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Changing CRM: 5 questions to ask yourself when making the decision

4 points to watch out for in order to properly manage your sales staff's activity

En matière d’activité commerciale, l’implication du dirigeant ne s’arrête pas à la définition de la stratégie : il est garant de sa mise en œuvre effective et veille constamment à maintenir le bon cap !

To prevent your salespeople from interpreting it in their own way, moving away from it gradually, or even ignoring it altogether, it is necessary to translate this sales strategy into operational guidelines and to monitor its implementation effectively.

To achieve this, pay attention to these 4 key points.

 

Build an individual sales action plan with each sales person  

Defining a clear sales strategy and presenting it to your team is necessary, but not sufficient to ensure its effective implementation during the year. This is the purpose of sales action plans defined at the individual level.

 

They are generally co-constructed by the salesperson and his/her manager, and re-evaluated or updated at regular intervals: annually, half-yearly, quarterly or monthly (this is known as a MAP, for monthly action plan).

This co-construction is the key to the commitment of each salesperson. The choice of periodicity can be made according to the sales cycle of your products and services, or according to the management method adopted.

 

Some companies, for example, define annual action plans and then weight the objectives monthly or quarterly according to the seasonality of their activity .

For example, a digital services company may achieve 50% of its annual turnover in a single quarter, during which the majority of its subscriptions are renewed.

 

Each salesperson must have an operational action plan with the key data necessary for his or her daily activity, on points such as: targeting, intensity and nature of sales actions, in order to have the means to achieve the defined objectives.

 

Make sure that this individual action plan reflects the business strategy 

This commercial action plan is the operational implementation of the commercial strategy defined beforehand. It must therefore reflect it and transcribe it on an individual scale, taking into account theallocation of commercial efforts to your targets, whether in terms of coverage or commercial pressure, and thecommercial organisation you have opted for.

 

If the sales strategy determines, for example, that 35% of the total turnover should be achieved in segment A of the customer base and 25% in segment B, two different translations are possible in the individual action plan of one of the sales staff:

 

  • or he will himself have to generate 35% of his turnover from segment A and 25% from segment B (in the context of an organisation with a distribution of the client portfolio by geographical area, for example);
  • or he will have to achieve 100% of his turnover on segment A, with other sales representatives in charge of segment B (in the case of an organisation with sales representatives specialised by customer segment).

 

Hence the importance of defining the action plan at the individual level, to ensure that the concrete application of the business strategy will not give rise to multiple or even divergent interpretations!

 

Define precisely the activities to be carried out with your sales staff

To avoid any haphazard improvisation on the part of your sales representatives, define precisely with them and for each one :

  • the targets the type of accounts on which they will work (type of accounts, meeting precise targeting criteria, or even a list of named accounts, and types of interlocutors targeted within the accounts)
  • the type of sales actions to be carried out at each stage of the sales process (leads to be processed, calls, physical meetings, quotations or sales proposals, reminders, etc.), in the front or back office
  • the frequency and intensity of these actions, by customer segment (e.g. 8 calls and 3 appointments per year on prospects attached to customer segment A)

 

From a more qualitative point of view, also specify the sales methods In a more qualitative sense, specify the methods to be used at each stage of the sales process (e.g. company pitch, type of questions to be asked during a discovery meeting) and the expected results for each of them (data to be collected during a discovery meeting, elements to be validated to qualify an opportunity during a sales meeting, etc.).

 

Regular meetings between the salespeople and their managers are essential to transmit these guidelines and monitor their implementation. These meetings are particularly useful foridentifying deviations from expectations, dealing with difficulties encountered in the field and refining the sales tools used (call script, interview guide, standard report to be recorded in the CRM, etc.).

The frequency (monthly, quarterly, etc.) and the degree of "formality" of these follow-up meetings should be defined according to the level of support you consider necessary; this may vary according to the company's managerial culture and the level of seniority of the sales staff, in particular.

 

Regularly analyse the indicators and adjust the system if necessary

As a manager, you are responsible for ensuring that the commercial strategy is respected and thatthe objectives are achieved. To do this, it is important that you have an overall view of your company's commercial situation in real time in order to steer actions without waiting to know the final result of the financial year. 

 

Equip yourself with the appropriate management tools, particularly dashboards, so that you can analyse the KPIs (key performance indicators) and monitor the actions taken by your sales staff. This will enable you to detect any necessary adjustments and to implement them, if necessary. 

 

In particular, monitoring your team's sales pipeline is a key element in ensuring the reliability of future revenues. The number, value and quality of identified opportunities, their creation date and their level of progress in the sales process are all parameters to be analysed. 

Similarly, if your salespeople's conversion rates show significant differences on the same product range, this should alert you to the cause.

 

Finally, sales and turnover (in volume, in value, by type of product/service, by customer target, etc.) are of course essential indicators of results to be measured.

Your sales strategy indicates how you want to structure your development. The analysis of the steering indicators allows you to validate its deployment and to adjust the operational action plans, without waiting to know the result in terms of orders taken or customer invoicing! 

 

Respecting these 4 points of vigilance will enable you to effectively manage the deployment of your commercial strategy at the operational level and thus optimise your chances of achieving the objectives you have set yourself.

 

To stay competitive and maximise your chances of converting leads into future customers, it is important to optimise the return on your sales assets. Find out how by watching this webinar:

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