As you know, managing sales people can be difficult, even in the best of times.
Ensuring every sales person is pulling their weight, and reaching their goals and quota, needs constant monitoring.
During these pandemic times, managing your people remotely is even a bigger challenge for everyone.
So, what to do?
There are many resources, and ideas you can use, to help you manage your remote sales teams. I’m sure you’ve read many.
As a manger of sales teams for over 20 years, let me break it down to 4 key factors that I believe are the most important for ongoing sales and marketing success.
These factors are:
1. Tools
You obviously need the right tools to help your sales and marketing people survive, grow, and prosper during any time. Here are three areas I believe are the most important. There are many tools you can use in each area, but these areas will help you manage your people much better.
2. Communications
Obviously, communication is key for ensuring your sales people have ongoing success. Here are some ideas to keep the right communications flowing between your sales and marketing people and management.
3. Measurement
What gets measured, gets done.
Set Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) with each sales person. This gives you an excellent source for measuring how each of them are performing. Below are some ideas for KPI’s.
Most sales people are paid, at least partially, on how much revenue they generate.
But there are many other things that need to be measured too. This is why having the right technology makes it easier to measure the activity.
Many sales people are measured on such items as;
If you pay sales people at least partially with a salary, you need to ensure each of them understands what that salary covers. It could be such things as filling out the CRM, attending internal meetings, working with marketing, getting coaching, etc. Too many companies do not lay out what the salary does cover, and management gets frustrated when these items are not done.
4. Training and Coaching
These days, most outside sales people are not in the field as often and can plan their day without as many office interruptions. That means more time for customer contact and prospecting, and it also means there’s more time available for training and coaching.
Most sales people have had little or no formal sales training. It’s just expected that they know what to do, and so it’s no surprise when they don’t know. When your organization has a process, everyone’s on the same page. There are many programs and systems available to provide basic and enhanced selling skills. We’ve been involved with Sandler for 17 years.
Coaching helps your people apply techniques, learned in training, in the right situation at the right time, and aids motivation by reinforcing what’s being done well.
There are many dimensions to coaching. One very productive (and underutilized) technique is the role-play. Here’s one example.
If a sales representative is describing a difficult or awkward situation, role-play it.
You, as the manager should play the sales person first. This allows your sales person to understand your expectations, and by going first, you take the pressure off. Then, it’s the sales person’s turn. You can do these in groups. You can take turns with each person, or you can do the first role-play and then have the others pair up and each do both the sales person and the prospect side.
Role-play reinforces the selling situation with each sales person, as they are critiqued by a sales manager and also their peers. It is a very powerful aspect of coaching.
Where we can help
Our clients, and other companies we speak with, tell us that they have a pretty good sales staff, but they’re mainly managing existing accounts, busy with proposals and presentations so, they don’t have much time for prospecting.
That’s what we do. We’re experts in helping our clients with their prospecting.
So why not let us do your prospecting for you. Then your sales people can spend more time selling to new accounts while maintaining their current customers.
And instead of cold calling, we can set up warm calls for them to follow up on.
That is what we do best. Lead generation and appointment setting for your sales people with your prospects.
We guarantee that every lead and appointment will be qualified to your specifications.
We’ve been doing it for 20 years. So, we’re pretty good at it.
Let us help you get a jump start for your post lockdown business.
Contact us today and we will get back to you ASAP, to discuss your needs and how we might help you.
There is no charge for this, and most companies learn a lot, just by talking to us.
Send us an email at inquiry@yorkc.com or, to go directly to our contact page,
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