For most organisations, improving sales performance can be the best route to improving profitability, yet continually improving sales volume and profit levels remains an ongoing challenge.

How can you go about making sure your entire team feels inspired and what are you doing to inspire them? Here are five things you should do today to make a difference.

Be clear: In the early days of any business, selling anything might be regarded as a result. As your organisation matures (and whilst you should rarely turn away business if it comes to you), be really clear about what your best offers are - those that are profitable, make your customers happy, have the greatest likelihood of stimulating referrals and that generate repeat business - and consistently enthuse your team to understand that this is where you want to be proactive.

Focus: Engage with your team to ensure they are clear about who you should and really want to target. A 'spray and pray' approach can mean everyone is busy, but if you're not targeting those areas that will generate real success, demoralisation might be your only outcome from a whole mass of 'busy-ness'.

Reward and recognise: We all like to be told we've done a good job, and almost all organisations tell me they have a mechanism for employee reward and recognition beyond the bonus payments made to Sales for on-target achievement. But when I get 'under their skin' to understand whether it's really 'lived' or merely documented, I find that for all the best reasons in the world, it's rarely so. This is a real shame, because reward and recognition doesn't need to be big and expensive, just heartfelt.

Repeat: Remember that analysing your business success doesn't only provide the stimulus for reward and recognition, but it can also provide a great trigger to thinking how and where that success might be repeated.

Make it your mantra: None of this is new thinking, you probably do each of these things at least once a year. But in the pressure of day-to-day business when your landscape can change quickly, your teams change intermittently, and morale change in a heartbeat, it is down to you to think about this stuff more often.

So ask yourself regularly...what have you done today to inspire your team?