Sales Management

Do you want to optimize the sales performance of your company and reduce risks? AB Consultant offers you personalized support to deploy sales management by the commercial activity management solution adapted to your strategic and operational challenges: generate quotes, follow up on business and opportunities, carry out purchasing operations (purchase orders and return), manage sales, inventory, payments, credit notes and invoicing.

Sales Management solutions

What is Sales Management?

Sales management is the process of planning, recruiting, training, organizing, supervising and coordinating a company’s sales force. Whether you’re selling a service or a product, sales managers are responsible for managing the sales force, setting team goals, planning and controlling the entire sales process, and ultimately making it happen. the team’s vision. More than any other group in an organization, the role of a sales team is probably the most crucial, as it has a direct impact on an organization’s revenue.

One of the most important tasks for you as a sales manager is to set up and implement a sales process for your business. Let’s take a closer look at designing the ideal sales process for your business.

What is a sales process?

Here is a concrete definition:

A series of planned activities at each stage of your sales pipeline, used as a roadmap to move the sale forward. The sales process begins with making contact with the lead and ends with closing a sale.

No two businesses are the same, and the same logic applies to creating a sales process. Ideally, your sales process should replicate the buyer’s journey and be clear and explicit. It even needs to be understood by a new sales rep. As a sales manager, you need to define a sales process that ensures you achieve your specific goals at every stage and walks the lead through the system seamlessly.

To understand where the sales process fits into an organization, it is important to understand what a sales and marketing funnel is and how a lead flows through the funnel.

Set up a sales process for your business

The sales funnel or marketing funnel is a customer-centric marketing model. It theoretically illustrates the process of making a purchase decision. As a sales manager, having the right process in place to convert the leads that come to you from your marketing team is paramount. Here’s a step-by-step explanation of what you need to do at each stage of the sales cycle to maximize your chances of converting those promising leads into your pipeline.

A simple four-part sales funnel.
A – Awareness, market potential
I – Interest, prospectus or potential clientele
D – Desire (desire), people interested in product.
A – Action, customers, people who bought the product Tavin, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

CRM system as sales management software

“If it’s not in the CRM, it didn’t happen”.
Sales relies on getting the right data at the right time, and modern CRM systems have dramatically improved the ability to do this by providing an organized sales pipeline for all businesses. Plus, all the information that comes in and out of the business cycle is easily captured in a CRM application so you don’t miss any key information when dealing with customers. For example, when a CRM system is in place, a sales representative can ensure that cold-calling a lead is not boring, by being fully aware of all relevant customer information.

Increased efficiency of sales teams, higher lead conversion rates, increased automation and improved customer engagement are some of the benefits that CRM software brings to the lead management process sales of an organization.

We’ve listed a few key CRM features that will help businesses dramatically improve their sales performance here.

Our missions and sales management processes

Sales management is a discipline made up of 3 main processes and six business processes aimed at:

• to plan,
• arrange (coordinating sales operations and implementing sales techniques )
• and develop the sales as well as the revenue of a company.

It encompasses training plans and sales performance monitoring, in order to improve the sales strategy.

Managing a sales process also requires the use of sales management software: its tools make it possible to centralize relations with prospects and make all the information the sales team needs accessible.

Let’s complete our definition of sales management by detailing the six business processes that make it up:

1. Sales strategy

Business strategy is a process that mainly defines:

• business goals,
• sales forecasts,
• prospecting planning,
• the sales techniques to apply according to the type of prospect,
• the geographical area to be targeted.

2. Recruitment and training

The sales manager should build the best sales team possible.

It does this through two processes:

• recruit a sufficient number and quality of experienced salespeople,
• implement training in certain sales techniques so that staff take the appropriate courses, obtain the required certifications and be operational.

The company must have trained and mobile human resources in order to travel the assigned region or sector.

3. Stimulation of the sales force

To motivate his salespeople, the sales manager applies different means:

• an attractive salary plus appropriate performance bonuses,
• a sales management system that notifies the entire team when a contract is signed,
• regular and encouraging communication to congratulate efforts and successes, mentioning each member of the team,
• a challenge with a key prize (a trip, for example) can be set up to reward the best seller.

4. Customer relationship management

This business process includes two components:

the information collected on a contact (surname, first name, profession, etc.),
the history of interactions with this contact, including positive or negative comments.
The sales team must carefully fill in the contact form in order to carry out a rigorous follow-up.

Each contact form must list:

• contact information used to qualify a prospect,
• the stage at which the prospect is: making an appointment, identified opportunity, sale, loyalty, etc.,
• the history of exchanges indicating each communication channel used to exchange with the contact such as telephone, email or social networks, etc.

Customer relationship management is generally associated with the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool, which centralizes all this information by making it accessible to the entire team.

The quality of your exchanges depends on the customer experience: take care of them! Your satisfied customers are your best advertisement.

5. Sales administration

This process aims to guide the team in the proper execution of administrative tasks. The sales manager plays an advisory role with his teams: he provides concrete answers to questions and gives his recommendations according to the sales context, the type of customer or prospect.

It also ensures proper use of the standard documents made available:

• quote templates,
• contract templates,
• purchase order templates,
• invoice templates,
• the rules to be applied regarding reductions, etc.

💡 We will see later how commercial management software simplifies document management in the Cloud for the whole team.

6. Performance analysis

The sales manager monitors the activity of each member of the team, and measures his progress in relation to the objectives to be achieved, and evaluates his performance.

By having a complete commercial management software, the team leader may:

• monitor the activity of each sales representative in real time and adjust their schedule accordingly,
• manage the commercial activity of the entire team on a dashboard equipped with indicators,
• redeploy efforts on the most profitable actions,
• prepare reports for its general management or the marketing department.

Photo credit: geralt via Pixabay

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