Sales management solution: nothing miraculous

Is it enough to implement sales management solution to guarantee a smooth sales flow? Is it a kind of magic, a secret that we know but others don’t?

Sales management is based on absolute common sense, there’s nothing mysterious or miraculous. If you read the following you would say it is obvious. We believe it is. That’s why it just must work.

There are the necessary conditions that need to be effectively arranged in any organization that sells to other business customers:

• Opportunities.  You sell the product/service/solution, but your customer buys the solution of his (business’) problem. Everybody knows it. But do your products/services/solutions disclose the value the customer gets if he signs the contract? Really?
• Customers. Selling to the wrong customers (i.e. who do not have the problem that is solved by your product/service/solution) is waste of time. Moreover, it demotivates the salespersons as they hit the wall too often. Are your potential customers ready to accept meetings requested by your salespersons? What should be done to make ‘no’ answers sound rarer? If you hanged up the phone if the caller offered to solve a problem you’ve just dealt with?
• Sales processes. A production manager knows what steps and tasks in what subsequence should be done in order to complete the product. And what about sales manager? Say, if some subsequence was effective (ended with sale), was it repeated to generate more sales in the same, once effective, way? Really?
• Sales people. You call them managers, but what do they manage? The outcome of the sales? Or the processes and the resources involved in them? Or the current customers? Do the measurements set stimulate your sales people to focus on new sales or they damn sales people to just managing accounts? It is widely supposed that division of work is impossible in the sales environment. So managing the resources (that are involved in generating new sales), managing schedules, supporting customers and selling itself is somehow the one inseparable autonomous process, that should be necessarily carried by the same person. Really?

Getting back to the question we started with: sales management solution has nothing to do with the magic. It is about overwhelming changes causing opportunities (products/services/solutions), customer segmentation, sales processes and the roles of people involved in sales.