Sales management is an involved process that includes hiring, onboarding, training and motivating sales reps. Those in charge of sales management are typically tasked with designing and optimizing the overarching sales strategy as well. Sales management is essential if a business wants to succeed.
When you have great sales management in place, you’ll see a much bigger return on investment and a more motivated sales team. But for your sales team to be the best it can be, you have to put the right sales managers at the helm. In this blog, we’ll talk about elements of excellent sales management in your company.
Example Skills and Responsibilities
Sales managers and leaders need to be capable of a few key skills and responsibilities to enact good sales management practices. Remember, just because someone is a good sales rep that doesn’t mean they’ll be a good sales manager. The skill set is different. A good sales manager needs to be able to manage people, lead a team, coach, recruit, communicate well, strategize, conduct analysis and generate reports and much more. Let’s take a look at some of these key skills in greater depth.
Supervising a Sales Team
Your sales management leaders should be able to supervise a sales team and develop the reps on that team. Your sales team is essential to the success of your business. Sales is your lifeblood, so it stands to reason that you would want your sales team to be the best they can be. That starts with good management.
Sales team members of every skill level should be given individualized coaching and attention to help them develop their skills and become more efficient contributors to your revenue. This means giving them access to the resources they need to sell, teaching them how to sell your specific product or service and motivating them to do their best work.
Developing your team also means helping them set sales goals and targets and helping them reach those goals. Once you have expectations and goals established, your team will have a clearer way forward. In short, a good sales manager should be keeping their team on track with their training, their goals and their ongoing development.
But before you can create a dream team, you have to find the right recruits to make up that team. That’s where recruiting and onboarding come in.
Onboarding New Sales Reps
You need to set your sales team up for success from the jump. This means recruiting the best talent, but it also means implementing a smooth and comprehensive onboarding process. When you have a great onboarding process, your new reps will feel more comfortable from the outset and have a great chance of success in both the short term and the long term.
Sales managers should be fully integrated into this process and involve themselves from the beginning. Since they’ll be in charge of ongoing development, it’s important that new recruits get to meet their managers and leadership early and often. This way they’re comfortable asking questions, making suggestions and talking strategy.
When you’re onboarding your new reps, make sure you provide them with all the resources they’ll need right away. Something like an employee portal can make it easy for them to access their training materials and other resources when necessary.
Developing Strategy and Sales Intelligence
The process of onboarding, training and supervising your sales team is only half the battle. You also need to develop a comprehensive sales strategy and use sales intelligence to truly optimize your sales management processes.
Optimizing your sales strategy starts with clearly defining your sales cycle and honing your sales pipeline. Your sales cycle and sales pipeline help your team see where they are in a sale and help you see which aspects of your pipeline are strong and which are weak.
Sales intelligence can play a huge role in helping you refine your strategy. With sales intelligence, you collect and compile data that lets you see the best way to optimize your sales cycle. This allows you to make data-driven decisions regarding your strategy instead of relying on gut or intuition.
Tracking and Forecasting Performance
Finally, it’s crucial for sales managers to track and forecast performance. This allows your sales teams to actually see their performance and understand how they’re doing. When you have a team and individual reps trying reach quotas and sales goals, they need a visual representation of their progress. This provides them with motivation and shows them what they still need to achieve to reach those goals.
Also, when you’re collecting all of this tracking information, you’ll be able to start creating forecasts. These forecasts will show you your revenue potential for a quarter and will help you make more realistic sales targets for your teams.
How Do I Choose the Best Software for Sales Management?
All of these tasks can be made much simpler and more streamlined when you have the right software for sales management. With sales management software, you can have your tools for coaching, onboarding, forecasting, training, tracking and more all on one dashboard. You can give your team access to the tools that are useful to them.
When you’re trying to choose the right sales management software, you should make sure that it’s intuitive and that it has everything you need in one place. That’s what Flockjay can provide.
Your Sales Team Takes Flight With Flockjay
Help your sales team take flight with Flockjay. Flockjay is a sales elevation platform that provides your sales team with what they need to do their best work. Flockjay uses peer-to-peer learning to empower your sales reps and teach them best practices. Get in touch with us today for more information and to see how we can take your sales team to the next level.
