What is Sales Management (and what are its objectives)?
Meta: In this post we explore what sales management is, what the objectives of sales management are, and how a fractional VP of sales can help your business meet those objectives.
A sales team is only as good as the person who leads it.
You could have a sales team full of rock stars who could sell maple syrup to a Canadian lumberjack, but if there’s a lack of strong management for the team, they’re likely going to flounder.
According to HBR half of high-performing sales organizations use sales processes that are closely monitored, enforced, or automated. But these process don’t monitor and enforce themselves. There needs to be someone at the helm, making sure that everything runs according to plan.
That’s where sales management comes in.
Sales management is the process of developing and directing a sales team. It involves planning, implementation, as well as recruiting, training, and motivating your sales staff.
In essence, a sales manager keeps your team rolling down the road toward your company’s sales goals, while avoiding the potholes.
What are the objectives of sales management?
Only about 32% of a sales manager’s time is spent managing the sales team. The rest of their time is divided up among aspects of the job like strategy, analysis, and making sure the processes that guide the team are in place.
One tricky thing about sales management is knowing when to focus on the various objectives and how to decide what needs your attention at any given moment.
Sales Operations
This is the part of sales management that revolves around the team itself. Managing operations includes building your sales team, setting their targets, assigning territories, and establishing goals and quotas.
But it doesn’t stop with setting things up. Sales management is also about fine-tuning these aspects of operations. As a Sales Manager, you need to know which reps are closing more deals, which territories respond to different sales tactics, and regularly adjust goals and quotas based on the strengths and weaknesses of your team.
Sales Strategy
Sales management also involves creating and maintaining the process for sales within a company. A VP of Sales helps outline the steps involved in the process including details around how often reps should follow up with prospects, determining the stages of any given sales funnel, and what the best practices should be for your company.
The more attention that’s paid to sales strategy, the easier it is for the sales team to work efficiently and effectively. They know who the best leads are, where they’re coming from, and how to best engage with them. And, just like with operations, sales managers are constantly refining their strategies to reduce as many of the hurdles their sales team might encounter as possible.
Sales Analysis
You can’t manage sales without spending a lot of time looking at data. We’ve already touched on a couple of ways sales management can improve team performance by looking at the numbers, but there are a lot of factors that need to be considered in this critical part of the sales management job.
Not only will sales managers be looking at the number of leads that are coming in (and the number of qualified leads), but they’re also going to be looking for patterns around close ratios, upselling, cross-selling, and the overall sales cycle.
If there are ways to maximize the CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value), most likely that would be discovered during sales analyses.
How a Fractional VP of Sales can help
An outsourced VP of sales, also known as a fractional VP of sales, is someone who brings years of experience building high-performance sales teams and overcoming sales challenges to work with a company on a contract basis.
Essentially, a fractional VP of sales understands the complex problems that face sales teams and have processes in place to solve these problems. They operate as an integrated part of your team while building out the resources needed to boost sales, then they teach the sales team (or sales manager) how to repeat the process.
Fractional VPs tend to follow one of two frameworks when working with a team. They are:
Review, release, rollout, replace
Review, refine, rollout, replace.
Regardless of which path they take, the goal is the same. Review everything the team is currently doing. Refine their processes. Rollout the new system. And, finally, train someone to replace the Fractional VP of Sales so the sales team can operate without them. It’s a process that’s dedicated to creating self-sufficient sales teams to maximize both short term and long term business growth.
Fractional VPs are like a lifeline for your sales program. You bring them in when sales have flatlined, your business has shifted gears and you want to quickly adapt to that change, or when you’re looking to scale your business quickly.
Let’s Scale Your Business
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Perhaps you’ve adopted a domination mindset for next year but you need some help to get your sales process and sales team aligned with your vision.
We’ve helped SaaS and service-based companies across dozens of industries to resurrect their flatlined sales efforts. If you're currently making $500K or more in annual revenue and would like the experience of a Fractional VP of Sales who has built out systems and processes that helped sales teams reach new levels of excellence, please reach out to book your free consultation today!