The Ultimate 2024 Guide for VPs of Sales
Contents
70% of salespeople who meet or exceed their annual quotas cite their leadership as one of the biggest reasons behind their success.
But how can you master the right mix of target fixation and orientation, selling adaptability, and strategy that can keep your team on track in 2024? Let’s find out:
How Make Use of AI as a Sales Leader in 2024
AI tools are handy at every step of the sales process, from creating prospecting messages to predicting sales. In fact, 7 out of 10 salespeople think AI tools will help them work better, faster, and more efficiently.
Why?
Because AI can pull large amounts of info, process and segregate it, and make it usable for decision-making — often without you noticing. It saves you hours and can take the guesswork out of sales.
But how can you use AI as a sales leader? Here are a few ways:
1. Use It as a Productivity Assistant – You can use generative AI for research, data analysis, outreach, and content creation.
2. Automate Manual Tasks – Instead of having your team take notes on calls or meetings, integrate an AI-powered note-taking app like Grain into their workflow. This will help them (and you) revisit key meeting highlights quickly.
3. Consolidate Data Using AI – Sales outreach has multiple channels and making sense of all the data can be like climbing a mountain. Generative AI can automatically plug that data into your team’s CRM system in real-time.
4. Gather Insights Through AI Reports – Your team doesn’t have to sift hundreds of pages of data to get an idea of what their sales goals should look like. Instead, have them use AI to extract those insights from their data.
5. Identify Leads Using AI Lead-Scoring Tools – Scoring high-quality leads can take days and the process is often error-prone. AI lead-scoring can help you sort, consolidate, and eliminate bad leads from your system, helping you focus on the best.
Once you’ve automated your process with AI, you can also use its predictive analysis abilities (which use machine learning) to analyze historical data, identify trends and patterns, and utilize its insights to make forecasts. You can use these to make informed decisions.
How to Create a Team Environment for Remote Sales Teams
Remote sales teams often get more done, but according to 67% of sales leaders, they’re more challenging to manage and keep going in one direction. This is because of poor communication, lack of a set-in-stone sales tech stack, and an isolated work environment, which can lead to inefficiency.
1. Set Clear Expectations
You can’t always reach out to someone in real-time in WFH settings, so you need to set clear expectations that prompt them to always chase the “close.”
This may require you to use automation to ensure your team always knows when they can reach out to a prospect and always has relevant information on hand.
2. Make Regular Check-Ins a Part of the Process
Regular check-ins can help you connect with your team, identify issues early, and provide as much support as needed. You can integrate these into the system in the form of daily stand-ups, quota review meetings, and weekly check-ins.
And instead of winging it or spending too much time talking to each salesperson, you can set up a standard check-in process from the get-go. For instance, you can divide performance and efficiency into quantitative and qualitative variables and review your people based on that.
3. Invest in Remote Sales Enablement Tools
If you want your sales team to be as efficient as can be, provide them with tools that help them close deals faster. Some of these include:
- Scheduling Software – It helps your AEs and SDRs schedule calls and demos in advance. Prospects can also pick the right time for them, so your people are never intruding, which makes for more deals. You can start with Calendly, SavvyCal, or Clara Labs.
- Prospecting Tools – These help your salespeople identify prospects faster, figure out whether they’re going to buy from you, and track the sales process. You can start with Mailshake’s Data Finder.
- Cloud-Based CRM – It gives your team a complete overview of the sales pipeline, enables them to track all deals, and helps them collaborate with marketing teams to improve the buying experience. You can try HubSpot, Salesforce, or Pipedrive.
You can also provide your team access to revenue intelligence tools like Gong. These analyze your sales call and outreach data and provide insights that can help your team move the needle on deals quickly.
4. Provide Detailed, Actionable Feedback
Feedback benefits both you and your reps because it helps you increase team collaboration and steers your SDRs and AEs in the right direction.
However, make your critiques and praise constructive, detailed, and actionable. Instead of just telling an underperforming rep to up their game, provide context, be honest (don’t mince your words but be sensitive), and suggest ways they could improve.
For example, if a rep struggles with meeting quotas, don’t just say, “Improve your performance.” Instead, offer specific insights like, “I’ve noticed you’re juggling quite a few tasks, but not all of them seem to be directly impacting your quota. Let’s try to prioritize them based on urgency and how much value they bring. It might make hitting the overall goal feel easier.”
This way, they get clear advice on how to improve.
5. Celebrate All Wins Together
It’s important to recognize and appreciate your team for their contributions and achievements. Why? Because acknowledging their efforts can significantly boost morale and help them maintain their motivation.
Make it a habit to highlight both team and individual successes, even if they may not seem earth-shattering.
You can do that through a simple shoutout in an email thread, on a Slack channel, or during a team meeting. This lets your reps know you have their back all the time. It could also push them to work harder.
Focus On Outreach: How to Improve the Deliverability of Your Cold Emails
Email deliverability is more than just setting up your DMARC, SKIM, and SPF configurations, custom tracking domains, or sending only 50 new emails per mailbox per day. You also have to keep track of your email provider’s rules. Case in point: Gmail.
From February 2024, any sender who sends over 5,000 messages a day to Gmail accounts has to meet several requirements to secure their systems. These include:
- Using a TLS connection for transmitting email.
- Setting up DKIM and SPF email authentication for your domain.
- Setting up DMARC email authentication for your sending domain.
- Adding ARC headers to outgoing emails if you regularly forward emails and a List-id: header to outgoing messages.
- Avoiding impersonation of Gmail “From: headers” because it might impact your email delivery.
- Aligning the domain in the sender’s “From: header” with either the SPF domain or the DKIM domain to pass DMARC alignment in direct mail.
- Formatting messages according to the Internet Message Format standard (RFC 5322).
- Making sure that IPs or sending domains have valid reverse and forward DNS (PTR) records.
- Ensuring that marketing messages and subscribed messages support one-click unsubscribe and include a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the message body.
- Avoiding reaching a spam rate of 0.30% or higher and keeping spam rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.10%.
Make sure to meet all these requirements to ensure your emails are delivered as expected and not marked as spam. Got any additional questions get set up with an email deliverability expert at Mailshake here.
Stay Up to Date With Industry News: Influencers, Podcasts, and Newsletters to Follow
Next up is industry news. Here is how you can keep up with it in 2024.
1. Newsletters
The seven newsletters you absolutely need to know about include:
- Accelerate Newsletter
- Sales Hacker
- Gong Newsletter
- Prospecting From the Trenches
- The Close Sale Brief
- The CRM Lab
2. Influencers
Here are some influencers to follow for insights:
3. Podcasts
These sales podcasts are gold:
- Shake Sales
- The Marketing Book Podcast
- Practical Prospecting
- Full Funnel
- Sales Enablement with Andy Paul
- Sales Gravy
Make Small Changes to Get the Most of Your Team in 2024
Mastering sales leadership takes hours of effort and years of experience, but you can chip at it every day to help your team become more adaptable, effective, and successful than ever before.
The best way to do that is to always invest in your education. Consume podcasts, learn about new sales tools from influencers, and check out the newsletters we’ve recommended above to get a taste of something new every few weeks.
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