The management of the salesforce is essential for every company since it is considered a pillar of growth, which will allow it to either excel or fall.
Salesforce management refers to all salespeople existing in a company and who can constitute a salesforce.
The crucial question lies in “how to manage the whole commercial team?”
Each commercial company is faced with a delicate mission to take good care of its team, energize it, motivate it against stress, manage it in terms of load, and fully understand the operation of the management of the force of sale.
We will discuss the essential steps to follow, which are as follows:
1. Recruit good profiles
Salesforce management lies in the recruitment of skills. A commercial job is not at all easy. In reality, it is a job full of rivalry, stress, and challenge.
Each salesperson must have skills in know-how: They must know technical skills in their field, mastery of rebuttal techniques, management of objections issued by their clients, know how to establish arguments, master their sales plan, know how to conclude sales, reach the objectives of the company, in terms of the evolution of turnover, managing customer loyalty, mastering the tools of CRM “Customer Relationship Management” or in French the GRC “Management of Customer Relationship.”
Also, in interpersonal skills: a salesperson must reflect on his business. A salesperson who does not know how to behave well will damage his company’s reputation. We must not forget that if the brand image is destroyed, the company will have to redo its positioning. They need to refresh its company logo, redo advertising, change activity, features of products, etc.
A good salesperson will have to behave well in front of his customers. Have good posture, good manners, be polite, etc.
2. Manage your team
Managing a team is based on three essential vital points:
Manage the stress of your team
The management of the salesforce is very complex. Since it is difficult to manage human beings and to master, as they say, what is going through their heads, hence the problematic mission of a good manager, they must be tenacious. They must have the charisma to maintain their team, boost it towards success, to coach and motivate it.
Be a psychologist. At the same time, a trainer, a coach, and a good manager. A delicate mission for every manager!
A salesperson who does not reach his sales figure and sees other salespeople around him achieve their goals proves their profitability in the company.
The latter risks giving up, becoming stressed, and subsequently succumbing to depression. In this kind of situation, the manager will have to play his role.
All the well-being conditions eliminate the notion of stress and the negative energy that risks spreading in his group.
Most managers don’t know how to behave. So much so that they put a lot of pressure on their teams. They are exercising excessive authority, losing track of humanity, and beginning to view salespeople as machines.
And it is in these cases we can have problems linked to poor team management. Who can harm the operation of the company in general?
Manage the workload of the team
Running a team costs money. Since charges begin to accumulate for every business, a commercial regenerates charges to continuity, but in return.
He must achieve figures and achieve his commercial objectives. Expenses, such as his telephone subscription, his prospecting equipment (briefcase, mobile phone, laptop computer, etc.), travel expenses (road costs, payment of his mileage, plane ticket…), road expenses (payment for meals, dinners & galas), and accommodation expenses (hotel expenses)…
Manage the commercial objectives and the time of the team
A perfect team must know how to manage its time well, and as we say, “Time Is Money”… Time planning is essential because the manager must help his team manage his time well by developing circuits adapted to each visit.
The objective is to reach the maximum of customers and prospects. In record time, to limit the accumulation of charges, and as we know, moving requires a means of transport (service car), daily consumption of diesel. For this reason, moreover, it is necessary to limit its journeys to reduce the time.
For example, by using shortcuts to avoid long roads, avoid traffic jams and manage unforeseen events. You should know that each salesperson’s time is linked to his work and he must devote it to his lunch breaks!
Each manager must mention for each commercial their commercial objective. For example, it is necessary to reach ten sales per day, prospect 05 prospects per day, and reach 100 sales per month. Precisely we mentioned the prospects, I explain them to you: they are in numbers of
- cold prospect: the prospect is not yet interested
- lukewarm prospect: the prospect is interested but not yet ready to buy
- hot prospect: the prospect proceeds to the act of purchase
So the mission of each salesperson is to push each prospect to become a final prospect, hence a future customer and subsequently a potential customer.
Conclusion
In short, the manager’s responsibility is to push his team to close sales. To improve the company’s turnover to have profits while ensuring the well-being of its salesforce.
A manager is a brave person who is constantly faced with very complex missions in his company, but his challenge will remain to maintain his team.
