With almost 29% of sales professionals’ main goal for the year being to make their sales process more efficient, it’s no surprise that some of the tactics need to change. Hubspot’s survey showed that the top reason why prospects back out is the length of the sales process – and that can be impacted by mostly internal factors, such as lack of communication between your teams or lack of a clear strategy. Over 27% of professionals highlight the importance of trust and setting realistic targets in their ability to succeed.
It's no secret that 2023 is expected to be a tougher year with fewer growth opportunities. So, how do you keep your recruiters on top of their targets and make sure your team works together to help achieve agency growth in 2023?
What’s so great about monthly sales reviews?
Looking at the data above, it’s clear that having a strategy and checking in with your team is crucial to achieving success. In order to keep your recruitment teams engaged, you need to continually review and analyse performance, outcomes, and impacts. This means putting a quarterly plan meeting into their calendars as soon as you’ve got your strategy ready – and then breaking those quarters into months, which will bring you to monthly performance reviews. Remember, it’s not about scaring them to death – it’s about keeping them actively searching for new solutions and reviewing what’s been working (or not), as well as testing new approaches. This will continuously keep your team engaged with your growth plan, but also ensure they’re on top of their work at all times. And if there are any problems, you can spot them straight away and address the issue.
Steps to a good monthly review
Step 1: Prepare for the Sales Review
Preparation is very important for both you and the consultant. You need to make sure that you have all the information that you want to cover throughout the meeting at hand. The best way to do this is to run reports based on the plan that was set the previous month, so you are able to go over both the positive and negative bits of data.
Step 2: Review the targets set at the beginning of the month
Your meeting should always start with reviewing whatever goals you’ve set together in the previous monthly meeting. Have they been met, exceeded, or missed? Why did that happen? You want to go over all the sales metrics that were set the previous month to see where they are against target.
Be careful, though. You do not want to turn your sales review into a blame game – that will simply demotivate your team at the start of a month.
Step 3: Check the KPIs
Another crucial part that will allow you to track progress of your team members is keeping an eye on their KPIs or success measurements. KPI’s should be in place to help team members hit their individual targets. Even if a team member hits all their sales targets, you should still be reviewing their KPI’s to see what worked for them. This way, you’re ensuring that they know exactly why they succeeded this month and what they need to do to repeat it. On the other hand, if one of your recruiters has not achieved their goals, a review into their KPI’s will be key to understanding what happened.
Remember, though - not all the same KPI’s will work for every team member (after all, we are all different!), so setting the right ones for each individual and allowing them to figure out what they need to do more of will help.
Step 4: Talk about challenges
It’s something not a lot of people like to talk about, yet reviewing the challenges and going step-by-step through what could have been done differently is the only way your team members will grow. In the sales review it is important to understand what challenges they have faced in the previous month and if any of these have affected them in meeting their targets. These may include things like bad data in the CRM or lack of appropriate tech stack. With that, working out a plan of how these challenges can be addressed will become a lot easier. By doing this collaboratively, you are working as a team towards growth of the agency – which makes your recruiters feel involved.
Step 5: Plan for the upcoming month
Finally, make sure you use this month’s data to put a plan and strategy in place for the upcoming month. It’s crucial that you don’t do it for them, though - it is their plan, and they are setting the actions that need to be carried out to achieve their goals for the month. Putting a new plan in place gives your recruiters a clear guide to what they need to focus on for the next four weeks. Everyone should leave the sales review feeling confident about the plan in place and a better understanding of what needs to be done and why it needs to be done from both a personal and business point of view.
To learn more about predictions for the industry in 2023, download our report:
