It’s four pm. Your morning coffee and your lunch have worn off. You find yourself staring out the window, fantasizing about supper and Netflix…
But wait! There are just a few things that you have to do before your day is truly over. When you were just a sales rep, maybe you could set your brain on cruise control in the afternoon. But now that you are a sales leader, there are five tasks that you should do at the end of the day to make sure you are leading your team toward sales success.
Having a clear end-of-day routine will not only help your team but will also help you keep track of daily tasks that often fall to the wayside.
Check Team Tracking
A good sales team leader quality is their ability to non-invasively and non-judgmentally track the work their sales team is doing every day. Before you close out your browser for the night, you should take a moment to check in with your sales portal to see where your team is standing concerning their sales goals.
Once you have done this check, you are ready to create a plan to keep your team on track. If your team is exceeding expectations, think about ways to help them keep their momentum, and if they are underperforming, think about factors that could be slowing down their work and how you could help mitigate them.
Set Coaching Goals
One of the factors that can slow down performance is the lack of training among employees. The end of your day is a good time to reflect on whether certain team members might need help getting up to speed on different aspects of the sales process.
Look at the performance of different reps, and look for people who constantly struggle to meet targets. Make a concrete plan for steps you will take the next business day to get that salesperson up to speed and help them meet their targets.
Prepare Meeting Materials
If you notice a trend among your team members with aspects of the sales process they struggle with, consider a meeting rather than individual coaching. Try to write down what you want to coach your entire team about at the end of the day when it’s top of mind.
You might think that you will be able to easily remember these meeting minutes tomorrow, but in reality, our minds often clear overnight. Yesterday’s end-of-the-day insights of yesterday become a faint memory. Try to write down your talking points for the meeting in as much detail as possible, so you can put your best foot forward in the morning.
Submit Platform Requests
Sometimes, a sales team will underperform by no fault of their own. Perhaps your team is working their hardest, but there are still a few steps in the sales process where they seem to get stuck. If this is happening to your team, you should check-in and see if there are any changes in the sales platform that could be slowing them down.
While some sales leaders choose to submit their platform requests as the sales team shares them throughout the day, this can actually be quite difficult for the IT team because they have to keep track of pages of emails, and inevitably some requests will slip through the cracks. Try bundling all of your platform requests for the day and submitting them, fully organized into categories, to the IT team. Just make sure that you notify your IT team of this change before you make it, so you don’t scare them.
Celebrate Daily Successes
Remember, you don’t want all of your end-of-day communication with your team to be about improvement. This can damage employee morale and self-esteem. Make sure that you take time at the end of the day (and especially the end of the week) to celebrate the big successes and to provide encouragement.
Whether through an email or a quick end-of-the-day meeting, what is important is that people feel appreciated. You can even frame your constructive criticism as a compliment if you would like. For example, if one team member shows particular proficiency over others, consider recognizing them and giving them specific and detailed praise in public so that other employees know what their template for success looks like.
If you keep these five tasks in mind during your last hour of work, you will be able to beat the four pm blues and bring out the best in your team.
