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What is the biggest issue facing a Sales Manager today?
Managing a Sales Team is a very challenging job, particularly during tough times. From your perspective (or your clients); what keeps a sales manager awake at night?
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3 Answers
Designing a sales process and organization that will scale. I would include the following in this:
1. Demand: How will we create demand in the market that yields opportunities for the sales organization? How will I engage those opportunities?
2. Sales Cycle: What does a prototypical sales cycle look like? What are the key conversion points? What tools do I need to move someone to a close?
3. Organization: What does a prototypical sales rep look like? Where can I find lots of these people to recruit from? What does per rep productivity look like over time?
4. Self Sufficiency: How do I make these sales reps self sufficient? What training, tools, etc do I need?
5. Visibility: How do I as the sales manager provide visibility to the team and rest of the organization?
If you nail all of that (which is hard), then you are left with 2 things: making good hiring/firing decisions and blocking and tackling with respect to specific opportunities/sales cycles. Both of these things are easy to do.
Perfect storm B2B realities: slow economic growth in many sectors + shift in buyers power due to web based information (no need to call sales reps early in buyer's process) + commoditization of many products/services (means huge top of funnels) + committees of buyers (3-15 people) + shift from outbound 'sales centric" model to inbound "buyer centric" model (VP, CEO's still don't understand) + lack of sales 2.0 process/tools + "not so fun anymore" = Sales Managers turnover every 18 months. (like a hockey coach)
I believe sales turns more and more into sales negotiations, according to my own experience, if products are complex. So how do we as sales people create better 2-way communication, negotiation and interaction online? Would improved ERP, CRM, WEB & MOBILE business process integration be part of the solution?
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