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Firms are increasingly turning to Sales Management as a key element of increasing revenue and operational efficiency. This guide provides the necessary knowledge, skills and competencies for the position’s growth in today’s competitive business environment.
The “sales management pdf” is a document that covers all of the basic elements of sales management. It includes a step-by-step guide to managing your sales department.
From developing a team to defining sales objectives and adopting tactics to meet them, sales management involves a broad variety of actions necessary to effectively create and manage a sales operation. Master six important components of sales management, as well as the sales tools and resources required to do these duties more effectively.
The fundamental components of building and running a successful sales program are outlined in this comprehensive handbook on sales management:
- Putting Together Your Team
- Recruiting Procedures
- Candidate Evaluation and Interviewing
- Creating an Offer
- Your Sales Team’s Onboarding
- Creating a Sales Strategy
- Setting Sales Objectives
- Creating a Sales Strategy
- Developing Sales Techniques
- Sales quotas are a great way to keep track of how much money you’re making
- Adherence to Operational Best Practices
- Providing Sales Support
- Software for Customer Relationship Management
- Lists of Prospects
- Sales Expertise
- Additional Information
- Keeping Your Sales Team Motivated
- Positive incentives should be used.
- Recognize your achievements
- Make Use of Friendly Competition
- Performance Evaluation
1. Creating a Sales Team
Attracting and hiring talented salespeople to fill various sales development, account executive, or customer service positions is part of sales management. Having the appropriate people may be the difference between meeting your organization’s sales objectives and falling far short. It’s critical to be thorough and methodical throughout this stage of creating your sales operation.
Recruiting Procedures
A consistent procedure for establishing sales job descriptions, receiving applications, and filtering down possible candidates with interviews or tests is required to create a competent sales force. It should ideally enable you to pick and choose from a pool of suitable candidates for each position you want to fill. Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and LinkedIn are examples of job search services that may aid in the creation and organization of job ads as well as the screening of applications.
Job descriptions must clearly reflect the tasks and responsibilities of the position in order to attract the suitable candidates. Compensation, perks, business information, job location, and projected work schedule are all common topics in job descriptions. Make sure to include the corporate culture and whether or not remote work possibilities are accessible, since the opportunity to work from anywhere is becoming more desirable.
Craft your job descriptions such that they include enough information to spark a candidate’s interest without being so extensive that they feel overwhelmed and decide not to apply. To get started writing your own job description, download our example below.
Download a Free Job Posting Sample
Assessing & Interviewing Candidates
Schedule and conduct interviews with potential prospects after narrowing down the submitted applications to a pool of qualified candidates to evaluate how they would fit into your corporate culture and learn more about their past experience. It’s critical to keep in mind that interviewing is a two-way street. You’re interviewing them for a sales position, but they’re also interviewing you to determine whether your firm is a suitable match for them.
Another technique to screen candidates is to use skills assessment tools to evaluate whether they have the knowledge and abilities necessary for certain roles. This may be accomplished via sales simulations or a skills exam that includes sales-related questions. If the process continues on for more than a few months, competent applicants may lose interest or get recruited by another organization, regardless of whether you utilize interviews, assessments, or both approaches to evaluate a candidate.
Creating an Offer
Send an offer letter after the field of potential candidates has been reduced down to those you wish to employ (grab our free offer letter template below). The suggested beginning date, basic pay plus any commission or sales incentive structure, and working hours should all be included in this letter. Make sure you provide a contact person who they can contact if they have any queries, and ask them to react by a certain date.
Our customisable offer letter template is available in PDF, Word, and Google Doc formats.
Pro tip: Use a candidate rating system in which the best prospects get the initial job offers, and then offer letters may be forwarded to the next candidates in line if they decline. This ensures that you have qualified individuals ready to make offers to at all times. With applicant scoring features and one-click offer letter production, recruiting management software like SmartRecruiters can help you manage this process.
Candidate list from SmartRecruiters with a star rating (Image courtesy of SmartRecruiters)
SmartRecruiters provides letter customization. (Image courtesy of SmartRecruiters)
2. Your Sales Team’s Onboarding
To familiarize new sales staff with their work as well as your company’s culture and values, a formal onboarding procedure should be designed. Initial sales training should be included to immediately familiarize new representatives with your company’s sales process and goods or services. It also teaches your new worker to crucial corporate resources and the strategies they’ll need to complete sales tasks, meet quotas, and achieve sales targets.
Download our free sales onboarding checklist and personalize it for your company and sales process to make building an efficient onboarding program simpler. From general orientation and workstation setup through sales training, objective and expectation setting, and resource allocation, this checklist covers the onboarding duties that must be accomplished for each sales person.
Treat the employee onboarding process as a project with a start date, an end date, and tasks to be performed to better manage it. Trello, a project management software, may be used to keep track of completed onboarding activities and outstanding tasks.
Trello is a project management tool (Source: Trello)
3. Creating a Sales Strategy
Building a sales operation through recruiting and onboarding sales professionals was one of the two functions of sales management outlined above. If you’re a solopreneur, on the other hand, drafting a sales strategy can be the first thing you do to manage your sales operation. A sales plan covers every facet of creating and executing a revenue-generating strategy.
Setting Sales Objectives
The first stage in creating a sales strategy is to determine your company’s sales objectives. It determines your sales strategy, including methods and how sales quotas are established for teams or individuals. Sales goals and objectives establish a target number for concluded transactions or income earned, as well as how a sales goal target will be met.
To determine your sales objective, you must first determine your revenue break-even threshold, which must be reached in order to pay all of your expenditures. The amount of targeted profitability over break-even shows you how much more income you’ll need to be profitable and meet your company’s objectives. This income must be converted into a sales target, split into individual activities, and conveyed to your sales force.
Setting and monitoring sales targets is easy with Pointagram. One of our top selections for the finest sales gamification software is this platform, which allows you and your team to see success. It will convert your sales objective into a visual target with a finish line to symbolize the goal and display symbols to reflect your team’s progress toward that goal.
Finish line for Pointagram’s sales target (Source: Pointagram)
Creating a Sales Strategy
You should have a set of repeatable actions for lead generation, qualifying, nurturing, and turning those leads into buying clients, whether you are managing sales by yourself or have a team of agents conducting sales operations. This is often referred to as the sales process.
There are two key sales process aspects to develop, both of which use performance metrics to measure your ability to take a lead to the next level. A sales funnel is the first of them. The sales funnel depicts the steps of your sales process from the perspective of a customer’s journey from first learning about your company to making a purchase.
Each step of the customer journey (awareness, interest, consideration, and decision) should be identified, as well as conversion rates for each. This enables you to view the current state of each lead as well as your efficiency in moving leads through the funnel. Reporting tools in customer relationship management (CRM) software like HubSpot CRM provide lead conversion rates at each level of the sales funnel.
Conversion rates for HubSpot’s sales funnel (Image courtesy of SuperMetrics)
A sales pipeline is the other component of the sales process to develop. Internal sales tasks that must be performed before a lead becomes a client are represented by sales pipeline stages, which vary from those in the sales funnel. Sales pipeline activities, in other words, advance a lead through the steps of your sales funnel. Sales pipeline activity may be tracked in a Kanban view in CRMs like Pipedrive, which shows each deal possibility under a pipeline stage.
Pipedrive is a sales pipeline software. (Image courtesy of FinancesOnline)
An example of a sales funnel, along with the phases of the pipeline.
Developing Sales Techniques
How you execute sales activities and complete sales transactions is referred to as sales strategies or methods. Emotional selling is an example of a sales strategy that may be used to attract leads, nurture them, and influence purchase choices. To build and cultivate interest or inspire purchase choices, it entails provoking emotions such as altruism, greed, jealousy, guilt, pride, or fear via lead nurturing conversations or marketing material.
Upselling and cross-selling are two further examples of revenue-generating sales methods. Customers are persuaded to buy other items or services that are complimentary to the thing they just bought via cross-selling techniques. Upselling techniques, on the other hand, encourage clients to purchase a more costly version of the item they want or a more expensive alternative.
Upselling, cross-selling, and consultative selling are just a few of the various methods that may be used in your sales process. If you have a sales team, regardless of the approach you choose, you must ensure that each member knows how to utilize it correctly by providing essential training.
Sales quotas are a great way to keep track of how much money you’re making
Set sales quotas for your team (or yourself if you’re entirely responsible for sales activities) after you’ve identified your sales objectives, methodology, and unique methods for moving leads through the process. Setting a sales quota defines actions like the amount of calls or emails to be made within a certain time period. They may also be performance-based, with minimum standards for income or transactions that must be completed.
Sales quotas set productivity goals for salespeople, incentivizing them and allowing you to hold them responsible. Quotas should be split down into shorter time periods, such as daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly, and regularly monitored to ensure that everyone is on course to meet their targets.
Adherence to Operational Best Practices
There are a few guiding principles that managers in all sorts of functional jobs may follow to ensure that the day-to-day sales operation runs as smoothly as possible. The following are some sales management best practices to follow:
- Meetings should only be conducted for critical information or for anything that needs input or participation among a group. Create a meeting outline for everything that will be discussed, establish a start and finish time, and adhere to the agenda and timeline.
- Set clear goals for yourself: Make sure each team member understands precisely what is expected of them, as well as the repercussions and rewards for their performance, especially when it comes to goal and quota communication.
- Promote transparency: A culture should be established in which workers feel comfortable sharing information with their superiors and managers feel comfortable sharing information with their team. Encourage an open-door policy so salespeople know they may go to their management about any issues they’re having.
- Continually emphasize the necessity of ongoing communication and cooperation, while also doing it from the top-down and offering tools that make it simple to communicate.
4. Providing Sales Support
A crucial element of sales management is providing your sales team with the resources they need to be effective. These resources can be specific sales enablement technology, product or service education, coaching and insights, ongoing training, or Lists of Prospects or sources to help generate leads.
Software for Customer Relationship Management
CRM software is used to keep track of prospects, interact with leads and customers, and coordinate with other team members on sales activities. CRMs serve as a centralized system for organizing all sales operations, and they can automate many routine processes using technologies like workflow automation and lead nurturing programs.
Popular CRMs, such as Zoho CRM and Freshsales, also provide performance and activity metrics derived from data submitted into the CRM’s system. This data may be seen on a dashboard or downloaded in the form of reports.
Dashboard for Zoho CRM (Source: Zoho)
Lists of Prospects
Sales reps are often provided with Lists of Prospects. Lists of Prospects may be purchased or acquired through a marketing agency or appointment setting service, or through inbound lead generation methods like online web forms, advertising, networking events, email marketing, or social content. Once obtained, your sales team members will introduce their products and services to these leads or attempt to qualify them by cold calling or emailing.
Pro tip: Purchasing leads from a lead database is one of the quickest methods to obtain a large number of leads at once. Our guide to the best places to acquire leads details six prominent lead-gathering sources as well as each of their best-for situations.
Sales Expertise
Having the right knowledge is an underrated resource that sales managers and business owners tend to forget as a way to fully prepare a high-performing sales team. Although individual coaching sessions are one way to improve upon what a rep already knows or doesn’t know, professional sales training is another option to create Sales Expertise.
There are a variety of sales training programs available that either concentrate in a specific area of sales (such as a prospecting course) or provide a wide, general scope that covers all aspects of selling. Our list of the best sales training programs will assist you in navigating the congested field of sales training companies.
Additional Information
Other tools and applications that help your sales team meet goals can either be built into a CRM system, integrated with a CRM, or used independently. Below you will find Additional Information your business can provide to make your sales team more productive:
- Phone systems that use the Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) protocol: Telephone systems like RingCentral, GoTo Connect, and 808 let your workers to make calls from their computer or mobile device through the internet, and the most of them link with popular CRM software.
- Calendar-based scheduling software: Schedule meetings, confirm them, inform participants, and sync events to calendars with appointment scheduling software like Calendly.
- Software for video conferencing: Platforms like Zoom make it simple to book and manage video conference events.
- Software for project or task management: Tools like Trello and Monday.com make it simple to organize, manage, and allocate projects and tasks to team members.
- Internal communication tools: Slack, for example, allows members of your team to interact efficiently with one another.
You should keep yourself in mind as a sales manager when it comes to software tools that will help you be more productive in your profession. For more information on numerous tools you might use for various areas of a sales management role, see our selections for the best sales management software.
5. Keeping Your Sales Team Motivated
Your sales force must have the drive and desire to accomplish their objectives in addition to the resources required to achieve high performance. Building a great sales culture inside your business, including recognizing achievements and encouraging healthy competition, is essential for motivating a sales team.
Positive incentives should be used.
To motivate your sales team by celebrating wins, Positive incentives should be used.. These are rewards and recognition that are given when reps hit their sales quotas or exceed their sales goals. Sales gamification tools like Tango Card make it easy to reward sales reps with gift cards, prepaid cards, or charity donations for great performance.
Recognize your achievements
You can also Recognize your achievements to high-performing sales reps by praising them during team meetings or through gamification software such as WooBoard. WooBoard gives organizations a public board where managers and other team members can recognize high achievers by sending “Woos” acknowledging a good deed, a quota target being hit, or any other accomplishment they want to point out to everybody.
Make Use of Friendly Competition
A sales rep’s motivation to meet and surpass their targets is typically boosted by friendly rivalry. These contests might be one-on-one, team-vs-team, or amongst the full sales staff. Sales competitions may be tailored to your sales operation and process, with point systems based on sales quota activities, completed transactions, and total revenue earned, for example.
Gamescope from Zoho and Hurrah! from Hurrah! Managers may use leaderboards to organize contests, set up point systems, and measure the success of each salesperson participating in the competition. Visual progress monitoring may bring out anyone’s competitive spirit and push them to give it their all.
Battle of the Zoho Gamescope competition (Source: Zoho)
6. Performance Evaluation
To manage the sales operation, it’s essential to monitor the performance of individual reps as well as sales teams to ensure activities are being completed and goals are being met. If you find that a team member is falling short, plan to provide coaching or allocate Additional Information (such as sales training) to facilitate sales performance improvements.
Sales reporting capabilities included in customer relationship management (CRM) systems like HubSpot and Pipedrive, as well as spreadsheet software like Excel and Google Sheets, may be used to monitor performance. What you’re looking for is that sales activity matches what’s needed in their sales activity targets, and that each rep is delivering enough deals or income to meet the company’s objectives.
You must determine the core reason of poor performance if a sales person is behind on their statistics or performing at a lesser level than their colleagues. This might be a problem with a particular component of the sales process or just a lack of quality leads to meet their targets.
Reporting on HubSpot’s sales activities (Source: HubSpot)
Pipedrive’s objective and performance tracking (Source: Pipedrive)
Conclusion
Sales management necessitates taking on a wide variety of tasks at the same time. You’re not just a sales coach, but also a team motivator, recruiter, strategist, and operations manager, and you’re in charge of giving everything your sales team needs to thrive and become high-performers. To guarantee that your team is well-equipped to reach your company’ revenue and growth objectives, use the correct sales software and follow these sales management practices.
“The sales management system” is a guide to the different aspects of sales management. It includes information on how to sell, what to sell, and how to manage your team.
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- elements of sales management
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