–noun [seylz] [man-ij-muhnt]

Sales Management Process

The importance of sales management is critical for any commercial organization. Expanding your business is not possible without increasing sales volumes, and an effective sales management goal is to organize sales team work in such a manner that ensures a growing flow of regular customers and increasing amount of sales. This model is cyclical, so it is a constant and continuous process.

• Conception
• Planning
• Execution
• Control
• Feedback

Managing sales is not difficult while a company is small with a few customers and sales reps, and the sales process is simple and transparent. However, when sales start to grow, companies quickly begin to understand that it is very hard to manage enlarged sales workflow as effectively as they did before. Managing increased sales volumes is more difficult because sales management processes becomes more complicated and the sales department has to deal with all aspects of the process. Not only do the number of sales tasks grow, but so do the number of regions, customers and products. It is almost impossible for sales people to handle the sales growth without a solid sales system for planning, tracking, analyzing, reporting, and controlling all aspects of sales activity, projects and tasks.

Sales Planning

Unfortunately, when the business is growing, customers need more products, services and customization, this individual activity oriented approach can become a barrier for sales to grow because unfocused and uncoordinated activity decreases effectiveness. Your sales department must be reorganized, and sales people should specialize and co-operate with each other as well as other departments of your company. Poor team sales management leads to losing orders and customers, so it is better to introduce a sales planning system as soon as possible.

After setting sales goals, each salespersons’ activity should be planned by regions, clients, channels, managers, products etc. A sales team leader or sales department head should forecaste volume and operational metrics to evaluate the sales managers' effectiveness and to motivate them towards the sales goal. While planning is important to consider, do not overlook market potential and structure, company's strengths and weaknesses, customer relations, company history, competition, etc.

Sales Tracking & Reporting

Sales Tracking
Sales tracking is an integral part of sales management. Without tracking sales tasks it is hard to find out if everything goes right and estimated intermediate results are achieved in time and in the limits of expected resources. If anything is out of expected range, you can analyze the details, talk to a sales manager responsible for this task and take corrective actions.

Sales Tracking tracks selling activities as opposed to Revenue Tracking which focuses on tracking the progress of forecasted opportunities. The most difficult part of tracking selling activities is knowing if the activities will actually lead to sales revenue. Tracking the number of calls, door knocks and other revenue generating events are critical to analyze the number of calls / door knocks it takes to convert one new customer. This is known as process related reporting.

Sales Reporting
The sales reporting includes the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) of the sales force. The KPI indicates whether or not the sales process will arrive at the results set forth during the sales planning process. Furthermore, the KPI empowers a sales manager to take corrective action in the event the indicators deviate from the projected values. For a manager to be successfull they must empower this method to track if their sales reps are correctly engaging in enough of the revenue generating events to produce sales in the future. This is known as a results related report.