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Sales management in the context of B2B sales plays a key role in the effective conduct of commercial activities. It is a process that includes various stages and activities aimed at increasing efficiency, monitoring results and maintaining relationships with business clients. In the article you will learn what exactly the sales management process is, what its stages are in practice and why it is so important in the activities of every company.
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In every business there are many moving parts that need to run smoothly, so managing the sales process must be clear and effective. The main goal of sales managers is to increase the team's profits while delivering value to customers. But what exactly is sales management?
Sales management is a comprehensive process that includes various stages such as planning, recruitment, training, performance monitoring, negotiations, and maintaining customer relationships. It is the coordination of activities to ensure that the team operates efficiently and achieves goals. It also involves analyzing and developing employee skills and forecasting future achievements.
In short, sales management is the strategy and activities aimed at successfully conducting commercial activities. Managers must ensure that all elements of the process are synchronized and lead to increased profits while offering value to customers.
Sales management is the process of planning, directing and supervising professional sales, which includes recruiting, assigning tasks, monitoring, rewarding and motivating the sales team. This can often be thought of as managing part of the promotional activities within a company's marketing function.
Sales is the only function in a company that generates income, so it must be properly managed. The company's financial results depend on the performance of the sales department. There are certain aspects that can be motivating for future sellers. First, salespeople are often the highest-paid people in business, and working in sales is often considered the fastest path to advancement into management.
It is important for organizations to create and maintain an effective sales team. This is because sales managers are entrusted not only with managing resources to achieve specific sales results, but also with management functions such as planning sales activities and organizing the team to meet sales goals. Sales management is related to marketing management, which influences the role of various promotional activities in a company.
Sales management is important for achieving a company's marketing goals. Sales managers define personal selling goals and develop strategies for them. The sales budget is part of the overall marketing budget, taking into account the goals of the marketing department.
Effective sales management is based on four key areas that are closely related:
Sales management methods vary depending on the nature of the products, sales channels, and whether you sell to end customers or to intermediaries. There are also differences in sales managers' preferences for organization, motivation and planning, which depend on individual choices and work style.
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The main goals of sales management focus on increasing the efficiency and long-term development of the organization. These goals include:
In addition to managing the team, sales managers play a key role in building relationships with customers and other stakeholders. Sales management is an extremely important function in organizations of various industries because it affects the profitability of the company and the development of its structure. The sales department plays an important role in achieving the organization's broad business goals.
Sales managers must pay special attention to key areas to achieve sales management success. These are the important aspects:
Managing these key areas is essential to achieving success in managing your sales department and achieving your company's goals.
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A good sales manager who has established an appropriate sales culture in the company, focused on appropriate processes and effective sales communication, uses an appropriate environment to monitor and manage both the process and the work of salespeople.
Often such a tool is a CRM system. An efficiently adapted CRM system enables the analysis of important information in a simple and effective way, which facilitates quick making of key decisions. This significantly affects work efficiency, because a competent sales manager not only supervises the work of salespeople, but also regularly analyzes, evaluates and uses it to develop employees' skills so that the team constantly improves its results.
However, monitoring the sales team is not limited to just assessing the results at the end of the month. An effective sales manager monitors many key pieces of information regarding each salesperson's work process, such as the conversion of potential customers (leads) into sales opportunities, the conversion of these opportunities into signed contracts, the duration of the sales cycle, the average transaction value and many other indicators.
Thanks to access to this data, we are able to assess the probability of sales for a given salesperson in a given month, plan sales in advance, and, above all, if sales goals are not met, draw conclusions, identify the source of the problem and avoid it in the future.
Let's take a look at the recruitment process for a sales position. Determining the requirements and responsibilities related to a given position and using a well-designed recruitment process gives you a real influence on who will become a member of the sales team. Of course, professional knowledge is important, but equally important are experience, commitment, charisma, presence and emotional intelligence.
Implementation and sales training for new employees should include education about the company's image and product functionality. It is important that these trainings focus on presenting the product in the context of current market conditions. The customer may wonder what the competition has to offer, so it is important to show what features of our product make it stand out from the customer's perspective.
The sales department must be equipped with specific goals and tasks and maintain constant cooperation with the marketing and customer service departments to understand and respect established processes. A key aspect is that sales team members understand the customer's challenges and needs and are able to adapt solutions and products to their individual needs. Salespeople who act as advisors usually enjoy greater customer trust than those who focus only on selling their product.
The most common sales management problems we often encounter. Each of these problems is briefly described so as to leave no doubt as to their nature. I try to avoid exaggerated narratives, so let's get straight to the point. Be warned that there may be a hint of sarcasm in some cases, but sometimes it's the best way to explain my intentions.
Let's look at it using the example of a personal trainer. Let's imagine that I am such a trainer and my client wants to lose 5 kilograms in a month. Now, would you consider me a good coach if I just gave him this task and after a month, checked whether he achieved the goal? This sounds quite absurd, right? Unfortunately, this is how sales management works in many companies. The boss gives salespeople a goal to achieve and tells them, "Just sell it!" When the goal is not achieved, the blame is placed on the competence of the employees. However, a personal trainer exists to help the client, not just impose goals and wait for results.
This mistake can be understood by thinking about digging a trench. Let's assume we have to dig a 100-meter trench. Based on our calculations and experience, we know that if we were working at our current pace, we would only dig 70 meters in a month. This means we are 30 meters behind. If we do not develop a precise plan or do not find out how to dig the missing 30 meters, we are simply counting on a lucky coincidence or that someone else will do the job for us.
In fact, taking into account the average transaction value, conversion rate and time needed to close the sale, it may turn out that achieving the missing 30 meters would require conducting 20 meetings a day, which is unrealistic. Before we act, the math can give us a clear signal that our current plan needs a major overhaul.
Note: The solution is not just to say, "We will work harder.
Over the years, I have seen many intriguing sales management strategies and processes that seemed perfect on paper. Unfortunately, reality often showed that these fantastic ideas did not survive in practice.
The person responsible for sales management must be close to the daily work of salespeople. Not only to stay in touch with reality, but also to notice areas requiring improvement. It is often discovered that salespeople are struggling with problems that they do not talk about out loud. This allows you to focus on solving problems in their natural environment, instead of conducting training that does not bring real benefits.
Allowing chaos in management
During our consultations with clients, we often ask about the main goal of cooperation. One of the most common goals we receive is the need to sort out the chaos associated with sales.
I know of no better way to deal with "sales chaos" than to establish four key processes:
Determining exactly how these processes are carried out is an excellent first step towards bringing order to the "chaos". Moreover, defined processes significantly shorten the time needed to introduce new employees to the sales team. However, it should be remembered that designing and implementing sales processes is a complicated process that requires attention and commitment. Therefore, it is worth familiarizing yourself with non-linear sales processes to expand your knowledge on this topic.
Nothing is more unfavorable than a dead process that was once intended to serve sales management. This is a person who has put a lot of effort into creating these beautiful processes, but they are now outdated and not useful.
Competition in the market is constantly evolving and customer expectations are changing. Products and solutions become obsolete. Therefore, it is important that sales processes are flexible and constantly adapted to current market conditions. If the sales department has defined processes, it is also necessary to introduce a process for improving these processes (SIC!). At least once a month or, better yet, once a week, someone (ideally the entire team) should reflect on whether the processes being performed are effective and whether they can be improved. It is a kind of "driving school" that allows for regular process improvement, similar to the Scrum methodology.
An extremely important aspect of improving the sales process is the ability to measure and collect data. We often focus only on measuring the bottom line, but sales management involves much more than that. There are many other things worth measuring:
Action measures: Allows you to check whether established processes are actually being implemented.
Quality measures: Helps assess how effectively these processes are implemented.
Management measures: Helpful in controlling the profitability of the entire enterprise, which is the sales department.
Data collected and analyzed in an appropriate manner allows salespeople to understand which of their actions translate into the final result. Therefore, every sales manager should remember that you can only manage employee actions that will be taken today.
A big mistake in sales management is not having a proper CRM system or treating it only as an expensive notebook. In fact, the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system should play a much broader role. It is a tool that not only allows you to collect information, but also:
Documenting processes: It helps to write down and document sales processes, which is crucial in optimizing them.
Monitoring activities and processes: Allows you to track the activities undertaken by your sales team and assess whether the processes are actually being implemented.
Action planning assistance: Supports the decision-making process by providing data and conclusions, allowing you to focus on the actions you need to take "today".
Using CRM only as a notebook does not use its full capabilities. Therefore, it is important to implement and use a CRM system strategically and effectively.
Another mistake is maintaining illusion and lack of realism in sales management. It often happens that management or directors set ambitious business goals, while assuming that the sales department will work a miracle and achieve these goals, despite the lack of realistic plans and strategies. On the other hand, the sales team also often pretends that they can achieve these goals, even though this may be impossible.
This situation, where both parties pretend that everything is fine, can last for years and lead to frustration and lack of results. In fact, it is important to be realistic and base your sales goals on concrete plans, strategies and market analysis, rather than relying on illusion and hope for a miracle.
An extremely important aspect of sales management is the ability to flexibly respond to changes and adapt activities during the month. It's like a personal trainer helping a client lose weight. If the client has not lost a single kilogram after the first week, it is important to immediately analyze and adapt the strategy. Waiting for a miracle to fix everything is inappropriate.
In fact, some people neglect this flexibility, claiming they don't have time for it or simply ignoring the need for change. However, the person responsible for sales management should emphasize results and be willing to adapt activities when the situation requires it, rather than focusing only on bureaucratic procedures and meetings.
The sales team often has valuable knowledge and ideas, but unfortunately their voice is often omitted in the decision-making process in other areas of the company. Often, these proposals seem like an area where sales staff are trying to justify their failures rather than adding value to the organization.
A wise sales manager will understand the importance of creating a company-wide feedback culture in his department and will take these suggestions seriously. In this way, you can improve your company's position on the market. However, to achieve this, salespeople's competences are necessary, because the lack of such competences will make the company's only problem always seem to be that it is too expensive and does not provide the service on time.
Recruiting salespeople is a specific task that is not always best handled by the HR department. Finding a good salesperson is not just a matter of reviewing CVs and conducting standard interviews. This job requires deep knowledge of sales processes and the ability to recognize real talent from fakes.
In the sales department, especially if you employ more than 15 employees, recruitment should be treated as a permanent process. Failure to plan recruitment and replacing employees in a hurry is a mistake that many companies make. Decisions are often made that do not meet the needs of the organization at all, simply due to the lack of time for thorough recruitment.
In summary, improving sales management is crucial to achieving organizational goals. There are many other sales mistakes, but the ones I discussed are the most common and are worth addressing to achieve success in the marketplace. I look forward to your comments and information about other problems you face.
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