Tips for Precise, Predictable Sales Management

Sales management is anything but easy—just ask anyone who has done it. The sales manager is supervising people who are innately self-sufficient loners and who really don’t want to be supervised. Salespeople make their own observations and conclusions and commonly don’t take directions too well. Add to all of that the lack of accurate analysis tools on the part of sales management and you have a recipe for uncertainty at best.

No single book could cover everything there is to know about sales management—not by a long way. But this ebook provides some powerful, basic tips to make sales management considerably more bearable.

Today a sales process is essential to a smoothly functioning sales force. Considerable time and care should be taken in its creation, for it is as essential to your business as a business plan or product specifications. You wouldn’t skimp on those—don’t skimp on the sales process, either.

Traditional CRM systems, despite all their “bells and whistles” of advanced technology, have not made the necessary changes to become the streamlined tools they need to be. In today’s highly competitive business environment, a CRM solution must be far more than a complex method for measuring potential and accomplished quota achievement. In fact it needs to be the backbone, memory and mind of a sales force and all who must interact with it.

Sales management is anything but easy—just ask anyone who has done it. But there are 4 steps which, if fully applied, will at the least greatly ease sales management’s burden.

Instability and turnover within a sales force can be one of sales management’s worst nightmares. There are five key elements to recruiting—and far more importantly, keeping—a stable team of high-powered sales reps.

The key to improving the sales force is through coaching from sales management. While this has been known and discussed for some years, what might not be so obvious is the importance of sales analytics to the process. Here are four ways to improve sales force skill through the use of those analytics.

“Hockey-stick” is a fairly common descriptive term that describes a revenue graph that creeps along the bottom or the middle of the graph for most of a period, usually a quarter, and then in the last few weeks jumps up to the top (resembling a hockey stick). The skillful implementation of a sales process, CRM solution and the right sales analytics will do away with “hockey stick” revenue performance—along with the severe stress brought to bear on sales reps and the rest of the company.

Download Tips for Sales Management now.