The Ultimate Guide To Sales Management
Sales management is an incredibly important element of your sales team that can ensure your collective sales efforts are optimized. You’ll want to transform the leadership of your sales team to help your reps maximize profits and deliver more value to customers.
So how do you ensure this transformation into a streamlined sales department? In this article, I’ll review what sales management is, the basic sales management process, the most important sales management skills, and essential sales management techniques.
Use this breakdown to empower professional development for every sales representative on your team.
What Is Sales Management?
Sales management is the process of leading and overseeing your team of sales reps to ensure they’re creating strong relationships with prospects and leads to close more deals. Sales managers take on the responsibility of implementing new sales management processes, objectives, and strategies that will help their teams hit KPIs, targets, and other sales goals.
The three main categories under sales management include sales strategy, sales operations, and sales analysis.
The Basic Management Process
While every sales team is a little different, the sales management process can be similar. Some of the basic responsibilities you can expect your sales manager to handle include:
- Hiring and onboarding new salespeople
- Training and coaching your talent
- Setting team-wide goals
- Formulating sales strategies to achieve goals
- Motivating sales performance
- Evaluating team members
- Reporting on sales performance
Your sales manager may also be in charge of managing leads and sales forecasting market trends to inform the sales strategy for each quarter.
The Most Important Sales Management Skills
So how do you ensure your manager is properly implementing and overseeing sales operations? By hiring sales leaders who have specific management skills, including:
- Planning: The sales manager’s job is full of assigning areas of coverage, setting up performance indicators, and designing tactics for lead generation.
- Directing: Sales managers need to inspire outstanding team performance by offering feedback and guidance that motivates their reps.
- Communicating: From discussing day-to-day operations to messaging higher-ups about sales activities, communication is a key part of your sales management system.
- Problem-Solving: Make sure your sales leaders can address concerns and issues in real-time, finding quick solutions to any problem.
- Evaluating: Effective sales management means being able to look at your sales pipeline, strategy, and metrics to ensure the process is optimized.
- Supporting: Sales managers must create incentives to motivate employees to hit sales objectives and provide coaching that ensure employee retention.
When a sales manager has all these skills, they can develop a great work environment and help their team achieve successful sales. In addition to a positive impact on your bottom line, effective sales managers can also contribute to an increase in sales revenue, better reliability in sales forecasting, higher customer and staff satisfaction, and increased productivity.
Sales Management Techniques
In addition to having the right skills for the job, sales managers can turn any new hire or sales team member into a sales leader with a variety of management techniques.
1. Top-Tier Recruitment
Any powerful sales team starts with finding, hiring, and training the best sales reps. Since recruitment is so expensive, managers can save time and money when they spend the time upfront to engage the best people.
Specific job descriptions that list required skills are a good start, but your managers should also look for self-motivated individuals, who learn quickly and respond well to a competitive environment.
2. Ongoing Sales Training
As market trends evolve and the needs of potential customers change, your team will need frequent training that ensures they’re updating their sales techniques to meet sales targets and quotas. You might also be dealing with new products or pricing, so even your best team members require ongoing training.
Sales training apps can help ramp up your training and onboarding.
3. Relevant Feedback
While the sales profession may breed a highly competitive environment, your manager will be able to prevent burnout and keep everyone on track by motivating them with relevant feedback, incentives, and sales gamification.
4. Forecasting for Future Strategies
This is a key technique that combines forecasting and metrics tracking. Even if your team is closing deals, and you have a high quantity of likely future sales, you should be setting goals for the following quarters. Forecasting uses historical sales data to help managers pinpoint issues in the sales pipeline, surfacing actionable insights for revenue growth in the future.
Sales Management Tools
While your sales managers have to be highly skilled, they don’t need to do it all alone. There are a variety of sales management tools that can help your sales reps connect with each other, amplify customer relationship management, and enable collaboration via virtual solutions. The best sales management software will include these top features:
- Pipeline Tracking
- Video Conferencing Capabilities
- Social Media Management
- Phone Dialers
- Intelligent Automation Tools
- Email Integration
- Calendar Management
- Reminders And Notifications
- Sales Reporting
- Quote Builder Tool
- Dashboards
- Invoicing Tools
- Sales CRM
Some of my favorite sales management tools include Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho CRM. These platforms deliver all the tools above and much more, like deal tracking, conversation intelligence, and ticketing tools for customer service.
Bringing It All Together
Sales management may not be a simple job, but this critical role is the lynchpin of a sales management strategy that enhances your company’s bottom line. Explore different sales plans and implement them with your sales manager to transform your sales organization.
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