Last updated on August 2nd, 2023
In this post, we’ll be covering how you can form the sales management systems your team needs to thrive in any economic environment.
A sales management system is the difference between a well-oiled sales machine and a team that’s floating by, or worse, operating in the red.
If you want your team to sit with the former group, you’ll need the systems in place to get you there.
And that’s precisely what today’s article will be about.
So let’s get to it.
- The roles of sales managers
- Sales management techniques
- What is a sales management system?
- Sales management tools
- Tips for utilizing sales management software
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The Roles of Sales Managers Throughout the Sales Process
One of the cornerstones to any team’s success is their manager. Without proper management, a team won’t have the direction, coordination, or possibly even the motivation to push towards their goal.
But what does a sales manager actually do? And how do they help the team achieve all of that?
Put simply, a sales manager leads the team.
They give direction, coach sales reps, and manage much of the admin work that goes on behind the scenes. And while they might not be “in the trenches” much of the time, a manager’s role is a critical one.
Let’s take some time to further break down the vital responsibilities of a sales manager.
Setting Goals
Goals are some of the most powerful tools a manager has in giving their team a sense of direction. Without well-set goals, the team’s just winging it.
And “winging it” isn’t very good for efficiency’s sake.
It’s even been shown that goals can increase the chances of success by 10 times.
A good way to approach goals is with the “SMART strategy.”
SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Based. Or, to paraphrase, ensure your goals have a set completion date, can be measured, and are targeted and specific enough that you can continue to track them throughout the process.
Creating Sales Strategies
Another significant factor to your sales team’s success is the method to its madness.
In order to operate at its best and continue to improve, your team needs a repeatable strategy to work off of.
And as the manager, it’s primarily up to you to create those strategies.
Developing action plans, drafting processes, and deciding on the most effective approaches for your team is up to management. (Though that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hear your reps out if they have ideas for moving forward; sometimes, the best ideas come from the people right in the thick of things.)
Assisting the Sales Team
Your team’s success is your success, so you should make it your goal to help them wherever possible.
What this help entails might differ from situation to situation, but the point stays the same:
As a manager, do whatever you can to make selling easier for your sales reps (within reason, of course).
Showing that you’ve got your reps backs goes a long way in improving team morale, which brings us to our next point.
Motivating Teams
Sales managers’ jobs don’t just involve pure performance, numbers, and planning. It’s also their job to keep spirits high and motivate the team.
Remember, none of us are robots, and motivation isn’t an unlimited resource; but sales managers can either be a massive dampener on motivation or boost a team’s needs. It’s up to the manager to decide which they’ll be.
Feel free to check out our 15 favorite ways to motivate your sales team.
Performance Evaluation
Evaluating the performance of sales reps is also a critical part of managers’ jobs. While looking into team insights, you can get valuable information on various parts of the sales machine.
Most of the time, you’ll be evaluating two things: Your team’s effectiveness and efficiency.
The evaluation process lets you see your team’s shortcomings, strong points, and areas for improvement. That way, you can continue to guide your team in the right direction.
But with all that talk about what a sales manager does, we haven’t even gotten into how they’re supposed to do it.
Sales Management Techniques
Managing a top-performing sales team doesn’t just come naturally; a skilled manager has to train and learn the skills of the trade to help their reps shine.
And luckily for them, there are tons of techniques and strategies they can implement in everyday operations to make things run that much more smoothly.
We’ve covered some of the responsibilities and tactics that managers can use so far, but it’s time we talk about one of the most powerful tools they have:
Sales management systems.
A sales management system can take many forms and shapes, but they all generally come down to the same ideas. Systems take all of the complicated processes and pieces to the sales puzzle and streamlines them into a much neater, easy-to-digest package.
What is a Sales Management System?
As I mentioned before, sales management systems can take many forms. Whether it’s a set of regular processes that you and your team reps follow or a software package that helps you streamline operations is up to each individual team.
But today, we’re going to be talking about the latter.
And that’s in the form of using a sales CRM to square away your systems and processes.
What are CRMs?
CRMs or Customer Relationship Management Software, are programs designed to help a team… well.. manage their customer relationships.
To do this, they generally take a whole slew of features and combine them into one app for an organization to use.
That app can track contacts, add and remove information from databases, and much more, all on autopilot.
They’re massively useful for a list of reasons that’s too long to go through in full right now. But we can certainly name a few of them — starting with one of the biggest hurdles to efficiency for any sales team: Data entry.
Sales Teams Getting Out of Spreadsheets and Into CRMs
The problem with data entry is that it’s a necessity, but we can say from experience that it still feels like a waste of the team members’ time.
After all, we’ve got limited hours during the day, and spending it writing into spreadsheets doesn’t feel like the most valuable use of said hours.
But what if there were a way for you to take the time spent on data entry and allocate it elsewhere?
Because (and you could probably see this coming) there is!
One of the most vital things that any good CRM does is take the tedious, menial spreadsheet work out of team reps’ hands and automates it.
And now that automation has come up, let’s talk a bit more about it.
Automation: Why It’s Crucial in The Management Process
As a sales team, there are only 3 possible paths that you can take:
You either fail, you stagnate, or you grow.
Failure isn’t an option for the vast majority of us, and any competent manager will be working to ensure it doesn’t happen.
Stagnation may not be the end of the world; if you and your team are happy with where you’re at, feel free to stay on this path. But I’m willing to bet that most of us are shooting for the third path, growth. And to be more specific, most of us would like consistent, explosive growth.
The problem?
Scaling a sales team means scaling the work that management needs to do.
And you’ve got a few options for that as well. You could increase hours, but again, everyone has a limited amount of hours in their day. So this isn’t viable for consistent growth since it has a cap.
You could also bring more talent onto the management team, but if you’re dealing with explosive growth, that’s going to lead to major growing pains and end up with a messy, convoluted team in the end.
So the next option is to automate.
Automation is one of the best ways you can reliably scale because it doesn’t rely on manpower; computers are much better at handling large amounts of menial work than people are.
Number crunching, data entry, contact tracking, and more — they’re all tasks that could be handled by automated systems, and if your goal is to scale, they should be automated with systems.
And that’s why CRMs are so vital to scaling organizations.
Want to learn more about how to implement automation into your sales processes? Check out our sales automation guide.
What Companies Are They Good For?
For any organization looking to scale, CRMs are the ticket to success.
You don’t have to worry about a computer tiring out, losing motivation over boring tasks, or making mistakes when entering important data into spreadsheets.
CRMs free up the time of sales team managers and reps alike, and this freed time allows them to focus on things that are much more important to increasing profit.
With that said, a super tiny organization, or one who’s not looking to scale might not need a CRM yet. However, pretty much every team can find valuable use in one.
But how do you know if it’s the right time to invest in one?
Luckily for you, there are some telltale signs to look out for.
How to Know When a Sales Management Software is a Necessary Investment
Get this: In a recent study, it was found that the average sales rep only spends about one-third of their time actually talking to prospects.
The reason?
A large portion of their day is filled with tasks that could’ve been automated. Things like call scheduling, data entry, and similar tasks take up large portions of each rep’s workday.
This is a prime example of when you need a CRM to help take part of operations over.
When you find your reps spending too much time with menial tasks and not enough with the tasks actually making money, you’ve got a problem on your hands.
A problem that CRMs can take care of easily.
To put it simply:
If your team’s barrier to scaling happens to be the time they spend on menial tasks, a CRM can help solve that problem.
A problem that CRMs won’t solve?
Improper management.
If your team’s barrier to scaling is a poor management style, you’ll have to address that issue first, CRMs won’t do too much good.
Now, I can already hear some of you saying: “Okay, that’s a lot of talk about CRMs, but we haven’t gotten the details on how they actually work yet.”
So it’s time for us to give an overview of the exact features a CRM can do for your sales management.
Sales Management Tools to Take Advantage of
Again, the full list of features that every CRM brings to the table is too long to cover in full here, but we can give you a pretty good idea.
Starting with one of the most important features, data consolidation, and streamlining.
Consolidating Client & Pipeline Data
When working without a CRM, many teams end up with overly-complicated sets of spreadsheets and data that are kept practically everywhere.
This disorganized mess of client data can lead to tons of wasted time.
Not only that, but your reps would traditionally have to enter all of that data and then fetch it whenever necessary.
And that’s not to mention any typos or mistakes that happen during the data entry process.
Any CRM worth its salt will help you consolidate all of that data and keep it in one organized spot, saving your reps all the needless hassle that comes with managing data over multiple programs and locations.
Contact Scoring Over Various Touchpoints
Prospects don’t generally convert on the first touchpoint. It takes multiple points of contact to take one through a well-constructed sales funnel.
And to convert the most prospects possible, you need to track each of those touchpoints to get a good overview of where each prospect lies in the customer journey.
Without a CRM, this task can get quite convoluted when your database grows large enough.
But with a CRM, the program does all the heavy lifting for you and gives your team all the insights they need at a glance.
The assigned scores to each prospect will show how likely they are to convert at their given stage.
Lead Qualification Without As Much Hassle
Tying in with the last point, lead qualification becomes much easier with a contact scoring system.
Instead of manually qualifying each lead, the CRM is used to identify their scores to give you a much better idea of a prospect’s potential to buy.
This saves you tons of time and resources that might’ve otherwise been spent on “dead-end prospects.” You know, the ones who weren’t going to buy in the first place.
Automated Customer Journeys
The customer journey is a critical piece of sales. It helps you take the cold prospects and warm them up, building the essential trust you need to make the sale at the end.
And with a CRM, your potential customers are moved through that journey on autopilot.
As their score increases over various touchpoints, a CRM will take them to the next level whenever necessary.
This means that your reps have more time to focus on the steps that need a human touch most: discovery and sale calls, closing, trust-building — the whole nine yards.
Scheduling
If there’s one massive pain that any sales rep has to deal with, it’s scheduling calls and meetings with all of their prospects. Likely over multiple time zones, all while managing their own schedule too.
With a CRM like VipeCloud, each of your sales reps can set their schedules and have prospects do the scheduling for them with features like our auto-scheduler.
How Sales Management Software Improves Team Efficiency
All of those features aim to do one major thing:
Save your team time, energy, and money by streamlining and automating the various processes during the sales journey.
All of that saved time and money is less overhead for the team as a whole, which means more profit and efficiency.
Streamlines Complicated Processes
The processes that would otherwise be needlessly complicated are made simple with CRM automation, like contact scoring and scheduling.
A team that only has to deal with a small client base might not have much trouble with these tasks, but as they grow, the processes become exponentially more convoluted.
Consolidates Data & Wastes Less Time
The same goes for data; there’s only so much information one person can work with during a given day. But computers are capable of near limitless number-crunching and data entry, even in small periods of time.
Not only that, but CRMs help to store all of that limitless data in one place so your team can access it at a moment’s notice.
Allows Even Small Teams To Have Big Reach
Any tool is a force multiplier.
A hammer? It multiplies your striking force so you can drive in nails.
A baseball bat? It multiplies your force with added leverage so you can strike home runs.
And a CRM? CRMs multiple your team’s productivity to let them extend their reach by vast amounts.
Even a small team can deal with a massive client base using automation through CRMs. But just like with the first two tools I mentioned, there are some techniques and tips you can use to use those tools correctly; CRMs are no different.
Tips For Utilizing Sales Management Software
Tip #1: Be ready for a transition period.
CRMs, just like any tool, take some getting used to. Luckily, with VipeCloud, we help your team export all of its data and get used to the program so you can get through that transition process much more smoothly.
Tip #2: CRMs won’t help if your management is disorganized.
Let’s take this back to the baseball bat example.
Even the strongest batter isn’t going to get any home runs if they don’t have the hand-eye coordination to hit the ball in the first place. In order to get the most out of a tool, your technique still needs to be strong.
This is true for CRMs too. Automation won’t help if your management isn’t functioning correctly.
On the other hand, a team with skilled managers will soar if given a productivity multiplier.
Tip #3: Don’t overutilize automation.
Automation is great, but just like with anything — too much of a good thing can become a bad thing.
Sales is a process largely about trust, and humans have a hard time trusting computers. So that’s where you and your reps come in.
Ensure that your team is still adding the human touch where it’s necessary. Things like trust-building and calling prospects are still vital parts of the puzzle; they aren’t processes that computers perform very well.
Implementing a Sales Management Software Today
And with all that out of the way, we have even more good news.
You can try out VipeCloud today, for free. That way, you can see for yourself how it transforms your team’s productivity.
And as said before, we’ll even help you migrate your systems over to the platform for free too.
So what are you waiting for? Request your free demo of VipeCloud today.
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