6 Key Areas to Review Weekly: A Sales Manager Checklist
Stay ahead of the market by maximizing the opportunities in the world around you.
Leading a sales team is a constantly evolving mission with a single objective: to meet and exceed the sales objectives for the area you’re managing. It involves constant recruiting, training, motivating, and coaching of both direct reports and non-reports. It is a constantly giving position that takes nothing and gives credit where credit is due.
The variables that can impact your success as a leader are tremendous. Below is a weekly sales management checklist and its purpose is to help you stay on top of the primary issues that should have your attention on a regular basis to keep you on track.
The Market
- Do we know what is going on in our industry?
- Do we know what is going on in our market?
- Do we know what is going on in our competitors?
- Do we know what is going on in our customers?
- How are we differentiated?
- Do we have the right metrics in place to measure change?
- What does the team need to know more about?
Goals & Roles
- Do we have defined goals for the year?
- Do we have defined sub-goals for the next 30/60/90 days based on the annual goal?
- Does everyone understand their roles and expectations in achieving the goals?
- Does my team have a plan for achieving those goals?
- Do we have the right metrics in place to measure progress?
- What can we provide to the team to help them?
The People
- Do we have the right people on the team?
- Do we know what the team is great at?
- Is the team utilizing their strengths to their full potential?
- Do we know where the team needs help?
- What tools do we need to use better?
- What activities do we need to do better?
- Do we have the right metrics in place to drive success?
- How can we coach the team for better performance?
Operations
- How well is our lead generation working?
- Are we easy to do business with?
- Do we have the people and processes to support the sales?
- Are we maximizing our capacity?
- Are we meeting our revenue / units / margin goals?
- What are our customers saying?
- Do we have the right business intelligence to make informed decisions?
- What can we improve this week?
External Relationships
- Who are our top customer? Who changed? Who can we grow in the middle 60? Who do we fire>
- Do we have the right strategic partners to help us add value to our customers?
- Who else need to know about what we do?
- Who can we be a resource for?
Self-development
- What is my 30-60-90 day plan and is it focused on the goal?
- Who can I use as a sounding board?
- Who can hold me accountable
- What books have I read in the last 3 months?
- How can I help others in their personal lives?
- What can we celebrate?
Your particular sales world will most likely involves a few more points or slight changes that are specific to you and your team, your company, your industry, and your market. You may be an owner in charge of the sales effort, a sales manager in a large company, or even an autonomous sales person that has to manage themselves. Regardless, the sales management function still needs to perform and consistently addressed, these are the sales management fundamentals that will put you and your team in front of the pack and help you maximize the opportunities in the world around you.
7 Sales Metrics and 7 Questions You Should Utilize for Sales Growth and Sales Coaching
In a recent seminar about “Building a Sales Management Function” that I was honored to facilitate, we talked about what metrics matter to an organization that wants to be forward thinking and use leading indicators instead of the traditional “Postmortem” metrics that most companies use. Looking backwards is fine if you are alright with using your rear view mirror to drive forwards, but companies that are focused on sales growth should be using a different set of Metrics. These seven metrics are both useful for production and for a sales management function to identify coaching opportunities for better sales performance.
These seven sales metrics are key to effective sales management for organizations focused on growth:
1. #of Face-to-face meetings with “new qualified targets” (not prospects or leads) regarding new opportunities
2. # of two-way phone or email conversations with “new qualified targets” regarding new opportunities
3. # of Face-to face meetings with existing clients regarding new opportunities
4. # of two-way phone or email conversations with existing clients regarding new opportunities
5. Amount of new opportunities added to their sales funnel
6. The # of actions that moved existing opportunities through their sales funnel
7. The amount of new business that closed from their sales funnel
These seven sales metrics will help identify how effective a sales rep is at both finding new business (volume) and moving business through the sales funnel (velocity). These seven sales metrics will also provide your sales management function with the information and business intelligence they need to coach your sales rep for better performance once you bench-mark them.
What questions would you ask as a sales manager to coach your sales reps once you have bench-marked these sales metrics?
1. How can we increase the average value of the new opportunities you find in new clients and existing clients?
2. How could we decrease the length of sale from 6 months to four months?
3. How can we increase the amount of opportunities in existing clients?
4. What else do you need to help add volume to your sales funnel?
5. What are the objections you are getting from clients and how are you navigating them?
6. What do you need to do differently next week to get better results?
7. How can I help?
You cannot manage want you do not measure and what you measure gets done, so what are you measuring and what else do you need to start measuring? A good sales management function will help their sales reps put money in their pockets so everyone is happy. I guarantee your sales reps want to know the measuring stick and know that someone wants to help them.
Please feel free to contact me if you need help identifying what sales metrics makes sense for you to measure for growing sales and how you can start using them to improve your sales performance.
10 Reasons your sales effort is complacent
Do any of these sound familiar to you?
- You do not have regular sales meetings.
- A member of your team quit and you have no CRM to access account information.
- You spend less than 60% of your time with customers.
- 20% of your selling efforts accounts for 80% of your sales.
- You recently lost sales because you did nothing.
- Your sales cycle is longer than last year.
- Your customers are buying less.
- Less than 25% of your sales come from new customers.
- You have seen less than 4 customers and prospects in the last week.
- You do not subscribe to any sales blogs or read any books on new ways of doing things.
If more than 3 of these reflect your organization’s selling function, you may want to consider making some changes to your selling processes, changes to your structure, changes to your compensation plan, and investing in some training.
6 Questions to Help Move the Chains
In how many sales meetings this week is the owner looking at the sales funnel and scratching their head about the lack of movement of opportunities from one stage to the next? There seem to be plenty of opportunities and potential clients out there so what is the problem?
I guarantee it is a lack of proper qualification of the opportunity to begin with. The sales funnel needs to be cleaned up and by asking some basic sales leadership questions, you can help coach your team to identify the true opportunities to potentially “move the chains” and take them to the next level.
- Who is the potential client?
- What do they actually need and want?
- How do they make decisions?
- Who are the stakeholders?
- What other options does the potential client have?
- What is a clear next step that we need to do now to move this forward?
Many sales people can’t say “no” to potential opportunities and clients even though they are not ideal prospects. This causes their sales funnel becomes full of opportunities that get stuck at the proposal phase because they have no clue what to actually offer to them.
If you are looking at the sales funnel and can’t understand why the actually sales are not happening, try drilling down deeper into each opportunity with these questions to coach your team to move their chains.
If you need help integrating some of the best practices to help coach your sales team, please contact us to schedule a SWOT analysis of your sales structure, sales process, and sales skills
How to Get a Faster ROI from Your New Sales Person
You just started a new sales person after your last sales person walked out the door only after 6 months. You ordered new business cards, set up an email address, put together some sales figures, printed a customer list, and gave them a stack of brochures. They should be set to go, right? This is the most common scenario for any company that has a high turnover in their sales teams. In fact, it was the way I was on-boarded as several companies earlier in my career.
Most companies do not have the proper systems and processes in place for on-boarding new sales people and without them, the sales person is set up for failure from the beginning. What does it take to set the new sales person up for success? I call it the 4-P’s and it is everything that should be given to a new sales person to hit the streets faster and produce an ROI for your company.
Position: How thorough is the job description? Have all of the expectations been communicated? Are their support people in place? Have goals been set? Does the sales person understand what their role is in the achievement of those goals? Without a clear understanding of the sales position, the opportunity for misunderstanding of role and expectations can lead to frustration and lack of results.
Products: Has the new sales person been trained on your product or service and fully understand the value it can deliver to your customers? Do they know the pricing? Do they know your entire portfolio? Do you have technical expertise that can support the sales person? Are your marketing materials current? The failure to properly train and even cross train your new sales person will destroy your credibility with customers.
People: Who are the people that you want to deliver your product and service to? Do you know what an ideal customer looks like? Do your marketing materials speak to your target market? Do you know your competition? Do you know your differentiators? Do you know how your customers buy? The failure to understand your market will not develop a clear marketing and selling plan to follow.
Processes: What metrics do you have in place to measure success? Is your CRM in place and the use of it mandated? Can you document your customer buying process and what roles are responsible for the various stages and touch points? Do you have support people for order entry, shipping, billing, and servicing so your sales person can stay in front of customers and new opportunities? The failure to have proper support in place for customers will make your sales person get involved with non-selling activities and you will only get 20% of the selling effort you need.
To get a faster ROI out of your sales person, you need to take away any potential for misunderstanding, not knowing expectations, ruining you credibility, and not being able to measure success. For help developing your 4-P’s, please contact us at SalesTechnik
Do you measure activities or do you measure what can make a difference?
How many times have you wanted your sales teams to just make more calls thinking that is the best way to increasing sales? Organizations that fail to deliver real-time intelligence to their sales team fail to maximize their efforts and hence get hung up on “making more calls” as the solution.
While most sales managers and owners love reports that measure their sales team’s activities in order to forecast sales, they may be missing opportunities by not focusing on reports that provide necessary information that would allow them to create a better strategy to begin with. Their current strategies and tactics are based upon dated information that could be months old and hence are often useless to make a difference quickly.
So if what gets measured gets managed, what information should you be measuring and delivering real-time to your sales team to be more agile in the field to increase sales?
- Sales of customers by demographic segments
- Profitability of customers by demographic segments
- Sources of new leads by demographic segments
- Dollars in each stage of the funnel
- Conversion rates for each stage of the funnel
- Average value of each opportunity in each stage of the funnel
- Achievement % to budgeted sales and profitability
- Market share % and industry trends
- Distribution by product line and products by demographic segments
- Customer attrition rates
- Customer satisfaction rates
- Production forecasts
- Delivery and project completion progress
Now more than ever, sales managers need to provide their teams with more timely insight and detailed sales analytics that can deliver a competitive advantage to their sales team, allow better forecasting by the sales manager, and increase sales for the company much faster than they would be able to if they were only tracking activities.
Grow Your Business by Targeting Ideal Opportunities
Many organizations are unable to grow fast enough because their sales teams spend too much time with opportunities that are wrong for your business.
Have you ever:
- Thought your weekly sales funnel reviews are the same week after week with no progress?
- Been tired of hearing phrases such as “They asked me to stay in touch” or “They are still deciding”?
- Believed your sales efforts are focusing on prospects that you do not want to do business with?
The simple fact is that sales people hate saying “no” because they believe they can every opportunity they find and hence every opportunity they find becomes a prospect of some sort. This leads to waste of time and efforts on opportunities that will never close, your opportunity funnel becomes clogged with bad prospects, and your business does not grow. I guarantee these opportunities were never a good opportunities to begin with because you have not identified the characteristics of your good clients and what a good opportunity looks like to your organization for the sales team to call on.
What was done by the salesperson to identify the opportunity as ideal? What questions were asked to qualify the opportunity? Can your organization even identify what an ideal client is and what an ideal opportunity looks like to help your sales team target better opportunities?
If a company is able to define what an ideal client looks like, then the marketing and sales efforts are able to work more efficiently because selling time is only spent on qualified opportunities that match the characteristics of your ideal clients. Additionally, your operations should perform better because you are only doing business with ideal clients that you are meant to be serving.
Should your ideal clients be of a certain size? Should they have certain annual revenue? Should they be able to purchase one or more of your products or services? Should they have a certain structure? Should they have a certain credit rating? Should they be able to lead you to more business?
By identifying your ideal client characteristics, you will be able to identify what an ideal opportunity looks like and hence your sales team will be able to identify where their time should be spent and become more efficient with closing more ideal clients to grow your business faster.
How Your Parents Set You Up For Failure in Sales
Many business owners that have to sell their products and services and the people that are tasked with selling for them have never considered themselves as sales people. I have heard it many times, “I am not a sales person and I am not comfortable with selling”. It’s not your fault and you can blame it on your parents.
What did your parents tell you while you were growing up?
- Don’t talk to strangers
- Don’t bother that important person
- That person doesn’t care about what we do
- It’s not polite to talk about money
What do you have to do in sales?
- Talk to strangers
- Bother the important people
- Talk to people that should care about what you do
- Talk about money
It is time to get over the notion that you are not a salesperson. Sales is nothing more than having a passion for what you represent and being able to transfer that enthusiasm to others, like potential customers. If you believe in what you represent, just talk to people about it and make sure they are the right people or are people that know others that can benefit from what you represent.
Be sure the people you talk to are strangers, be sure they are important, be sure they are the person that you can provide value to and the person that can make sure you get paid.
Don’t “B” The “ANT” When You Find an Opportunity!
There are many CRM systems that measure the “Probability to Close” metric of a sale for our organizations. There are also many discussions on social media about how we can effectively measure the likelihood that a particular piece of business that we are chasing will become reality for the organization. This potentially creates a problem for our organizations when that particular piece of business might not actually become a reality at all. How can our organization effectively plan resources based on a “Whim” that is entered without a factual basis by us?
As sales people, our organization trusts that we are bringing qualified opportunities that will close within a given amount of time so they can plan on delivering the goods and services that we are selling to make the customer happy and deliver a profit for everyone involved.
What criteria do we use to measure probability for our organizations? I would offer the following criteria to ensure the proper amount of resources are dedicated to the proper opportunities that we deliver. We need to answer the following criteria that define the actual sale and assign a value to it to ensure success for all of the stakeholders. The criteria is known as “BANT”
Budget = 20%: Do the prospects have the budget to purchase what we are offering to them as a value?
Authority = 20%: Are we speaking with the decision maker(s) that can purchase the product or service that can add value to them?
Need = 20%: Do they need what we are offering as a product or service and can it add value to them?
Timing = 20%: Can they purchase the product or service that we offer within a given timeframe that will produce value for both stakeholders?
The remaining 20% is all “Us”. Are we and our company a credible source of the product or service that will bring them the identified value in the time frame that they expect instead of the competition that they have also met with? I guarantee you that we are not the only choice they have!
Most of us do not ask the right questions to discover the “Budget” before we present a solution and then are surprised by a response from the prospect that they can not afford our product or service. How do those sales meetings and reviews work out for us after the time and resources you have spent chasing the business?
By using the above criteria to measure our opportunities, we can ensure that the organization will align behind us to deliver the necessary resources for the qualified opportunities that we are delivering. Don’t miss the “B”!
Every Company has Low Hanging Fruit
The question “How do we grow sales quickly?” is asked in every business on a weekly basis. The easy answer for us is that you would not have to ask that question if your sales function was doing three simple activities on a regular basis.
Asking for additional business from existing clients
When was the last time you met with your top clients to review the current business you were doing with them, showed them what else you could do for them better than others, and asked what they were planning that you might be able to help them with?
Asking for referrals from existing clients
Your clients have stayed with you for a reason. When was the last time you asked them who they knew in the industry that you could help as well and who else they do business with where you might be a fit?
Asking for new business from other “ideal” future clients
Can you identify your best clients and why you have been able to be a partner with them? Take your success and replicate it by producing a marketing piece about why people do business with you and send it to other “ideal” prospects with a call to action about engaging you.
These simple activities are often overlooked because businesses get caught up in their business and do not focus on them. Make these activities part of your regular sales meetings and their will be no need to have conversations about how you can grow sales quickly.
I hope these thoughts and philosophies help you increase your opportunities.
Peter C. Rathmann 