Predictive Sales Management
Meeting your revenue goal begins on the front line with better sales management. The key driver of revenue performance is your sales manager. They’re the link between your customers, your sales organization and senior leadership. Sales management is a difficult job and development of sales managers is woefully absent in many organizations. Sales managers typically get watered down leadership training or advanced selling skills training; very little, however, in how to drive superior performance through their teams.
Want to improve your sales managers? We can help! Based on the best selling book on Sales Management, “Cracking The Sales Management Code,” and our partnership with Vantage Point Performance we build the analytic, strategic and coaching skills that drive superior results, reduce turnover, and improve active engagement of your sales staff. Investing in the development of sales managers is critical to achieving your revenue goals. There are several ways to take advantage of this exceptional training and development of one of your most important assets – Your front line sales managers.
Cracking The Sales Management Code Workshop
Our flagship sales management training program, Cracking the Sales Management Code, is a robust set of training modules, each of which targets specific sales management tasks. We first assess the type of sale that your sales force makes to determine the key activities that drive your company’s sales performance. We then select the training content that will improve your managers’ ability to improve those specific activities.
Strategic Pipeline Management
The statistics are startling. Vantage Points joint research with the Sales Management Association shows that the sales pipeline is a VERY important tool for sales managers. In fact, 72% of sales managers hold sales pipeline review meetings with their reps several times each month. Unfortunately, 61% claim that they have not been adequately trained in pipeline management, and 63% say that their companies do a bad job of managing their sales pipelines. It appears that the sales pipeline is a very important thing that is being managed very badly. Ultimately, sales pipeline management is a critical activity for almost all of the sales forces we know, and better pipeline management can make a huge difference in sales performance.
With great sales pipeline management, forecasts are nailed, quotas are hit, and sales reps become much more productive. With status quo pipeline management, you get status quo performance. And as our research shows, most sales managers aren’t happy with the status quo. If you find yourself in the majority of organizations that are struggling to use the sales pipeline productively, let us help. – Our fresh, research-driven insights are helping major organizations revolutionize their approach to sales pipeline management. We can help you too. Click here to learn more about our Strategic Pipeline Management program.
Pipeline Coaching
This suite of sales management training, processes, and tools will arm your managers with sales coaching best practices that have been demonstrated to shorten sales cycles and increase win rates. Guaranteed. Traditional pipeline management focuses on inspecting deals as they flow through the sales pipeline – attempting to tighten forecasts. There is little scrutiny on what gets into the pipeline, and more will typically fall out of the pipe than will make it through to the end.
Pipeline Coaching® focuses on the quality of the sales pipeline and the effectiveness of the salesperson in shepherding the deals to close. Bad leads never get in, and good leads flow through a shortened sales pipeline. Pipeline Coaching® combines best practice techniques for both opportunity and call planning to create a structured, highly-focused, and efficient conversation between a sales manager and a seller.
- Which opportunities deserve your attention?
- How are you going to win them?
- What can the seller do to move the deal forward?
These and other targeted questions ensure that no effort is wasted, no deals are neglected, and all bases are covered. Pipeline Coaching® helps a sales manager exert control over the sales pipeline, while simultaneously developing the salesperson’s skill.
Front-line Forecasting
Sales forecasts. 82% of all front-line salespeople do them. 100% of executives pay very close attention to them. Yet 69% of all stakeholders don’t trust them.* This sounds like a problem. Most of our clients can agree to three things about sales forecasting:
- It consumes a lot of their sales force’s time
- It is very important to their organization at many levels
- It is a questionable process that yields erratic outputs
So what is the problem with sales forecasting? Our research indicates that there are 3 big problems that hobble sales forecasting efforts.
First, many sales forces use sales forecasting methods that don’t fit the way they actually sell. In fact, 85% of sales forces use an opportunity-based forecasting model, building their forecasts from individual deals using projected win rates and close dates. Yet, when exposed to alternative sales forecasting frameworks, 74% of those companies discover that they should be using other frameworks that better fit their actual sales activity.
Second, most forecasts lack any mathematical backbone to drive organizational consistency. Instead, the company’s forecasts are built on the estimates of their individual salespeople without the benefit of mathematical rigor to reveal the inner logic of the projections.
Third, all forecasts involve assumptions – many of which go undocumented. And if the underlying assumptions of your forecasts go undocumented, then the underlying assumptions go untested. Maybe it’s okay, or maybe it’s not. Until the assumptions are questioned, forecasts are the subjective guesses of a individual sellers. The more assumptions are tested, the closer to reality they tend to come.
Basically, most people don’t trust their sales forecasts because history has proven their forecasts to be wildly inaccurate. Our research into sales forecasting best practices reveals that most sales forecasts can be made more accurate and less time-consuming by making a few fundamental changes in the sales force’s approach to the task.
Click here to learn more about our Front-Line Forecasting training program.