Sales Management Process

The Sales Management Practices for any organization require much more than managing to a selling process. Too often, the “process” that people use to manage their teams is a little more than managing to a set of expectations and outputs required by the organization. Little structure is layered in at the sales manager level. We have found that the best-performing sales organizations see sales management as a business process that organizes and quantifies discrete actions, outcomes, and measures.

Business Planning, Forecasting and Pipeline Management, and Sales Talent Management are the three legs that we have identified as critical underpinnings of successful sales management. The sales process is generally a subset of the Pipeline Management component of the overall sales management process.

We define performance measures, which are high-level summaries of desired behaviors. Accompanying best practices are described for each performance measure. Critical to success is the description of quality criteria (i.e. what “good” looks like) that help the leaders of front-line managers assess for the purposes of coaching to success. And, finally, we define verifiable outcomes that leaders use to assess quantifiable outcomes for the role.

A critical element of our sales management process consulting services is that we quantify the time spent by sales managers to fulfill the required activities.

Too often, new sales management processes are layered onto existing ones without consideration for bandwidth in this critical role. We find that an objective analysis of time required to complete the key activities in a quality manner yields important data for decision making and prioritization by senior leadership — helping to know that the front-line managers are focusing their efforts on the things that matter most.

Sales Management Process Consulting and Training Services

Our approach to helping you define the sales management process is highly collaborative. We build on what is already working and what we know from our experience will make it better. This approach reduces risk because it minimizes the amount that we need people to change.

The core design work is done over a two-day workshop and would include key stakeholders who you want brought into the new process. Leading up to the workshop, we work with you to identify these key stakeholders, develop a project plan, conduct discovery interviews, and undertake all of the preparation and communication necessary for a productive workshop. After the workshop, we will create the final deliverables and conduct a virtual session with key stakeholders to obtain final acceptance.

We manage all of the project details, and our experienced facilitation team will guide you through the optimization process.

Deliverables include a documented process defining Performance Measures, Best-practice Activities, Success Criteria, and Verifiable Outcomes. Once data is collected, we conduct a validation workshop and complete final edits to the process. The process is then layered into the Coaching Workshop that will be conducted with front-line managers.

All Sales Improvement Initiatives Start with an Optimized Sales Management Process

Having a documented, optimized process provides a roadmap for more sales success, better efficiency, and precise forecasting. This is foundational for any optimization initiative in sales management.