Healthy competition in sales is important to encourage sales reps to achieve better performance. The sales reps are encouraged to go that extra mile to reach those targets, it is also an opportunity for them to learn from each other. But as the opportunities grow, there will be a need for more personalized outreach, which will require the collaboration of the sales reps. hence, there is always collaboration vs competition.
42% of sales reps feel they don’t have enough information before making a call.
This can be qualified as one of the major reasons why there are not enough sales and conversions.
In this article, we will be talking about how collaboration and competition are the two pillars that ensure the success of sales reps.
Collaboration vs competition
Why there is a need for sales reps to compete?
Healthy competition promotes the sales reps to achieve the numbers and many times, outgrow the numbers. Let us see some of the reasons why there is a need to compete among sales reps :
1. Constant motivation
When you have a fixed list of your goals, you will not try to outgrow them. With healthy direct competition among the sales reps, you will be able to always keep up the motivation. When there is competition and rewards among the sales reps, you will see they will be behind in achieving the targets without you needing to remind them.
2. Welcomes more creativity and innovation
The competition will enable the sales reps to adopt more creative and innovative methods. Many sales reps have content analysis software that will help them see which content is working the best for them.
3. Self-satisfaction for the employee
When you get too comfortable in your job profile with no new opportunities, you will feel bored and tired of your job. With the competition and new opportunities coming, the sales reps will improve and try to reach their targets. Setting new targets will help keep the sales reps engaged.
What is the need for sales reps to collaborate?
Along with fulfilling the targets and competing to get ahead of others, it is also important that the sellers collaborate to achieve better results.
Every sales rep has different experiences dealing with people and also different strategies to convert clients. Hence, with collaboration, the whole team learns and grows. Let us see what the primary reasons are for sales reps to collaborate:
1. A better learning cultures
With collaborative learning, sales reps or any employees can learn from each other’s growth and learnings. When your employees are learning in a collaborative environment, it will improve your company on a scale.
2. Employee engagement
When more people are communicating their viewpoints and contributing to the organization, it tends to grow more. When they have put more effort into the process, they will be more interested in the result. With the right collaborative approach, you can increase employee engagement.
The employee engagement rate has gone down over the years; these are the statistics until last year. To improve engagement rates, many companies are implying collaborative learning.
3. Work to fulfill shared goals
When the sales reps have common goals, they work together to fulfill those goals. In collaboration, you will add an element of leadership and it will add accountability too. A team working on a single project rather than a single person working on it will yield better results. Not everyone you can use the theory of collaboration vs competition.
How can you make use of both aspects?
The best sales teams encourage us to adopt both collaboration and competition.
- The salesperson or sales reps should collaborate with the team and compete with the company or business competitors. This will put the force into a single task that will encourage better success for the organization.
- The competition must not always be monetary. Rather, it can be the number of emails you sent or the number of demos you gave. There can be multiple winners because a team should compete together not against each other. Going apart from every strategy will not benefit you at all.
- A single person is not perfect in all tasks. Everyone has expertise in different fields and with collaborative dealing, you can benefit from all. You can apply all the employees’ expertise and create an excellent experience for your audience. One person may be good at analysis, one person may be good at customer handling and one person will be good at content building. You can benefit from all the qualities for improving your sales.
- Train your sales reps- Your sales reps should have appropriate knowledge of your product and how you want to pitch it. For that, you must train your sales representatives. The training should be based on your employees’ choices and what you think will be best suited for them.
- You must check various factors while making your training program. The primary thing to look after is the mode of training; whether you want to give online or in-class training, cohort, or self-learning. The best way to do that is to ask your employees.
- You can ask them to fill out forms so they will be able to answer your questions precisely. Make sure you make your training engaging as it will:
- Increase productivity by 14%
- Improve the customer ratings by 10%
- You can increase the sales by 18%
Source: peoplemanagingpeople.com
- Analyze your staff too – Many times, people are not aware of their potential or maybe overestimate themselves. In both cases, you must analyze the employee and suggest the ideal path for him or her.
When you are training your staff, you can analyze the metrics you will obtain through the training. You can see how many people are engaging in your courses or how many people are sharing the content. With metrics as such, you will be able to analyze what you need to provide your audience and how you will do it.
A win for an individual is a win for the company! When you encourage your sales reps to perform better through collaboration or competition, eventually your company will be profitable. As an employer, you must have an ideal balance between competition and the collaboration of your sales reps and do not run behind collaboration vs competition.
