Many enterprises have invested a great deal of effort in sales management, yet the results are not ideal, and sales managers are always troubled by one problem or another.
In fact, for a company to excel in sales management, it must have a comprehensive sales management system and corresponding sales management policies to match it.
The topic I want to share with you today is how to solve those sales management problems that trouble us.
Problem 1: Sales without a plan
The basic rule of sales work is to develop a sales plan and execute it. Sales plan management includes setting a feasible sales target and implementation plan. However, many enterprises have a series of problems in the management of sales plans:
Many sales targets are not set based on a precise grasp of market opportunities and effective organization of corporate resources, but are instead decided by sales managers based on their own experience and intuition.
——Unreasonable breakdown of sales targets, making them impossible to implement;
——The company management only assigns target numbers to sales staff, but does not guide them in formulating implementation plans;
——Due to the lack of a clear market development plan, the company's sales efforts have lost their direction, with various sales strategies, plans, and measures not being coordinated, and there are no measures for monitoring the sales process or evaluating its effectiveness.
Problem 2: No control over the process
Without effective control over the sales management process, there will be no good performance results.
——Unable to control the sales behavior of salespersons, thus unable to ensure the effective implementation of the sales plan;
——The salesperson's sales activity process is not transparent, increasing the operational risk for the enterprise.
Problem 3: No customer management
This means that proper management will realize its own value or create new value; poor management will lose its own value. Similarly, if a company manages its customer resources well, it will increase the lifetime value of customers; otherwise, it will lead to the company losing old customers while continuously developing new ones.
In the process of sales management, there are many problems in customer management, such as incomplete customer information, insecure data, departing senior employees taking away customer resources, and low customer lifetime value.
Question 4: No feedback on information
Information is the basis for corporate decision-making.
A salesperson's work results include two aspects: sales volume and market information. Relatively speaking, market information is more important because it concerns the company's future market and sales volume.
However, many enterprises have not established an effective information collection and feedback system, resulting in a large amount of market information being held by sales personnel, and the enterprises mostly receive fragmented and inaccurate market data. This prevents them from promptly identifying issues in their marketing strategies and making timely adjustments.
Question 5: No performance evaluation
Only with assessments can there be efficient execution, for example: the required daily call volume and visit volume, the customer turnover rate to be achieved, the unit price of new customer contracts, the renewal rate of existing customers, etc. However, many companies have not established a comprehensive assessment mechanism for these aspects.
Question 6: Imperfect System
Many enterprises have incomplete sales management systems, like a "wooden barrel" missing a stave that cannot hold water. Their characteristics are: unclear reward and punishment systems, lack of institutional rewards for behaviors that should be encouraged, and lack of corresponding penalties for prohibited behaviors; rewards that should be given cannot be delivered in time, and penalties that should be imposed cannot be effectively enforced.
