Sales Management & Strategic Marketing

LO 1: Understand the Basic Principles of Sales Management

What is sales management?

Sales management refers to creating selling strategies, recruiting and training the sales team, and organizing the activities that aim to achieve the companys sales target. Sales management is critical in helping the business create a superior sales force, minimize costs, develop a robust relationship among the team members and the consumers, and achieve the sales target (Chunawalla, 2021).

Benefits of Sales Management

Every company must have effective sales management processes for its market success. It will help the company meet its sales target, increase sales performance, thrive in a very competitive environment, close sales faster, and regulate sales processes. Additionally, sales management plays a significant role in lead qualification optimization. Furthermore, through effective coordination, planning, and controls, the salespersons can guarantee quality selling processes, thus enabling the company to scale up. In addition, through effective sales management, companies can minimize products distribution costs and achiever greater profits. Such processes would help various business owners and companies to build good relationships with potential clients and customers, improve effective communication with the employees, and increase new products and production of goods that the clients highly demand.

Objectives of Effective Sales Management

Every company and business has to set various goals to be achieved with a specific period. Most businesses objectives are very similar, even though every business develops different plans based on their ways and theory. Most of the companys sales management objectives are divided into both long and short terms. Short-term goals usually entail establishing sales volume to make the business profitable, capturing and retaining market share. On the other hand, long-term objective usually involves maintaining a given market share, availing technical advice to the sales team, collecting, analyzing, and tracking sales information, and training sales representatives (Chunawalla, 2021).

The roles of sales management

Sales management is not just about managing the sales. However, it also includes ensuring that the sales processes satisfy the customers needs. In a nutshell, it is providing that the sales team does excellent work, supervises the sales processes efficiency, and plans and sets sales goals.

Setting targets: When unrealistic targets are set, the company may suffer from negative influence. Therefore, for the business to make profits, there is a need for honest and correct targets that are achievable. The sales team reports can be used to determine the attainable targets. Nonetheless, it should also be known that earlier business performance may not necessarily gauge the current actions of the clients.

Quality leads identification. At any given moment, there might be many prospects making inquiries about the companys products. Therefore, sales management should ensure that salespersons have a unique approach to every candidate and act quickly and correctly in closing the business deal. Also, the sales manager should ensure that the sales team can establish and convert quality leads (Chunawalla, 2021).

Improving sales processes efficiency. Establishing quality leads is one of the sales processes optimizations. Nevertheless, the sales management team should also improve the speed and efficiency of making sales. For instance, using a software solution with a unique service can enable the company to designate tasks to understand the various processes better. For example, when users inquire through the site, indicating an interest in a given product, it is prudent to refer them to sales representatives with profound knowledge of the items beginning from the essential information. Also, when emails campaigns are sent to the clients and leads, developing a good relationship and trust with such prospects begins.

Monitoring sales team performance. There is a need for salespeople performance tracking to establish their progress in their work and their value to the business. However, it is also recommended for the sales team to be motivated for any well-done jobs. While training may be critical for cases of underperformance to improve their skills.

Analyzing reports. The sales management team must always collect the necessary information to make a decision. For instance, the management should evaluate issues that hinder the company from attaining its goals. The administration can also consider various information received while establishing the objectives and assigning tasks to the sales team.

Basic principles of sales management

Sales managers work in line with the company targets. Therefore, to meet the goals, there are certain vital principles that the sales team has to comply with. They include;

Consistency: For the sales process to succeed, multiple factors come to play. However, the most critical factor is consistency. Although achieving consistency is hectic, it is worth effort and time. When the company upholds character, it can create good relationships with the clients, close deals rapidly, and increase sales. Therefore, the salespeople should be given precise and transparent information about every stage of the sales funnel, seek reports to evaluate their progress, and train them on how to conduct themselves with the customers.

A level of independence: No successful sales manager can do everything alone. Therefore, assigning some tasks to the team and doing them independently while the manager tracks the results is vital. Alternatively, the manager can allocate some tasks to the top performers and reward the closing deals. As a result, the team will feel trusted and motivated in their work, thus delivering good results.

Team Members Equality: It is critical to respect every team member and treat them equally. A good sales manager should not indicate a preference for some salespersons and place them above their colleagues. Instead of giving preferential treatment to some salespeople, the manager should adjust the anticipated standards and the sales target.

Conviction: It is not easy being a sales representative, and one of the most vital principles is conviction. Conviction refers to understanding the clients from what they say and coming up with a counterargument to prompt them to buy the product. Salespersons usually meet criticism, negative feedback, and counterarguments. Proper product knowledge will enable the salespeople to communicate with the clients on the products benefits, improve their confience and customer retention, and handle objections.

Marketing and Sales Alignment

Within the company, sales and marketing are usually interdependent, and they rely on one another. Whenever these two departments are not working from the same page, none of them can achieve the primary target goal of attracting the businesss prospects and converting them to clients. To ensure the companys marketing and sales are aligned, below are some steps currently in play to ensure growth and success (Patterson, 2007).

a) Establishing a single customer journey.

The company has developed robust sales and marketing strategies that circumvent the customers journey experience. The company does not entertain different customer experiences for inbound leads for marketing and inbound leads from sales outreach. Moreover, the company has ensured that starting from the awareness point of the customers journey, the path is kept consistent across the entire company. That is, both in the sales department and marketing department (Patterson, 2007).

b) Established customer persona

The company has given a lot of focus to the customer to sell the companys products effectively. Both the sales and marketing departments have established customer persona, and they stick to it. As a result, it is easy to close the deals with clarity on who they are selling to. Furthermore, the company has clearly defined the customer profiles to avoid disagreement between the salespersons and the marketers on a clients quality. For instance, while developing a customer profile, the marketers would contribute to interacting with their materials. In contrast, the sales team will contribute to converting clients and buying the materials.

c) Tracking the same KPIs for both the Marketing and sales department

The company has developed common ground for both marketing and sales departments to determine what has to be done for the relationship and alignment to be considered successful. Furthermore, the company has also established standard metrics for marketing and sales teams to minimize overlap. To ensure that the organizations common goal is achieved, both the departments are tracked on the same KPIs. For example, the companys sales and marketing departments have standard metrics such as customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, sales growth, and revenue. Also, with the companys joint KPIs, marketing and sales departments measure success at all the stages of the sales funnel, enabling the company to optimize and re-evaluate whenever necessary (Patterson, 2007).

D) Collection of customers feedbacks.

The best mechanism that a company uses to evaluate the effects of its marketing and sales alignment is by obtaining the customers feedback. The company receives such input from the sales representatives on complaints presented by the customers and things that motivated them to buy the products (Patterson, 2007).

E) Provision of Marketing assets for all stages of sales

A critical function of marketing is to improve sales by attracting leads. However, the sales team would usually receive the customers concerns, questions, and even comments during the selling process. As a result, the sales team needs content to handle such objections, thus, the need for marketers again. Subsequently, the salespeople usually inform the marketing department on what customers need,...…there is plan also to digitalize most of the companys physical stores. The company also adopted social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, amongst others, to market and enabled clients to make orders from such platforms directly (Affandi et al. 2020).

Meeting the customer needs by leveraging sales insights: New markets are created in the economy due to shifts in lifestyle, thus new prospects. Consequently, the company has also changed its strategy towards the trendy tapping of the opportunities created. Moreover, an established team is tasked to listen to customers new tastes and preferences and report their findings. Having listened to the customers, the company develops new products that attract clients current needs and lifestyles.

Optimizing channel of sales future proof: Due to the pandemic effect, digital interactions have significantly grown, altering the conventional way of conducting business and making sales. As a result, our company has moved to making online sales and promoting virtual interactions. Moreover, to avoid going back to the old ways of doing business, the company has adapted to less vulnerable and resilient measures. Where resilience refers to optimizing future-proof channels while embracing virtual learning, working remotely, online sales, and digital marketing, those measures will help the company prepare for any unknown and adapt to a hybrid business approach (Affandi et al. 2020).

Sales Forecast and Compensation Methods

Sales forecast refers to predicting future sales based on deals on the pipeline, industry trends, and historical data. Companies and businesses can use sales forecast to estimate annual, monthly, quarterly, weekly, or even daily total sales. The company uses a couple of methods to predict sales. The following are the methods currently used for sales forecasts.

Reliance on the opinions of the sales agents: Sales managers use the feedback from their various agents to predict the future performance of sales. For instance, the manager can ask an agent the current challenges and their weekly target based on market trends. Unfortunately, this approach is not very accurate and can be misleading (Mahmoud et al. 1988).

Use of deal stages: The sales manager places the probability of closing a sale to every particular location within the sales process. After that, the sales manager can find the opportunity size product and the likelihood of establishing approximate expected revenue. This method of a sales forecast is simple; however, it assumes the opportunity age. For instance, the technique takes those two opportunities booked for sales demo within four weeks, and the other four months will close simultaneously.

On the other hand, finding a good sales compensation plan is essential for any company. A good program motivates the sales team to achieve the company goals minus putting to risk the profitability. Nonetheless, there is one perfectly right compensation plan. The company must, therefore, always consider several factors while choosing the appropriate compensation plan. Such factors may include company size, the industry, and the sales cycle length. For the case of our organization, the compensation plan is a straight salary for both the sales managers and the sales representatives. There are no commissions or incentives given to the sales team with this plan apart from their pay (Mahmoud et al. 1988).

Recommendations for changes in Sales Forecast and Compensation Methods

Due to challenges and changes brought about by the pandemic, businesses need to adapt to new methods of resilient and accurate sales forecast to enable the companies to develop consistent projections on future sales revenues. Equally, the compensation plan will significantly determine the ability of the business to thrive through the pandemic waves. Consequently, there is a need to use a custom sales forecast model with several variables plus lead scoring. The model is very accurate even though it relies on quality data. It also analyses the probabilities based on multiple factors. The use of this model will need analytical tools to assist in sales forecast creation.

Equally, on the compensation plan, it is prudent for the company to adopt a strategy that motivates the sales team to work harder to earn more money. Therefore, a salary and commission compensation plan is recommended. This plan is usually better than a straight salary because it cushions the company from paying heavy wages while no revenues are obtained. Secondly, it motivates the sales team to meet their targets and goals, thus, increasing productivity. Also, even when sales are meager, the salespeople will still get something to carry home to help settle bills, minimizing frustrations by the sales team during low sales sessions (Affandi et al.…