Sales has always been a highly competitive industry, pushing personnel to go the extra mile to get people interested enough in a product to make a purchase. Many staff members in the sales department have rigid goals, motivated leaders and a compensation-based strategy, making it essential for them to do well every month. This means finding more leads and tracking down potential buyers, and when a sales professional finds a good target, they usually won't stop until they complete a transaction.

The tricky part in this scenario is using sales onboarding to instruct new agents right from the start how to be persistent rather than annoying. This is one of the easiest issues to encounter with professional sales associates, The Financial Post reported. Contributing writer Amy Young, a professional consultant, wrote for the source that her experience with some firms has shown that it's easy to have the right product or service but to be introducing these tools to clients in a way that puts them off the seller's list.

Working on overall improvement
There are several key areas that businesses as a whole should concentrate on when making an offer more appealing than the competition, but as Young pointed out, it's not just in the numbers. While major brands and well-known advertisements can make lead generation easier, what may seal the deal is the way the product is pitched on a one-to-one basis from a sales representative. In Young's experience speaking with employees of various sales organizations, offering more substantial incentive compensation created a significant increase in the motivation a worker felt to complete a sale. Even in industries with extremely high workforce turnover, those who were given more money, bonuses and personal reasons to complete transactions were more likely to close and less likely to quit.

The focus, Young advised, needs to be in fostering proper outlook and techniques in personnel from the moment they set foot in the company. Creating a talented staff of motivated individuals should be an ongoing process, starting with sales onboarding and continuing with personnel sales performance management throughout the tenure of their careers. Every employee needs to be monitored, guided and trained in current best practices for finding opportunities and generating revenue. As selling tactics and promotional outlets continue to change, so too should personnel be updated about these new opportunities. There are always new tools available to expand sales professional's toolkits, giving them a better boost on the competition. Most of all, though, personnel should be trained to think that they want the sale themselves. Internalizing motivation and making it matter on a personal level will ensure better performance statistics.