You have a transactional sales team

Ensure your sales team knows the products and services they are selling inside out. Your sales talent should understand the client or customer's challenges, how your products and services differ from your competitors, and how your solutions can overcome the buyer's pain points. 

You must also ensure your salespeople understand what they are selling, who they are selling to, and how to adapt their selling style to the specific persona. To achieve this, you should test your sales reps regularly to ensure they have expert knowledge of your product and service offering and know how you differ from your competitors.

When building your transactional sales team, a key thing to consider is whether your salespeople understand the value of your offering, be it a product or a solution. Of course, they may have the general knowledge of what you’re selling, but understanding the value is another thing entirely. The best way to do this is to ask them questions. 

Here are some questions to ask your sales team to ensure they understand the value of your products or services. 

• Who is our target audience? 

• What do we offer? 

• How would you differentiate us from the market?

Your sales team must have the core transactional selling skills to ensure they bring the best results for your business. One of the critical skills your salespeople should have is the ability to ask the buyer the right questions. Good questioning involves asking open-ended questions. Your salespeople should ask an open question, for example, 'what is the biggest challenge you are facing?' Allow the customer to answer, then respond with a pitch of how your solutions can help.

Transactional selling is fast-paced and very active, so you must ensure your sales team is aligned with the behaviours of transactional sales, from being prepared to keep picking up the phone and reacting professionally to wins and losses to remaining resilient in striving to win the next sale. In addition, you must ensure your salespeople have the right behaviours and attitudes to help take your sales performance to the next level. 

Establishing or changing the way you target and KPI your team could fall under the behaviours of your transactional salespeople. So, for example, you could shift from measuring the volume of calls to measuring the next stage that happens as a result of that call - this might be a demo booked, a product in the pipeline to be sold or a second-stage meeting booked in the diary. 

You could look at conversion rates and how much your salespeople can convert on average while incentivising your team to grow existing accounts rather than solely focus on winning new business. 

Evaluating the qualitative nature of the conversations that are being had between your salespeople and your clients is essential to building your sales team. What do we mean by that?

As sales leaders, how many times are we listening to those first-stage calls?
And if we're listening, what are we measuring against? 

The next steps might be to provide your sales team with additional coaching on their knowledge of your businesses products or services and their value of them, the behaviours you wish to instil in your team to the skills you want to develop.