How To Build An Effective Sales Team In The Construction Industry
The construction industry is a highly competitive field where clients and sales representatives come from culturally diverse backgrounds. Building an effective sales team that achieves your sales goal is a must-have strategy if you want to increase revenue and success.
Finding The Right Type Of Salespeople
Although having high-quality products and services is essential, having the right type of salespeople will let you determine the success of your construction business.
What type of salespeople your team requires depends on your company’s business model, target market, and the particular services or products you are offering. Be sure you understand exactly what you’re looking for when making your decision to hire a salesperson. There’s a lot of common mistakes of hiring that business owners can run into. Make sure that’s not you!
Imagine the best profile for your team. Sometimes, business owners find themselves hiring “entry level” talent to reduce their overhead costs. However, you may find that with no experience, comes no results. On the other hand, you might not have the funds to hire a super senior sales person. Well, there’s a solution! You could hire fractional sales talent to step in with the quality of an experience sales person, but the price of an entry level hire. Try this out for your next sales hire.
Incorporate The Right Compensation Plans
Compensation plans can be crafted in many different ways. You could go with a base pay, a commission, a combination of both, etc. You should put some serious thought into how to structure your compensation planes for your sales team and business.
To keep the best and the brightest it is also important to have the right compensation plans with the right financial incentives for outstanding sales achievements. But how should you structure your sales teams compensation package?
Take your time and do research on different options. Incorporating the right compensation plans for your sales representatives will help you build a productive atmosphere as well as also motivate them and they will take pride in their work.
Set Clear Company Values And Goals For Your Sales Team
It is of utmost importance that you set clear company values and targets for your salespeople. Those values can include incorporating the right culture to make the work environment conducive to productivity and cost efficiency.
Having the right sales goal is also important so that salespeople are aware of their sales target. As a leader, you should have clear communication across your team of what the company goals are and how they fit into accomplishing those. Incentive them to see the bigger picture and encourage them to grow with your company!
Monitor Sales KPIs
Once you have your sales goals and communicate that to your team, make sure you’re consistently monitoring them. You should always monitor Sales KPIs and try to improve on those different KPIs to achieve an increase in sales and revenue. Sales KPIs can include average contract values and sales cycle length. These numbers are important to motivate your salespeople and build an effective team of sales representatives.
Although your business may be in the construction industry you should know that each company has a different business model and a different set of products and services aimed at different target markets.
The construction industry can be particularly difficult for newcomers to break into but an effective strategy and the right sales team combined with the right offering of products and services can lead to major long-term success and growth.
Understanding Your Market
The success of any startup relies heavily on understanding the market it operates in and identifying the ideal customers within that market. Understanding your customer and becoming a subject matter expert is key, especially at the formidable stages.
By having insight into potential customers, you know what problems you should be solving with your product and how to communicate in a way that appeals to them.
The market is the broader industry that you serve. The ideal customer dives deeper into who your product is the best fit to serve. It's a way to segment your customers.
You might not know who your product best serves yet, and that is okay, but it's important to hypothesize and test who is.
Make some assumptions about what would make a customer a good fit for your product and test those assumptions otherwise, use your current customer base and data to guide you.
Here are some of the key steps to understanding your market and identifying your ideal customers:
Understanding Your Market
1. Research industry trends and news: Stay updated on current and emerging trends in your industry. Search Google news, read articles and follow the right people on social media to gain insights into customer preferences and potential opportunities.
