How would you like to grow your sales revenue? Whether you’re selling products, services or concepts, the ability to sell remains the very foundation of a business. When it’s a question of selling and closing a deal, your prospects are not interested in make-believe. To be a proficient salesperson, one must have good listening and critical thinking skills and must know how to use his or her sales techniques efficiently.

As CEO, you know how important it is to put together a competent team who will contribute to the company’s advancement and apply your business tactics. Here are the best practices your sales force needs to follow to achieve this:

1. Always prospect regularly

Your salespeople cannot find themselves short of sales opportunities for a month and then work harder to catch up during the following month. They must prospect for potential clients regularly. Companies face inconsistent results because they allow the sales force to feed the pipeline inconstantly.

2. Always ask for recommendations and introductions

When representatives speak with your prospects and clients, they must ask for recommendations and introductions! Sales growth depends not only on the quantity of opportunities entering the pipeline, but also on their quality.

It is only natural that recommendations and introductions have better conversion rates than all other lead sources. The main reason your salespeople don’t get recommendations is that they don’t ask for them! Remind them that 80% of introductions result in sales and that the best way to get them is to deliver in the first place.

3. Always keep your pipeline full

Make sure your salespeople don’t wait for their pipeline to be empty before prospecting. Do a follow-up at least once a week or even every day to know what they are adding to their pipeline.

If enough prospects enter the pipeline, the rest will usually take care of itself. Consistency is important. Inconsistent efforts can only lead to inconsistent results!

4. Always hold your team accountable

Remember that your role is to keep your sales force accountable for their sales objectives as well as the plan created to achieve these objectives. The best way to ensure your team is following the plan and performing their individual activities is to hold daily meetings.

A 5 to 7-minute meeting every morning will keep the team focused on what needs to get done. These meetings will quickly bring to light any discrepancy between what was expected and what happened.

5. Always keep an eye on your team’s activities and behavior

Following up on your team’s activities and behavior is the only way to manage sales proactively. By keeping a watch on daily and weekly activities and behavior , you stay up-to-date on upcoming results and can put an action plan in place to correct any deviation before it’s too late – which can mean before the end of the month or quarter, when quotas need to be met.

6. Always follow the sales process

To achieve your sales goals, your sales process should be a recipe that has proven itself over time and is reproducible. It is only by following this process that your business can grow.

If you want to increase your revenue, you must be obsessed with having an optimal sales process. It needs to be made specifically for your business, market, industry, and product and help your sales force overcome specific obstacles it encounters during a sale.

7. Always stay firm on your price

When you don’t stay firm on your price in a bid, you create a precedent. You open a door for your salespeople and show that it’s acceptable to give a discount to a potential customer to close a sale.

You must also eliminate all exceptions and ensure that pricing isn’t too complicated to manage. I’ve seen companies where sales managers spent over 50% of their time managing price exceptions given to clients.

8. Always have the urgency to close

Your salespeople should be patient and allow the prospects to familiarize themselves with the sales process until they are ready to close the sale. Once the prospect is ready to close the sale, your window of opportunity is limited, and without a sense of urgency to close it, your salespeople may miss many opportunities. Salespeople often blame “bad timing” when a deal doesn’t close… but was this really something over which they had no control?

9. Always coach your sales team

You can’t put a team together and give it one-time training. You have to train your team on a daily. Coaching can be formal or informal, but it must always be daily. You should give your salespeople two types of coaching: pre-meeting preparation and post-meeting debriefing.

10. Never accept excuses

Making up excuses is often part of an organization’s sales culture despite senior management efforts. These excuses stunt your sales force’s ability to increase its sales regularly.

Your sales organization must not only be committed to achieving sales growth objectives; it must also be entirely responsible for the results!