Six Levers of Sales Management

Six Levers of Sales Management

Sales Tools & Ideas by TJ McCue

What I love about blogging is the collaboration that takes place. A client and I have been debating, discussing, exploring what the market really understands or doesn’t understand about Customer Relationship Management, Sales Force Automation, and how these impact the management or coordination of sales efforts. I think he’s on to something and so I’m sharing some of those thoughts here.

Last month, Sales & Marketing Management journalist, Julia Chang, wrote a  Great Article incorporating statistics from one of the leaders in understanding sales performance  CSO Insights about how sales forces stall.

• 26 percent of companies say they are experiencing a significant positive impact from their CRM systems.
• 53.2 percent of companies say their ability to properly qualify and prioritize prospects needs improvement.

My point with the above stats is that I believe we grossly misunderstand what CRM and SFA solutions are designed to do. My client, Alan Timothy, CEO of i-snapshot, argues that these solutions don’t often help us to sell better. They created an interesting Cost of Sales Calls ROI Calculator to remind us that each call we go on has a direct cost. It is oriented to i-snapshot’s solution, but more importantly, you can quickly show yourself what it costs to send a sales person out to a prospect – something I think it is easy to avoid quantifying.

As sales executives or managers, Alan and I both agree that there are only a few levers we can pull to create greater success (if we leave out recruitment of new sales superstars). 

The first three are effectiveness-oriented; the last three are efficiency drivers:

1. Improve an individual rep’s performance

2. Optimize our customer mix – are we calling the right people?

3. Develop a better sales process (pipeline management to some degree)

4. Focus call activity of the team/rep

5. Increase the call rate

6. Change the nature of the calls

Do our existing database tools help us with these six levers? I’m trying to boil down to a short list of what we can truly impact as sales team leaders. Our expectation of CRM/SFA solutions is that we will have increased sales, but the data suggest that we don’t get those results very often (only 26%). How do we get there? I think there’s a white paper in here (or perhaps one has been done – please let me know). I’ve been exploring each of these in light of the data points from CSO Insights, CRM/SFA solutions and their marketing promises, and would love any feedback.

TJ McCue is president of Q4 Sales, LLC – a business development and sales consulting company in the
Seattle area. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Atlanta Journal, Sports Afield, Backpacker, and others. His blog Beyond the Algorithm is going through an extreme makeover… He can be reached at [email protected].

Comments

[TJ McCue]

Edgar,
Many thanks for your comments. I agree with you -- most places are just interested in how many calls did you make...

But then in the process of getting sales people to make more calls, we make their job harder by asking them to enter tons of data into a CRM/SFA solution. SO, they spend an hour or more a day trying to remember what they have done, the results, etc. That is why we have such high failure rates of CRM solutions not being used or adopted. There are definitely tools to make it easier on the rep and increase his or her productivity.

If we understand and consider the sorts of data that a firm like CSO Insights finds in its research -- then we'll find a way to reach one of the important primary goals of sales: Increase Revenues!

Happy Selling.

[Edgar Valdmanis]

Personally I would argue that emphasis has been on "# of salescalls/salesrep calculator" for many salesmanagers. As long as the rep has completed his target number of salescalls then that's OK.
I have not seen many places where the focus has been on the customer. I may sound cynical, but this is my true experience. Fair enough, my main experience lies within the small- and midsize business area, but these would need a proper use of a proper solution as much as any large company.
Thanks for the six levers idea, I think we're onto something here.

[alan timothy]

I have been searching for some time on satisfactory definitions of Sales Management, and associated analytics/metrics all to no avail. The lack of definition of Sales Management and process has resulted in many products claiming to do Sales Management, when, as practitioner, you bench mark them against what you actually need as a Sales manager they are found wanting.

The six levers are a start to develop a base understanding of what actions a Sales Manager can take, the next step is to see the role of the various tools such as: SFA, CRM, Training, Rewards, Territory Management and new tools like i-snapshot and their associated ROI's.
Many of the tools are not in fact competitive but rather synergistic but offering different ROI's and implementation time scales. The choice then becomes the order a company implements them, and the certainity of the ROI.

[Jeff Walters]

Your are onto something important. We should all start thinking about CRM/SFA in two distinct ways. 1. Managing the sales force and their productivity. 2. Managing the prospect/customer information in order to best serve them through the sales and service cycle.
Historically, almost all emphasis has been on the customer and NOT on improving the sales person's productivity.