Successful sales management with projectfacts

Content

• What is sales management?
• Benefits of sales management
• Tasks in sales management
• Three steps for successful sales management
  1. Sales planning
  2. Sales management
  3. Sales controlling

What is sales management?

Sales management encompasses the planning, management and controlling of all sales activities in a company. Sales management is derived from the corporate strategy and is essentially responsible for whether set sales targets are achieved or not.

Specifically, sales management determines prices, discounts, sales quantities, sales measures and the use of resources in such a way that the goals defined within the framework of strategic planning are achieved. This makes sales management a central driver of corporate success.

Benefits of sales management

Systematic sales management brings a number of benefits. Due to the direct proximity to the customer business, the benefits of good sales management are usually quickly felt in a company’s market- and financial-related key performance indicators (KPIs).

Tasks in sales management

Sales management includes a variety of individual fields of activity, e.g.

Those responsible therefore need strong planning and analytical skills, extensive experience in sales, intimate knowledge of markets and customers, and a knack for motivating and leading staff. Their success is measured by whether the target figures agreed upon in the sales strategy with the management are achieved.

To meet this requirement profile, many companies (especially in competitive market environments) rely on CRM software. It supports sales managers in their work and is a valuable tool for the sales field and office staff.

That is the basic idea of “Adaptive Selling”. Companies that flexibly adapt their sales to different types of buyers are demonstrably more successful. A basic but frequently used typology distinguishes between two dimensions:

• Determination (striving to exercise power and control).
• Emotionality (readiness for relationships and emotions).

Four buyer types and corresponding sales recommendations can be derived from this:

In order to deal successfully with different types of buyers, it is important to entrust the right sales staff with customer acquisition. An overview of the social skills of your sales staff helps you to do this.

With the projectfacts software, you can store individual skills and competencies of your sales staff in the digital employee file. These can also be evaluated on a scale. Conversely, you can filter specifically for certain competencies. This way, you will always find a suitable contact person for every type of buyer.

Using key account managers effectively

Just as important as having a suitable contact person for the customer is retaining that contact person throughout the duration of the customer relationship. Numerous studies show that trust in the supplier is often a central reason for buying.

Especially in B2B business, this trust is transferred from the account manager to the company. If the person of trust falls away, the business relationship also suffers. This is to be prevented by the principle of “one face to the customer”. Customers always have contact with a central contact person, usually their key account manager.

In a sales management software like projectfacts, the idea of key account management runs through the entire process logic. The following graphic shows an example of how you can consistently use key account managers in new and existing customer care.

2. Sales control

Sales management deals with the operational management of sales activities. It provides guidelines for the daily sales work and creates mechanisms that structure the work processes and automate them as much as possible. Especially in sales management, intelligent software is often a great help.

Company surveys have shown that managers expect a noticeable increase in efficiency from a software solution. However, you will only achieve such added value if you analyse and optimise existing processes before mapping them digitally. The guiding principle applies:

A bad analogue process is also a bad digital process.

Systematise sales processes

Sales work is not a straightforward process. Rather, it consists of a multitude of activities, appointments and documents that accumulate over time. In order to maintain an overview, good organisation is essential.

projectfacts facilitates the work of your sales team by bundling all activities into one sales opportunity. It thus serves as the starting point for all sales work.

CRM contacts are collected in a central database. It functions as a kind of large interactive business card collection. All activities related to the contact are documented in a timeline.

Organisations are also divided into A, B and C organisations according to their importance for the business. This is done automatically for customers, prospects and suppliers. With corresponding service notes for incoming communication (e.g. a ticket), your team can prioritise tasks quickly and effectively.

Recording times and costs for sales opportunities

For effective sales controlling, the recording of costs and working hours on sales opportunities is extremely valuable. Often, working hours in companies are not recorded at all or only for processes relevant to accounting, e.g. in support.

Managing sales campaigns

Another important component of sales work are campaigns, e.g. in the form of trade fairs or newsletters. They are intended to help achieve the set sales goals by encouraging customers to take action in the interest of the company. For this purpose, a specific customer group is addressed with a predefined message in order to trigger a corresponding action.

Create offers and invoices easily

The number of quotations created is often a key figure in sales controlling. After all, it is an important indicator of sales success. It is therefore all the more important that your employees are quick and skilled in creating high-quality quotations.

A sales management software is a great help. projectfacts automates many administrative tasks for your team:

• Automatic generation of address block and letter salutation.
• Adoption of ready-made layouts in the style of your corporate identity
• Text modules and service catalogues for quick compilation
• Simple integration of price lists and discount systems
• Print offers directly or send them as PDFs

This allows sales staff to concentrate on the essentials: The content of the offer.

You also benefit from the same mechanisms when creating orders and invoices. In addition, offers can be converted into orders and orders into invoices in a workflow.

With intelligent software, you can reduce
the workload to a minimum and prevent errors at the same time.

3. Sales controlling

Sales controlling measures the performance of your team and relates it to the set sales goals. A number of key figures can be used for this purpose. Which key figures are suitable for which company varies greatly and must be assessed individually by the sales manager. Typical examples are:

• Turnover with new customers
• Number of new customers in a given period
• Conversion rate (ratio of new customers to leads)
• Closing rate (ratio of sales closed to offers)
• Number of sales calls per employee
• Intelligent Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

With projectfacts you also have the possibility to compile your very own KPIs. Do you want to take the volume of an order into account? Do you weight some order items higher than others? No problem with the projectfacts sales software.

Compile individual KPIs from the desired influencing factors, which are calculated dynamically for each sales opportunity. This results in both the target and the current value of the sales opportunity.

Does your company have several business areas that play by different rules? This can also be mapped with projectfacts. If you wish, you can define different KPIs for different sales funnels. This way you ensure that each sales department is oriented towards the right target figures.

Individual reports

Our sales management software provides you with a variety of reports with which you can measure your sales success. Reports can be presented in different ways, exported as PDF or in Excel and highly customised.

The sales opportunity is also a sales funnel. This means that it reflects which phase of the sales process your customers are currently in. By analysing the sales opportunities, you get an overview of the order situation in your company.

You can see which projects are currently in the pipeline and how likely a sale is. You can see how many interested parties are currently in which phase. In this way, you can recognise order peaks and turnover gaps and react in time.

Add columns such as industry, country or key account holder, which you can use for statistical purposes. In this way, a multitude of elementary questions in sales can be answered with just a few clicks:

• From which industries do our customers come?
• In which countries do we generate the most turnover?
• Which sales employees are the most successful?
• In which sales phase do we lose the most customers?

With projectfacts you trust in data instead of opinions.
Create the basis for efficient sales management with our software.

Header Image: © Markus Spiske – unsplash.com (2021)