How to Ace Your First 90 Days in Sales Leadership

You have to prove yourself, hit your first sales targets and build rapport with your team. Achieving these goals often defines your success in this role.

So what should you do to make your transition into a new role easier in just ninety days?

Tips for starting out as a sales leader

Your first 90 days in a new role shouldn’t necessarily be stressful and difficult to live through. Just follow these tried-and-tested strategies focused on team building, product analysis and achieving your sales goals to make it a breeze.

1. Analyze product’s business environment

Analyzing the product that you and your team are going to sell is crucial for hitting your first sales quota. That’s why it’s so important to start with assessing the business environment in which you are going to operate.

You should study your competitors and learn how your product stands out against their products — this is your unique value proposition (USP).

Next, you should define your products’ strengths and weaknesses — by knowing your strongest and weakest points, you can get some ideas on the best way to sell your product.

To collect this information, you can use open-source data — everything you can find on the internet or other sources. You can also reach out to people to learn more — your CEO and employees in your department.

If your company has a product development strategy in place, you can consult with product managers or anyone involved in the product development process.

2. Hang out with your team more

Learning about your team’s motivations, fears and goals is important for establishing rapport and becoming a good leader and building a business development team. Knowing what drives your people forward, you can find out how to motivate them better and create the right incentives.

To achieve this, spend more time with your team. A good idea would be going out for lunch together or to some place after work to hang out in a more informal environment.

You can also consider organizing some team-building activities to get to know your team better and build friendship. Let your HR department know about it and engage them into the planning process to make it easier for you.

When organizing some team building activities, include games on your agenda. Here are some you can consider playing with your team.

3. Share your plan with the team

Setting quarterly KPIs without your team’s active participation can lead to choosing unrealistic goals or underestimating your team’s potential.

To hit the bull’s eye with your goals list, make sure you involve all team members in the process of evaluating previous performance and setting up stretch goals for the future. Let your team speak up and define their goals on their own. In the end of the day — it’s you who will keep them accountable in the process of achieving them.

Once you collect your team’s suggestions on goals, you can also suggest your plan to them. Next, find out what they think about your expectations and learn how easily they can meet them.

Encouraging active feedback and participation can help keep transparency in the team and build the culture of responsibility and ownership.

4. Choose your toolstack

Choosing the right sales tools for work helps boost your team’s efficiency and create an omnichannel experience for your customers. As a sales leader, you can allocate the budget to new tools and have the authority to introduce new software across the department.

At the same time, you can encourage your sales reps to suggest the software that they find useful. Having a say in the decision-making and procurement process will make them feel much more empowered. And it’s your job to give all the tools your team needs to achieve their goals.

There are a few sales tools you can consider using as a team:

• Email outreach tools: These help make outreach much easier and faster. When choosing the email blast tool, make sure they have rich reporting features, so you can track your team’s progress easier.
• Email finder tools: These tools will help collect prospects’ email information in a matter of seconds. Instead of having sales reps spend hours on finding your prospects' email online, they can upload an Excel sheet to an email finder tool, like VoilaNorbert and find email addresses in bulk.
• CRM software: The best CRM software is the one that meets your organization’s needs in collecting client data, editing it and organizing information. All this makes your sales process more effective. To choose one, make a list of things that your ideal CRM software should offer and choose the tool that ticks all boxes.
• Productivity tools: With the right workplace productivity tools, your team can streamline processes, so they can focus more on closing sales rather than time-consuming organizational tasks.

Once you have chosen the tools your team will use, it’s time to test them out. Don’t just give the tools to your team, but make sure you are also actively using them, know all the useful techniques, and can introduce them to new teammates.

5. Set up your success metrics

“Defining success criteria for the first three months of your tenure and setting sales targets is crucial to proving yourself as an effective leader,” says Boris Jabes, CEO and Co-Founder of Census. In the end, the company you work for should see clear benefits from employing you. The increase in company revenue and profit can prove it the best.

While these two metrics can matter the most for key decision makers in your organization, you should also use supporting metrics.

Here’s a list of metrics that sales leaders can track:

• Average revenue per account
• Revenue % from new and existing customers
• Win rate
• Quota attainment
• Average deal size
• Conversion rate
• Churn rate

6. Understand company culture

Company culture isn’t formed by the company’s leadership — for company values to stick for years, its employees should contribute to defining the values.

Besides your role of facilitating your team in delivering sales targets, you should also dedicate time to culture sessions. During these sessions, ask your employees what values matter to them personally and what measures leaders can take for an organization to reflect those values the best.

For example, if your team mentions experimentation as an important element to their work, you should encourage it more in their daily operations.

Following your team's values is important to getting their support during the first months of your work.

Final thoughts

The first three months in your new role is a demanding time — you should get your team to achieve an ambitious sales quota, prove yourself as a leader and establish rapport with your sales reps.

Going into the trenches, showing as much support for your team as possible, listening to their objections and becoming their friend is an important first step to hitting sales targets.

It’s much easier to define achievable goals and hit them fast when you’re on the same page as your team.

Even if you don’t manage to achieve your sales targets for the first quarter, having a team that stands for you is your bargaining chip in talks with key stakeholders.