in the CRM or developing any playbook for others to follow. This is often due to a competitive culture that encourages salespeople to look out for themselves and compete with others, rather than helping their peers.

The importance of diligent CRM use cannot be stressed enough. Your CRM should serve as the central source of truth, not only to provide a reliable source of performance data, but to ensure that you can build a repeatable and scalable process based on success. Any email exchanges and phone conversations should be recorded immediately, and salespeople should be held accountable for updating fields to indicate progress in the funnel.

A standard goal framework is also an incredibly valuable tool for ensuring alignment across a B2B sales team. The Smartbound team has found that using the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) methodology for goal setting is a great way to set and track goals in a way that encourages transparency and accountability.