This is the beginning of a new blog series on the subject of sales management, its primary pain points, and how each of these is best addressed.
There are literally hundreds of pain points that plague a sales manager. If we were going to take them all up, this blog series would be rather endless. So instead we’re going to help you with the pain points that we know about, and that we can actually guide you through with the written medium.
Categories
As with any subject, an organization can greatly help. As we embark on our journey in tackling sales manager pain points, a good place to begin is to organize them into categories. Often just being able to visualize how problems or issues can be organized is a major step in solving them.
Sales manager pain points could be broken down into 3 major categories:
- Management
- Technology
- People
In this blog series, we will be using these categories to orient and guide the reader through the pain points and solutions we will be addressing. In the meanwhile, though, you could start thinking about any pain points you have, and where they might fall.
Here is a bit about each category.
Category #1: Management
What kind of management methodology have you chosen to monitor and lead the team?
There are thousands of books out there, each with its own “sales management methodology.” The question is, are there management principles which can be universally applied, in any culture, and in virtually any context?
As you will see, the answer is very much in the affirmative. Instead of drumming up some new “sales management” techniques, we’re actually bringing you principles of sound management, proven through over 150 years of practice. These are the principles that have been applied in and through Pipeliner. In reality “sales management” is actually “management” with some specialized practice. And great management methodology can be applied to any field.
Category #2: Technology
Technology has taken a very firm place in today’s world. Without technology, most things are totally impossible. This includes sales.
Everything related to sales activities requires some kind of technology: lead generation, prospecting, opportunity tracking—all the way down to the simplest tool a salesperson uses: the call.
In that technology is mandatory, it then becomes a question of which technology you chose. Then you must evaluate: is it really helping the company? Or is it backfiring because people don’t like it, or it’s complicated, or it’s too expensive?
There is a benchmark for the worthiness of technology. It is, “What should the technology do?” In other words, what is it for, what issues does it solve, and how does it empower you in sales management?
That’s really the only approach you can take. To do otherwise—to start evaluating or deciding on technological solutions before you’ve really examined all of the requirements your company will have for them—is very much like putting the cart before the horse.
Category #3: People
This is obviously a very important category, for without people you have no sales team.
People being people, there can be an infinite number of problems and issues that can arise with them, and we couldn’t possibly address them all. For the purposes of this blog series, we’re going to assume that your sales reps have been chosen, hired, trained and are now up and running. We’ll help you take it from that point.
The sum total of the actions taken prior to that point is called the “sales yield”—which will be the subject of a future blog series and probably an ebook. The sales yield is defined as “the average annual sales revenue per full-time, fully trained and effective sales representative” and equals the sales learning curve of the entire company.
Of course, the category of people includes you, the sales manager, and there is much we’re going to assist you with. Most sales management is about reacting instead of acting. Much of this reacting comes in the form of firefighting—meaning, taking various sales away from salespeople at the last minute so that they can be closed quickly enough to make quota. It is something that can become a vicious circle, something you never get out of.
If you find yourself in this category, we’re here to put you in the driver’s seat so you can act instead of react, drive the car instead of being a passenger, and cease firefighting.
Are you ready to get down to specifics? Great—stick with us through this series and let’s see if we can provide you some help!
Pipeliner CRM is Instant Intelligence, Visualized and in itself helps to ease many sales management pain points. Give it a try.
