Managing a Sales Team with Success - - Part 2

Managing a Sales Team with Success Part 2 (Please read Part 1 before proceeding to Part 2)

6- Manage the metrics

Control of the selling environment, internally and externally, gives you the opportunity to begin to measure activities and correlate their occurrence with performance. You will discover certain sales activities lead to desirable results and others portend unsatisfactory outcomes.

How do I get started?

First you must decide what information is important for your business to measure. Each business, industry and market may have different needs and key indicator. The three broad categories of sales data are:-

Activity-related measurements:

• These measures tell you how many times someone performed a particularly activity. 
• Telephone calls, e-mails, sales calls, mailings, proposals, and presentations are all examples. 
• The data may be collected daily, weekly or monthly. 
• Activity-related measurements are a very common place to start gathering your sales metrics.

Transformational measurements:

• These are the movement of prospects from one step in the business sales methodology to the next step. 
• Sales people are valued on their ability to deliver measurable results. 
• The way they accomplish this task is to convert suspects to prospects and then persuade them to become customers.

Prospect feedback measurements:

The range of measurements changes as you move from activity to transformational to feedback. 

• Activity-related measurements are very cut-and-dried, pure statistics. 
• Feedback measurements are more subjective and require greater interpretative skills. 
• Gathering the data for each form of measurement has its own distinct challenges.

7-     Accounts management and effective forecasting

Account management focuses attention on the customers and prospects who are most important to a business. These accounts may be your best current customers or promising new prospects; the amount of product they purchase often represents a significant contribution to the revenue plan.

Sales managers have a fundamental responsibility to lead account management planning sessions and progress reviews. 

The plans have several important business objectives:-

Gather account information:

• Planning starts with the basic information you will need about each account. 
• The material you compile should be created with an eye to minimally impacting selling time. 
• Documentation takes time and it is an effort to keep current. 
• Some salespeople are wary about revealing account details because it represents a disclosure of knowledge, which can be reviewed as power.

Plan a strategy for each opportunity

• The salespeople who manage these accounts should become experts about the organization they sell to and be able to lead an effective sales campaign. 
• Planning also encourages team work and realistic appraisals of the strengths and weaknesses of each person, product, competitor and prospect.
• Drawing support from and beyond the sales organization requires planning. Each participant to your prospect must be focused, coordinated and consistent.

Allocate business resources:

• Allocation can trigger financial decisions. 
• A prospect requires a mandatory modification to a product before they will consider your final proposal.  
• What will the modification dictate? Labour, material, engineering resources, production facilities, and delays in other projects – all of which have cost and pricing implications.

Monitor the execution:

• Despite the best efforts of top professionals, prospects have a way of surprising and challenging even the best of blueprints. 
• You don’t want to micro-manage each account for your team, but do what to be sure the plan is followed. 
• Leaders encourage initiative and discourage careless or thoughtless decisions. 
• The best way to be certain your account team lives up to its commitments is to verify the execution of their account management plans each step of the way.

Consult on adjustments:

• Along with oversight must come a willingness to encourage adjustments and provide advice. 
• Give your sales representatives credit for smart actions and refocus them when they miscalculate. 
• The more you learn about the accounts, the better you can grasp the details, provide meaningful advice and support your team.

Win the business:

Planning account management strategy is imperative, but don’t lose sight of one simple fact – every account management plan, each review, course correction and ounce of intellect, energy and teamwork you devote to the challenge of managing key accounts has but one objective, and that is – “Win the business!”

What is a forecast?

A forecast is a definitive prediction of future sales performance. It applies to individual sales people and the complete sales team. The forecast is set against a specific date in time, typically the end of a financial reporting period. It is used to project in advance which sales opportunities are ready to move to closure and when that will happen. Forecasting is a primary responsibility for sales managers and is often a difficult challenge.

The Key Business Challenges:

Let’s look for a moment at some of the key business challenges forecasting impacts:

How can you create accurate forecasts?

• The first order is to focus on the importance of creating accurate forecasting.
•  Second, you need a culture that promotes and rewards accurate disclosure.
• Third, salespeople need to embrace the fact that accurate sales forecasts are important to their personal success.
• Fourth, you need a business sales methodology to create the foundation for a forecast that is accurate.

Rules for accurate forecasting

• Rule 1: Forecasts are done on fixed schedules with a standardized format. Everybody with sales responsibility produces a forecast, undertaking the forecasting exercise multiple times during a financial reporting period.
• Rule 2: Accounts that have not entered into pre-selection selling are not eligible to be placed on a forecast! At this point, we will go real life example to understand how effective forecasting and motivation helps sales management.
• Rule 3: Your goal is to have enough “commit” accounts to meet or exceed the sales projection toward which you are working. Your experience will guide you to the “overage” in commits you will need to achieve plan safely.
• Rule 4: “Upside” accounts are fallback that are available for replacing “commits” that fail to close on schedule, and become future “commits” as you move forward.

At this stage we will go thru a real case scenario practicing Forecasting and motivation.

8- Evaluating salespeople

Sales managers create teams by evaluating people and the skills they bring to the organization. Every sales manager will spend a significant amount of time and energy thinking about the consequences of selecting the right people to accomplish important assignments. How well you recruit and train staff, decide when it’s appropriate to terminate salespeople and manage resignations will have an immense impact on your success.

Recruiting salespeople

Recruitment mistakes are, unfortunately, difficult to avoid. Making judgments about people, their abilities, motivation, and commitment to excel as sales professionals . . . are a challenge. To add to the degree of difficulty, you are judging both present and future skill sets and attitudes.

Where do you find potential top performers?

The traditional way to recruit salespeople is to take them from your competitors. They come with a portfolio of industry knowledge, customer relationships, and market savvy, and they require very little training.

Two quick points – it pays to know your competitor’s best salespeople and if you decide to recruit your competitor’s employees, you can assume they will respond in kind.

How to professionally recruit?

Hiring top performers requires both parties ultimately to agree to work together. In some markets, economies, and moments in time, employers have the upper hand; in other circumstances, potential employees are in control. Offering a candidate, a position they decline because the recruitment process was poorly handled is a lost opportunity. Losing an applicant to a competitor who out-recruited you is just as annoying.

Effective sales recruiting

Effective sales recruiting requires you to judge the value of your candidate’s past experience. Explore the sales and personal performance skills they possess now and project to grow towards. Decide if they have a career plan which aligns with your open position.

Training salespeople

It costs real time and money to train a sales team. It costs even more to ignore this basic business investment. Training for a sales team falls into three broad categories: market education, product expertise and selling skills.

Training is important to all businesses, well-heeled or not. The scope of budgets may be dramatically different but the need is constant. Turnover, inexperience and a surge in hiring all conspire to create the need for educational programs. The alternative is the inefficient and costly “teach yourself” approach. 

Terminating salespeople

Sales managers are responsible for making decisions which often lead to the termination of salesmen and women. It is a difficult part of the responsibility entrusted to your care. Taking away a person’s employment is a serious action. It’s also governed by a significant body of employment laws and regulations.

Managing resignations

?Every sales manager will work with salespeople who are difficult. They may have personality quirks which present challenges, struggle with countless other sales skills, argue with customers and annoy prospects. Yet they achieve plan. You coach them, motivate, train and re-train and still the issues remain. Frustrating! High-maintenance! When they decide to resign for a variety of reasons, you breathe a sigh of relief.

The best approach to those resignations you are comfortable accepting is to be polite, gracious and accommodating. The information can be valuable, interesting, partially true or just nonsense. Learn from the comments, ignore the inappropriate stuff and wish them the best.

Resignations you wish to have withdrawn present a different challenge. Sometimes the underlying reasons may be completely personal and beyond your control. It’s impossible to tell a working spouse they should refuse to relocate with their partner. The best thing you can do it to leave the door open for future re-employment or get very creative.

Thank you for reading. Will post part 3 shortly on

9-     Sales compensation plans

10-  Powerful sales meetings

11-  All sales managers have four constituencies

Dr Hussein Saad

Strategic Sales and Certified Sales Coach

+966 55 119 6445