Sales management is a structured team sports

It often happens that a good sales rep is one day promoted to sales manager or sales director. Congratulations! It is rare, although it exists ;) that one is good in hunting or farming and also knows how to manage, strategize and structure a team.

Structure? Yes indeed. One can say that the best sellers, are rather chaotic than well structured. They are firefighters jumping through different hoops at the same time.

How?

1. By creating a sales’ blueprint with a well thought organization built on clear job roles and by simple and known sales processes.

2. By translating the sales strategy into clear building blocks and by using these metrics consistently in all the team and one-to-one meetings, the individual assessment and internal communication.

3. By creating a demand generation steered by sales AND marketing, where both teams are sitting in the same boat peddling at the same pace.

1. Sales Blueprint & sales processes

Goal is to optimize the selling time by increasing the core sales activities (preparing calls and proposals) and the customer engagement. Unless the business is more transactional, it’s always better to have your farmers do the account management and have them focus on exploiting at full their relationships with the clients. In order to have your hunters focused on doing new business development. This enables your team to have different activities and sales objectives and you have a faster onboarding and require less different skills and training.

Sales processes should be simple, based upon the buyer journey and documented in an SLA with clear engagement from all involved sales departments.

2. Building blocks* embedded in sales meetings:

A Sales strategy translated into 3 levelled building blocks, levels to be used consistently during different meetings with the sales team.

Level 1: Commercial Results: not directly to be controlled by the seller

Revenue Growth – Profit – Market share – Customer Satisfaction

Level 2: Sales Performance Metrics: partly influenced by the seller

o Market Coverage: ensuring the sales effort and focus is on the desired customers & prospects

o Sales Capability: ensuring effective usage of sales skills & tools

o Customer Focus: ensuring growth & client retention

o Product & Value Focus: ensuring the right products are sold at the right margins

Level 3: Sales Activity Metrics: 100 % managed by the seller

o Sales Territory: Resource allocation to the right type of customers/prospects

o Customer Interactions: Interacting with clients and/or prospects

o Opportunity Management: Managing individual opportunities & win strategies

o Pipeline Management: Building & Maintaining a balanced pipeline

o Sales Enablement: Improving the sales team’s ability to execute

Structure your sales management in an organized cadence:

A. Quarterly Strategy & Forecast meetings

o Explain the desired Commercial Results & translate it into Sales Performance (objectives) metrics that clearly demonstrate how sales should be able to establish the overall and it shows them where to focus on.

B. (Bi-)Monthly sales team training meetings

o Part 1 consists of looking together with the team to the sales dashboard showing their level 2 sales performance metrics. If there are large discrepancies with budget, you move down to the activities to see where the issue lies and to tackle it.

o Part 2 should be prepared by the team members. The sales management only determines the agenda and structure – not the actual content.

The sales manager creates a template that all sellers should fill in and present during maximum 10 minutes.

They will share what their main activities were and the results it brought, good or bad. The goal is to share their tactics, focus areas of the next 2 weeks, and learn from best practices or failures. Levers should be exploited by the whole team, showstoppers should be tackled by the whole team as well.

Automatically your sales processes, sales playbook and training plan will be modified based upon the sales team’s actual needs and the reality they operate in.

o Depending on the agenda, these meetings should also include attendance of other departments like marketing, account management or customer success.

C. Weekly 1to1 meeting: based on the CRM data where:

o the individual sales activities (level 3 metrics) vs objectives & team performances

o their individual pipeline velocity & actual pipeline elements

o individual contribution to the sales team meetings

o and coaching needs are discussed.

3. A simple demand generation process steered by marketing & sales

Marketing should be able to eliminate the cold calling and replace it with inbound leads. If you want to have marketing and sales completely aligned and have them speak the same language, they should have the same objectives and qualify themselves the Marketing Qualified Leads.

This requires them to understand well the business and customer segments and what’s important in the value proposition and the buyer journey. Which feeds the content creation.

It seems logic that your marketing department regularly joins during a visit or call. However in reality that almost never happens.

Ideally every 2 months marketing and sales should look together to volume of leads, the conversion rate between each stage and the total sales velocity. This is in the end the performance of both departments. That’s also the moment to discuss what content worked and to determine future needs and adapt or confirm the content strategy.

Improve your sales’ productivity by eliminating admin tasks and have marketing provide a complete sales toolkit which is ready to use and developed together WITH sales. It’s up to the sales management to determine the sales pitch, to marketing to conceptualize and to sales to bring it with passion.

It’s a waste of time to have your individual sellers all build their own story and presentation or other marketing assets.

*Inspired by Cracking the sales management Code, by Neil Rackham