Every team needs a good coach.
If sales is a team sport, a coach is crucial for bringing everyone together, creating a strategy to reach the goal line, and running the right plays to get there. Whether it’s the World Cup, the Super Bowl, or landing that big fish enterprise account, the right coach can be transformational for a team.
Coaching sales teams, by another name, refers to sales management. Sales is such an intricate team sport that the word coaching feels more apropos, but for many new to B2B software-as-a-service sales teams and businesses, thinking about coaching as sales management can be a helpful framing for understanding how it’s done.
What is sales management?
Sales management is the art of conducting, supervising, and leading a sales team, so team members can collaborate with prospects, customers, and internal teams to repeatedly meet and beat their sales targets.
Sales management also refers to the collective group of people who manage or direct a team of sellers to help improve or optimize sales performance.
Simply put, sales managers manage sellers.
But as sales technology stacks have expanded, the roles and responsibilities of sales management have shifted, too.
What is the role of sales management within an organization?
Sales managers sit between the executive team and sales reps.
They include:
- Frontline managers
- Directors
- Vice presidents
A chief sales officer or revenue officer occupies the top tier of sales management, although their coaching tends to be reserved for bigger deals and coaching managers, more than coaching your sales teams on specific deals.
Key responsibilities of the sales manager
A sales manager might oversee:
- Sales strategy
- Sales operations
- Sales execution
- Sales analysis
Depending on where a sales manager sits in the organization, they may be responsible for setting the strategy, motivating the team, or for making sure the day-to-day, tactical sales processes are executed flawlessly.
Sales Strategy
Leaders at the top of the sales management structure typically set the sales strategy, which focuses on who the team sells to and how reps approach the sales process. This can include setting territories or account books, building sales stages, and setting compensation plans. The focus of a sales strategy is to provide revenue governance to make the sales process consistent for the buyer, and repeatable for every seller.
Sales Operations
If the strategy involves the ideas behind who to sell to and how, sales operations is where the sales process is implemented, analyzed, and optimized. Sales operations focuses on technology, tools, and frameworks. This means managing the CRM and choosing a revenue platform to help with forecasting and collaboration across sales teams. Sales operations also manages sales data analysis to help with forecasting and make adjustments to strategy and planning.
Sales Execution
Sales execution is the piece of sales management closest to sellers. Frontline managers play the biggest part in influencing how sellers execute on sales strategies and processes. They provide guidance and coaching directly to sellers by joining calls and getting involved in deals to provide additional authority and expertise. Higher-level sales leaders provide pinpoint coaching, based on their years of experience, to help move deals along.
Sales Analysis
Sales analysis happens at all levels of sales management. Data becomes key. And not just data for data’s sake, but understanding what the right data or metrics are, and then how to analyze all of that information in order to make key decisions about strategy and coaching for the field.
Sales managers examine historical trend data to understand how the current quarter might play out, and then use that information to apply resources to influence better outcomes. This is where Clari comes in, with tools like Flow that predict how much pipeline the team needs to meet their quota, and how close they are to achieving it. If the team needs more pipeline, a sales leader might urge them to focus on that, whereas if it looks like they have enough to close the quarter where they need to be, the team can shift to focus on closing more than outreach.
These are all calls that fall under effective sales management.
Sales managers also examine their team’s sales funnel to see where stage conversion rates are dropping, especially in tough macroeconomic conditions. Tracking top-of-funnel metrics around pipeline generation and how pipeline changes week-over-week helps sales managers track how they’re performing in relation to their plan and team quota.
Sales Management Strategies
There are many different ways to implement sales management strategies. The most common include setting goals and sales targets, training and ongoing enablement, and creating reports and forecasting sales to the broader business.
When defining sales strategies, it is important to set standards that can be governed both top-down and bottom-up. Creating a process that is repeatable is crucial, but if that process is not routinely inspected for friction at each step, deals can leak out of the pipeline. Reps need to understand what is expected of them from the sales management process, but also know that they can raise their hand when there is a breakdown in the sales strategy or process.
Building a sales operating cadence is another critical piece of sales management. Typically the executive levels of sales management will set the major collaboration points and processes: forecast calls, deal reviews, board meetings, and all the necessary data to make decisions must be considered.
Many sales management strategies are put in place to manage handoffs between internal teams. It is important for sales managers to also build a strategy for how reps collaborate with the buyer.
Tools for Sales Management
Every modern sales team will have Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to track basic business data. But now, as sales managers need to cover so many areas of the internal and external sales process, sales managers need more robust technology with automation—and the marketplace, including Clari, has responded.
A revenue platform that allows for past, present, and future deal and funnel analysis will keep every revenue-critical employee aligned to the broader sales goals, and allow insights to drive action.
Monitoring your teams’ close rates, pipeline generation, and quota coverage on your own as a sales manager means you can make proactive decisions and changes to sales strategies sooner rather than later.
Taking the time to build a sales methodology into the sales process ensures the right data is collected and the right steps are followed, making the sales cycle consistent and repeatable for both buyers and sellers. The platform that supports those efforts should make it simple for reps to add relevant methodology data, and make it easy for managers to identify gaps in process knowledge.
Another way to ensure fewer gaps in deal knowledge is to bring sellers and buyers together with a mutual action plan. Sales management benefits from implementing mutual action plan tools that bring the buying committee deeper into the collaborative sales process. Everyone— rep, management, and customer—gets a clearer picture of how the deal is progressing, what is needed and from who, and the immediate next actions. It’s a shared portal between you and your prospect to help them understand what it looks like to buy from you, a hub for all critical resources, individuals, and milestones needed to move toward partnership.
Actionable conversation intelligence tools that provide insights about the conversations that are recorded are a key part in managing and governing the collaboration between reps and buyers. Having keywords like competitor names, buying signals, and next step phrases surfaced in context allows sales management to provide valuable coaching when and where it’s needed.
Moving the sales forecast into a central platform allows all layers of sales management to understand what deals make up the forecast at any time. Forecasting calls become a collaborative process around what can be done to help bring revenue in, instead of a time-consuming series of meetings, updating and corroborating stale data in a spreadsheet.
Sales management must have a unified approach and be aligned on metrics across the team to employ these tools to their fullest potential. But a good coach, or a good sales management leader, scores touchdown after touchdown with the right support.
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