As a sales manager, you play a leading role in the company: you develop the sales strategy and manage the sales force to grow revenue. But you’re not on your own: your sales managers and sales representatives are key players who need to be mobilized, motivated and managed to achieve your objectives.
Do your salespeople actually follow your sales strategy?
You presented your new sales strategy to all your sales and marketing managers with a great PowerPoint deck: new market segments to invest in, products to prioritize...
...And then every sales rep went back to old habits: they keep selling what they’ve always sold, to the prospects they already know. It’s so much more comfortable not to change anything.
For your strategy to work effectively in practice, you need robust CRM software. Working with your integrator, translate this strategy into a set of overall and intermediate indicators that will let you measure the effectiveness of your sales efforts. Beyond the total revenue generated by each sales rep, you’ll now know in real time whether they’re focusing on the new products or markets that YOU defined.
Is prospecting being done properly?
Do your salespeople optimize their daily activities?
Do your sales representatives travel in the field? Help them plan their routes. By collecting data in your CRM software, your sales managers will be able to optimize sales representatives’ movements based on various criteria: geographic proximity, prospect location, etc.
From June 15 to 30, you can also assign all prospects in the closing phase to them as a priority, so you can secure signatures before summer. It’s easy: your CRM dashboards show you exactly which prospects are at this stage of the sales cycle.
Are deals being followed up on in a timely way?
What’s more frustrating than a salesperson who promised to call a prospect back and, because they waited too long, loses the deal?
Even worse: how do you deal with the “freezing effect”? You know: those salespeople who have already hit their monthly or quarterly targets and keep a few prospects on ice for later...
From now on, your CRM software will send your sales representative an alert if it’s taking too long to call back a “hot” prospect. And if your sales representative ignores this alert, your sales manager will receive one too. For complete sales oversight, you can even configure the CRM to send an alert to the sales director if the sales manager has also ignored the alert.
What customer data do your sales representatives record?
Finally, if this post is called “Do you know what your salespeople do?”, we could have extended the title with “Do you know what your salespeople record?”
A software program set up by a skilled CRM integrator should let you replace your sales team’s hunches with accurate data you can actually use.
No more useless “wall of text” reports. Your CRM can require sales reps to submit a brief report after each meeting-fewer reports overall, and no more endless checkboxes. This saves them time on a tedious task (which they dislike anyway) while giving you solid CRM statistics. Your strategic adjustments will be based not on opinions, but on facts.
And any sales manager who has seen their top salespeople leave knows this all too well: when a salesperson leaves the company, they take with them all their experience and the non-standardized information they’ve built up over the years (ah, that little notebook where they wrote everything down…). With properly configured CRM software, that’s over: customer data remains the property of the company.
