Managing Sales
I love sales. There cannot be a more fulfilling business activity than pitching.
Back in the day, when I was training to be a management consultant with PwC, we were introduced to the concept of 'guides'. These were individuals within the organisation you were tasked with restructuring, who would lead you to your defined goal. I have always found this to be a pragmatic way to navigate where you want to be for larger sized businesses. As businesses get smaller, I think they do business with people they like.
Obviously the comparison ends here with regards to management consultancy as the first rule of business changes is that you are not there to make friends.
This blog is about managing the sales process and ensuring you are both productive and successful. I have a lot of time for sales people. It is hard to prospect all that potential business, stuff it into a sales hopper, work the potential sale through a pipeline with all its ups and downs then get the money over the line. Along the way there could have been gorilla sales tactics, process-driven prospecting, advertising, marketing or blind luck to get to the money. Your sales team will probably be able to meet all those objections head on in their sleep.
By this, I mean that you can have a fantastic sales curve of new business, but without sustainability you could well be heading for a cliff.
For me it is all about building long term relationships with customers. We can leave the trend chasing, fast buck space cadets behind.
However how do you manage your sales process? How do you ensure you are being productive in this fundamental business function?
I think businesses need to define their sales into three groups:
- Existing sales (keeping them!)
- Developing clients (making the most of your long term business relationships)
- New Business ( a cornerstone of growth but never the single focus)
Today there are some barnstorming tools that allow you to manage your sales efforts. This is a decent round up of different services on offer and how they compare:
Christopher Sirk
Sales CRM’s are very powerful tools. I found Pipedrive to be almost indispensible when managing an auction hall. We worked for most of the national corporate delivery companies, the private client solicitors serving the West Midlands, many national retailers and a handful of the larger, international class auction halls. At any one time my team were managing around 1000 prospects who we either needed to ensure were happy with our service, potentially required wider services from us or indeed were potential straight new business.
Pipedrive allowed us to monitor existing business, expanded business and new business by focusing on named prospects and ensure that we had done the primary goal of business; keep our customer happy.
However I always felt that our rigid, persistent sales meetings could have been better implemented. Today, I would have used ClickUp to deliver the entire sales function for the business.
Sales strategies need to be well conceived with colleague buy in. Most of all they need to be well managed. Leadership is key. You can leave marketeers to deliver their bells and whistles and get rich quick schemes. For me, sales are rather traditional, and something that I appreciate about business. The riskiest I have ever implemented was following a book about 'gorilla sales tactics'. This involved hiring an employee to make appointments with difficult to tie down prospects. In some ways it did lead to some success.
I think a correct implementation of ClickUp could cover the basics of many sales-focused CRMS. ClickUp is around a third of the cost of other sales CRM's and most importantly, in addition will save your staff a day a week in help manage all functions of your business. No matter how large or small your business is, ClickUp will save you money and help drive turnover.
The trickiest part of sales is people management. However, this is probably the trickiest part of any business? Recruit well, train better and lead professionally and your business sales will thrive. Sales people sometimes get a bad rap for being completely money focused, poor team players and difficult to retain. This is nonsense.
