4 points of vigilance to properly manage the activity of your sales representatives

To prevent your salespeople from interpreting it in their own way, gradually moving away from it, or even completely freeing themselves from it, it is necessary to translate this sales strategy into operational directives and to effectively manage their implementation.

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

Build an individual sales action plan with each salesperson  

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

They are generally co-constructed by the salesperson and their manager, and reassessed or updated at regular intervals : annually, half-yearly, quarterly or monthly (we then speak of PAM, for monthly action plan).

This co-construction is the key to the commitment of each salesperson. The choice of frequency 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.

Thus, a digital services company can 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 containing the key data necessary for their 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 well 

This commercial action plan is the operational breakdown of the commercial strategy defined beforehand. It must therefore reflect it and transcribe it on an individual scale, taking into account the allocation of commercial efforts on your targets , whether in coverage or in commercial pressure, and the commercial organization for which you have opted.

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

• either he will have to achieve 35% of his turnover on segment A and 25% on segment B (within the framework of an organization with a distribution of the customer portfolio by geographic zone, for example);
• or he will have to achieve 100% of his turnover on segment A, with other salespeople in charge of segment B (in the case of an organization with salespeople specialized by customer segment).

Hence the importance of defining the action plan on an individual scale, in order to ensure that the concrete application of the commercial strategy will not give rise to multiple, or even divergent, interpretations!

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

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

• the targets on which they will work (type of accounts, meeting precise targeting criteria, or even list of named accounts, and types of contacts targeted within the accounts)
• the type of commercial actions to be carried out , at each stage of the sales process (leads to be processed, calls, physical meetings, quotes or commercial proposals, follow-ups, etc.), in the front or back office
• the frequency and intensity of these actions , by customer segment (for example, 8 calls and 3 annual meetings on prospects attached to customer segment A)

From a more qualitative point of view, also specify the sales methods to be implemented at each stage of the sales process (for example: company pitch, type of questions to ask in a discovery interview) and the results expected 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 salespeople and their managers are essential to convey these guidelines and monitor their implementation. In particular, they help identify gaps with expectations, address difficulties encountered in the field and refine 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 are to be defined according to the level of support that you deem necessary; the latter may vary depending on the management culture of the company and the level of seniority of the sales representatives, in particular.

Analyze the indicators regularly and adjust the device if necessary

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

Equip yourself with the appropriate management tools , including dashboards, so that you can analyze KPIs (key performance indicators) and monitor the actions taken by your salespeople. This will allow you to identify the necessary adjustments and implement them, if necessary. 

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

Similarly, if your sellers' conversion rates show significant differences on the same product range, this should alert you and prompt you to look for the cause.

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

Your business strategy indicates how you want to structure your development . The analysis of the steering indicators allows you to validate its deployment and 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 allow you to effectively manage the deployment of your commercial strategy at the operational level and thus optimize your chances of achieving the objectives you have set for yourself.