As a sales manager, you play a leading role in the company: you develop the sales strategy and manage the sales force to drive revenue. But you are not alone: your sales managers and sales representatives are key players who must be mobilised, motivated and supervised 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 on a stunning PowerPoint deck: the new market segments to invest in, the products that should be sold first...
...And then each sales rep went back to old habits: continuing to sell what they have always sold, to prospects they already know well. It’s so much more comfortable not to change anything.
For your strategy to work effectively on the ground, you need a good CRM solution. Together with your integrator, translate this strategy into a set of overall and intermediate indicators that will let you measure the quality of your sales activities. Beyond the overall turnover of each of your sales representatives, you will now know in real time whether they are working on the new products or markets that YOU have defined.
Is prospecting being done properly?
Do your salespeople optimise their daily activities?
Do your sales representatives travel to meet clients? Help them plan their routes. By collecting data in your CRM software, your sales managers will be able to streamline sales representatives’ movements according to various criteria: geographical proximity, prospect location, and so on.
From 15 to 30 June, you can also assign all prospects in the closing phase to them as a priority, so that you can secure signatures before the holiday period. It’s easy: your CRM dashboards tell you exactly which prospects are at this stage of the sales cycle.
Are deals followed up on time?
What could be more frustrating than a salesperson who promised to call a prospect back and, because he was too late, lost 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 who keep a few prospects on ice for later…
From now on, your CRM software will send your sales representative an alert if it takes 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 tracking, you can even configure the CRM to send an alert to the commercial director if the sales manager has also ignored the alert.
What customer data do your sales representatives record?
Finally, if this post is titled “Do you know what your salespeople do?”, we could have added to it: “Do you know what your salespeople record?”
A software programme configured by a good CRM integrator should let you replace the gut feel of your sales teams with precise data you can actually capitalise on.
So, no more unusable "big chunks of text" in reports. Your CRM can require sales reps to submit a short report after every appointment – fewer reports overall, and no more meaningless tick boxes. This saves them time on a tedious task (which they already dislike), and at the same time gives you solid CRM statistics. Your strategic decisions will then be based on facts, not opinions.
And any sales manager who has seen their best salespeople leave knows this all too well: when a salesperson leaves the company, they take with them all their experience and the non-standardised data they’ve built up over the years (ah, that little notebook where everything was written down…). With properly configured CRM software, that’s over: the customer data remains the property of the company.
