How to Manage a Sales Team: Strategies to Build and Lead High-Performing Teams
Managing a sales team is no small feat. From setting clear goals to inspiring sellers to deliver peak performance, knowing how to manage a sales team can make or break a sales manager’s success. And the best managers don’t just lead—they motivate. In fact, top-performing sales managers are 71% more likely to motivate sellers for high productivity and performance, according to RAIN Group research. The stakes are high, but so are the rewards.
To succeed, sales managers must navigate evolving market trends and buyer preferences while understanding how to manage a sales team to adapt to these challenges. Managing remote or hybrid teams adds another layer of complexity. To stay competitive, they must also embrace digital transformation. It’s a role that requires leadership, strategy, and adaptability.
But the effort is worth it. Sales managers who know how to manage a sales team successfully reap the rewards of building cohesive, high-performing teams that consistently exceed targets and drive organizational success. By mastering sales coaching, communication, and leadership skills, you can empower your team to thrive—even in the most competitive environments.
Read on for proven strategies on how to manage a sales team, as well as actionable tips to improve sales team management and sales leadership skills while developing a successful, motivated team.
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Key Sales Manager Responsibilities
Understanding how to manage a sales team begins with mastering responsibilities such as setting clear goals, motivating the team, and monitoring performance. Here’s a look at the key responsibilities every sales manager must know how to do.
- Building a Sales Team: Learning how to manage a sales team starts with assembling and developing a group of top-performing salespeople. This foundational step includes many activities, such as recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and continuous learning. By focusing on these areas, you can set your team up for long-term success and lay the groundwork for effective team management.
- Setting Sales Goals: Establishing clear sales goals and quotas provides performance benchmarks and direction to team members. These goals must align with the company’s primary objectives, realistic and attainable, and motivate sales reps to take action.
- Designing Sales Strategies: This includes crafting, communicating, implementing, and refining effective sales strategies for achieving team goals based on market conditions, competitors, and buyer behaviors.
- Leading and Motivating the Sales Team: Successful sales managers inspire their team to achieve high performance by setting a positive example and fostering a collaborative team environment. They also provide continuous feedback and recognition while addressing conflicts to maintain team harmony.
- Monitoring and Analyzing Sales Performance: Sales managers must routinely track key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics for informed decision-making. These insights help guide sales plan and strategy adjustments while helping to identify sales coaching and continuous learning needs.
Sales managers who master these responsibilities lay the foundation for team success. By building a strong team, setting clear goals, and analyzing performance, they create an environment where sales reps can thrive.
Now that you understand the key responsibilities of a sales manager, let’s explore how to build and lead a high-performing sales team.
How to Build and Manage a High-Performing Sales Team
Developing a diverse team of productive sales reps is one of the most important steps in learning how to manage a sales team effectively. Recruiting and hiring candidates with the greatest potential is how team creation starts. This involves defining your ideal candidate, using a variety of channels to find team members, utilizing assessments, and offering competitive compensation.
Sales onboarding is the next step in the process. However, old-school onboarding methods, where reps are given basic, one-size-fit-all information and sent off on their own, do not work. Effective onboarding now lays the foundation for continuous learning and skill development.
Also known as everboarding, continuous learning supports and enables sales reps to effectively meet the challenges of constantly evolving buying committees, buyer preferences, and market conditions. Unlike traditional classroom sales training, continuous learning is embedded into reps’ day-to-day workflow, without impacting productivity.
Coaching and practice are key factors driving the success of continuous learning. This also occurs in the flow of work for consistent progress, reinforcement, and confidence. This bite-sized style of learning keeps sales teams current, agile, skilled and competitive. They ramp up to full productivity faster, deliver greater results, and remain engaged.
The final aspect of building a high-performing sales team is setting clear goals and monitoring achievement. This is essential for driving performance and organizational success.
Set goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely (SMART) to boost success. Then monitor KPIs and data to gauge progress and assess performance. Doing so enables leaders to make informed management decisions.
Best Tools and Technology for Managing a Sales Team
Mastering how to manage a sales team includes leveraging the right technology. The right tools not only lighten a sales manager’s workload but also transform how teams operate by boosting productivity and effectiveness. From managing customer relationships to analyzing sales performance, these tools drive collaboration, streamline workflows, enable data-driven decisions, and ultimately help teams close more deals with greater efficiency.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems: CRMs like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho help manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer journey. They offer a central location for tracking sales activities, managing leads, and maintaining customer information, facilitating relationship management and sales forecasting.
Sales Enablement Platforms: Sales enablement platforms are comprehensive solutions that improve selling effectiveness and can integrate with a CRM. These platforms include tools such as sales content management, sales training capabilities, sales coaching insights through features like conversation intelligence, Digital Sales Rooms for sales deal collaboration and management, and sales analytics to measure sales rep performance and track sales deals.
Sales Analytics and Reporting Tools: Platforms like Salesforce, Salesloft, and HubSpot Sales Hub offer advanced analytics and reporting capabilities. They help sales managers visualize data, monitor KPIs, and recognize sales and performance trends for informed decision-making.
Communication and Collaboration Tools: Solutions like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom facilitate communication and collaboration within sales teams. These tools facilitate real-time messaging, file sharing, and video conferencing, fostering teamwork and offering smooth communication channels.
Lead Generation Tools: Platforms like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, ZoomInfo, and Leadfeeder help sales teams identify and qualify potential leads. They gather and analyze valuable data and insights about prospects, helping sales reps target the right contacts and create a healthy sales pipeline.
Sales Automation Tools: Solutions like Pipedrive, Outreach, or SalesLoft help automate repetitive tasks such as follow-up emails, lead nurturing, and scheduling, saving time and ensuring consistency in sales processes.
Forecasting and Pipeline Management Platforms: Tools like Apollo.io, Copper, or Monday.com allow sales managers to track and forecast sales pipeline progress. These insights enable them to anticipate future revenue and make informed decisions.
Sales Training Software: Sales training tools provide interactive training modules such as AI-powered role-play exercises, skill assessments, and performance tracking, facilitating continuous learning and skill development.
Proposal and Contract Management Tools: Software like PandaDoc, Proposify, or DocuSign streamlines the creation, sending, and signing of proposals and contracts, accelerating the closing process.
The right technology transforms how you manage a sales team. It simplifies complex tasks, eliminates inefficiencies, and equips you with the insights needed to make smarter decisions. From CRMs to sales enablement platforms, these tools empower teams to work faster, collaborate better, and close deals with confidence. By leveraging technology strategically, you can focus on what matters most: coaching your team, driving performance, and achieving results.
Measuring Sales Team Performance
Tracking key sales metrics is essential for improving sales performance through insights into effective strategies and areas needing improvement. Analyzing metrics helps identify sellers’ strengths and weaknesses, enabling targeted improvements for better results and more efficient processes.
Consistent tracking aligns sales efforts with business goals, fostering continuous growth and recurring revenue through customer retention. Although there is no one-size-fits-all list of best metrics to monitor, focusing on metrics that help drive results through coaching without overwhelming the team is key.
With that in mind, here are six sales performance metrics to routinely monitor, ensuring sellers remain on track to close more deals.
6 Sales Performance Metrics to Monitor
- Sales Lead Quality: Sales performance improvement starts with an effective qualifying process. Scheduling a lot of meetings with poorly qualified leads can lead to lower conversion rates and inaccurate performance evaluations. Start by developing an ideal customer profile, identifying common attributes of the customers you want to attract and can effectively serve. This ensures you’re targeting the right people and improving overall sales efforts.
- Sales Call Quality: It doesn’t matter how many sales calls your salespeople have if they are poor quality. Monitoring the call quality allows you to ensure reps accurately convey the value of your product or service correctly, stay on message, skillfully handle objections, and don’t talk too much. Listening to sellers’ sales calls allows you to help reps fine-tune the discovery call stage where most sales are won or lost.
- Pipeline Velocity: Measuring pipeline velocity allows you to track how effectively team members advance prospects through the sales funnel. This enables you to fine-tune the sales process and better coach reps for improvement.
- Demo-to-Deal Conversion Rate: Tracking the percentage of demos that convert to deals allows you to help reps improve their sales conversations, close more deals faster, and shorten the buying cycle.
- Average Deal Size: Tracking average deal size allows you to determine if business is growing, dropping, or remaining unchanged. If you see a downward trend, it identifies potential sales coaching needs such as increasing the value focus of sales conversations to reduce discounts.
- Coachability: Make the most of your team’s talent by helping reps quickly learn from their mistakes. This is a cost-effective method of sales rep retention. Coachable reps are willing to learn and have a greater chance of achieving or exceeding their goals.
Measuring sales team performance isn’t just about crunching numbers—it’s about uncovering insights that drive smarter decisions and better outcomes. By focusing on metrics like pipeline velocity, demo-to-deal conversion rates, and call quality, you can identify what’s working, pinpoint areas for improvement, and guide your team to greater success.
Proven Strategies to Manage a Sales Team
Managing a sales team requires strategic leadership, clear communication, and effective technology use. By focusing on recruiting, continuous learning, and ongoing coaching, sales managers can foster a productive and motivated team. Leveraging technology tools such as CRMs, sales enablement platforms, and sales analytics software, helps you streamline processes, track performance, and enable informed decisions.
While the challenges of adapting to market changes and managing sales teams can be demanding, the rewards of achieving sales targets and driving business growth make the effort worthwhile. By mastering how to manage a sales team with clear goals, continuous learning, and coaching, you can develop teams that consistently exceed expectations.
About the author: David Ashe is director of sales development at Allego. In this role, he oversees a sales team responsible for growing the company’s customer base, revenue, and profitability within the United States.
Unlock the Secrets to Sales Success
Discover how continuous learning can transform sales performance in this comprehensive report. Backed by data and real-world insights, this resource reveals strategies to drive revenue growth and build a high-performing sales team. Download the Report.
