No matter how you slice it, sales management is a tough business. But as with anything, once you gain some stable principles, it does become easier. Here are four primary risks for sales management—and how they might be addressed.
#1: Salespeople Reporting False or Misleading Information to Sales Management
It’s one thing for a salesperson to be overoptimistic about a sales cycle and its eventual result. That’s going to happen—optimism is what drives sales and can’t necessarily be seen as a bad thing. A competent sales manager who knows his or her sales reps can usually spot such undue optimism, account for it and take it in stride.
It’s another thing altogether, though, when a salesperson completely lies—for example, saying there’s a good opportunity being developed where none at all exists. It’s the kind of thing that acts as a hidden and very unwelcome land mine for sales management.
Tolerance for such as this should be minimal to none with the only mitigating factor being consistent and competent performance in sales during their past employment history.
#2: Salespeople Not Reporting Crucial Information
This is different from #1 above—the salesperson isn’t lying about a sales cycle, he or she is just not entering pertinent data into CRM or bringing it up in meetings. When encountered you need to get this fixed fast, as with every occurrence you as a sales manager are flying blind.
It should be noted that with a difficult or complex CRM application, especially one which weighs down a salesperson with administrative tasks without providing any assistance in return to their sales efforts, may continue to be a problem despite corrective actions. Today’s leading-edge CRM solution actually supports and empowers a salesperson—and in such a case sales reps will be a lot more willing to enter vital data into CRM.
#3: Sales Reps Short on Sales Skills
When a new salesperson hires on, he or she usually brings some degree of sales skill to the job. As the rep learns the specifics of your product and market, you will, of course, be able to observe them at work. In watching them as they shepherd sales through the sales process, you will undoubtedly be monitoring their strengths and weaknesses. You will then be coaching them on their weaker points, and/or weighing options to place them in specific positions to fully exploit their strengths.
Coaching and mentoring salespeople is an issue consistently seen in industry news, as demonstrated by Business 2 Community blog, especially today with the radically changing B2B sales landscape. Effective sales training should be a prime focus of every sales manager.
In order to raise the skillset of a sales force, however, a sales manager must possess the necessary time and attention to do so. If you are having to spend your workday chasing up numbers and reporting instead of managing your salespeople, improving the skill levels won’t find a place on your schedule. In such a case you’re more or less stuck with the skill levels you’ve got.
A leading-edge CRM solution makes it possible for you to visually and rapidly track all sales through the sales process, giving you an additional monitoring tool and eliminating the need to engage in a constant numbers roundup. You will then have the time necessary to coach and mentor your sales force to obtain optimum performance.
#4: No Reliable Automatic Way to Track Sales
A sales manager who has been on the job for a time usually evolves methods with which to track sales. Traditionally this has been a combination of available data from CRM, and verbal and/or written reports from sales reps.
In addition to the time-consuming nature of this operation (see #3 above), there is a more important aspect to it: How reliable is it? The information you’re receiving can often not be viewed in context with that sales rep, your company’s history with the client or type of client, and other vital statistics that will shed light on the likelihood or viability of an opportunity. You can only hope that all the “educated guesses” that go into a short or long-term sales forecast are somewhere near correct.
A leading-edge CRM solution allows you to take into account all the vital information regarding any sale: it’s probability rating based on past sales performance, risk assessment, profitability, the rep’s closing ratio and other pertinent factors. Not only is this information available, it is visually displayed so that you can have an instant and far more accurate sense of where sales are headed.
As you can see, addressing each of these risks boils down to the right CRM solution. If you don’t currently have it, it may be time to switch.
The best CRM solution for effective sales management can be found here.
