Contests and competition. Clear and actionable goals. Pride.

When it comes to your sales team, motivation can take on myriad forms. But nothing works as well as sales training that combines solid business principles with tangible tips designed to improve performance.

Here's a look at seven sales training tips to help you realize an uptick in performance:

Get real

Your sales training might be great in theory, but it needs to be even better in practice. That's why it's incredibly important to get real. Once your team has completed your sales training, go out into the field with its members, observe each sales professional in action, and make sure the training you're providing aligns with what your team is seeing in the real world.

Get personal

The ability to recognize and leverage the personal skills, traits, and thought processes of each member of your team is important. There are four key ways people process information – intellectual, rational, intuitive, and instinctive – and each comes complete with unique strengths. It's your job to get to know each member of your team – personally – and then figure out how to leverage their strengths for maximum effectiveness.

Become data driven

Your sales team is only as good as the data it's given. If you're not investing in a quality data source that provides verified leads, you just might be setting yourself up for failure. Make sure you and your sales team are using the best data available and your team will be better prepared to focus on the day-to-day tasks that matter most, meaning you will be more likely to reach your goals.

Listen

You're a leader. You study the data and make decisions that are in the best interest of your company. But what if you took a little time to listen to your sales team? Imagine what you might learn. After all, they're the people on the front lines. They're in constant contact with your clients. They know what might work better – and if you take a little time to listen to them, you might find some easy fixes you can make.

Get into a rhythm

If your training doesn't make it clear what your sales team needs to do every day, week, and month in order to be successful, your sales team won't be able to establish any type of rhythm. Rhythm exists when you know your team members well enough to match them to the right accounts and create open lines of communication. Sales training that creates rhythm establishes a clarity of tasks that leads to increased sales.

Refine your sales process

A strong sales process is critical to increasing your team's performance. It starts with strategic sales training. It moves on to creating a process that takes into account mistakes and then offers data and tools to fix them. It then moves into creating excitement for the process by listening and responding to your team members' ideas. Then it comes down to ensuring that you have the right management structure in place to repeat the process again and again.

You can motivate your team by creating contests and competition. You can set clear and actionable goals. You can also appeal to your team members' pride.

But at the end of the day, if your sales training doesn't apply to real-world scenarios, provide accurate data, and make it possible for your team to share ideas and get into a rhythm, it's not going to be as effective as it could be. Take a look at your team and refine the sales process. You'll see an uptick in effectiveness.