Today I attended the Silicon Valley Chapter of the Sales Operations Forum. The topic “Unlocking Sales Manager Value” was filled with best practices for both sales managers and the sales operations managers that work with them. The session was hosted by SAP & Baker Communications with sales directors from VMWare and Black Box providing real world practical insights. Below are my notes on Sales Manager Best Practice (SM-Best) and Sales Operations Best Practice (SOps-Best) to support it.
SM-Best: Coach in the day and in the moment. Coach one-on-one. Coach one-on-many in team meetings. Help reps prep for sales calls.
SOps-Best to support coaching: Provide real-time access to information. For existing customer accounts historical purchasing patterns are vital. To support new prospect coaching, supply buying patterns for first time customers, industry segments, business demographics, key applications or other relevant data. Dashboards of team and rep performance are coaching basics.
SM-Best: Set & manage the heartbeat of the team. Sales management is both an art & a science, work both equally. Help sales reps with strategic planning, it doesn’t come naturally. Adopt the tools that the company provides you. Treat sales operations as your partner.
SOps-Best heart healthy support: Help sales managers learn and utilize tools, it doesn’t come naturally. Learn the company business and how sales does what it does. Attend sales calls and sales meetings when you can. Learn the cadence and business cycle of your company, your customers and the industry.
SM-Best: Focus on the Forward Pipeline. Separate the forecast meeting which hammers on current quarter close from the forward looking pipeline which is developing business 1-2-3 quarters out (they are two very different conversations).
SOps-Best pipeline support: Clean the pipeline at the beginning of every quarter, don’t let moldy old accounts carry over without real activity. Learn the best shape for the pipeline, based on your sales process, and the best speed for moving opportunities, sales cycle time.
SM-Best: Use leading & Lagging Indicators. Look for trends and patterns. Work with your sales ops people to help them know what to look for.
SOps-Best support for stats: Provide comparison reports … YoY or QoQ or team compared to team … these are great sources of trending data. Multi-disciplinary view of data is particularly helpful.
SM-Best: Don’t over engineer process but don’t ignore it either. Have a sales process. Have many sales processes, if you need them for new versus existing customers or different vertical markets or various products. Manage the sales team to the sales process.
SOPS-Best process support. Map the sales process into the CRM or SFA tool. Help sales managers know when and how to use tools available. Map communication tools, templates, sales tools and collateral to the best use scenario in the sales process.
SM-Best: Protect Selling Time. Get rid of useless meetings. Train people not to copy everyone on email. Kill the CYA email threads. Schedule 30-minute meetings, they don’t have to be an hour. Have sales ops vet requests that take away selling time.
SOps-Best protection: Communicate with the sales force on Monday & Friday, leave Tue-Wed-Thur for face time with customers. Aggregate communications to the field, keep them crisp and fast paced. Build a playbook for sales. Build a playbook for sales managers. Keep the playbooks flexible in order to address new opportunities that might arise.
SM-Best: Celebrate. Money is not the prime motivator for sales people, it is achievement, accomplishment and recognition. Look for ways to celebrate the big and little accomplishments all the time. Make recognition inclusive … prospecting team, pre-sales support, field engineers, operations, project managers, etc.
SOps-Best party plan: Think of sales people as athletes. Stack rank lots of items … growth, penetration, new product sales, new industry, contribution to community… the big deals are always highly visible. Help sales managers reward and recognize getting the job done and doing it right.
The core ideas for this Sales Ops Forum session came from Walter Rodgers, CEO, Baker Communications. Learn more at www.bakercommunications.com.