A good article here from Selling Power titled Five Questions Every Sales Manager Should Be Able to Answer. The questions are spot on, but pay special attention to number 3 (my editing):
- Which lead sources result in the highest percentage of closed deals? Do you know where your best leads come from and what those leads look like? When you do, you can better direct your marketing efforts and dollars while boosting your conversion rate.
- Are your reps selling the most profitable products? Often, reps will sell the products that are easiest to sell rather than the ones that provide the highest margin for the company. Face it: they’re going to get to quota the easiest way they can and if it means selling lower margin products, they’re going to do it.
- What percentage of the time is your sales process being followed? This is an important question. Assuming, of course, that you have a process in the first place, do you know how often reps are adhering to it? Many sales executives have lamented that there are sometimes as many processes as there are reps. If your sales results are in need of a course correction, dig into this question. It may turn out that fixing those results is as simple as getting everyone to adhere to your established process.
- Where do your reps tend to stall in the sales process? In other words, do you know exactly how deals move through the pipeline for all your reps and where in that pipeline reps tend to get hung up?
- Which competitors do you lose the most business to, and why? All managers knows who their biggest competitors are, but do you know precisely how much business you lose to each one? And more importantly, do you know why?
I am always amazed at how many sales managers lead without a selling system. Now, I’m not talking scripts, but a selling system with enough flexibility for each rep to adapt it to their natural strengths and styles.
We walk into many sales departments where each salesperson has their own approach to selling. The reason this spells trouble is that you never have an accurate forecast, the sales manager has difficulty coaching the salespeople and new hires are often sent into the market without the right tools to succeed.
Much of this approach comes from sales managers who are unsure themselves about which selling system to use. If they are using some form of a selling system, the next issue is holding the salespeople accountable to the system. The best sales teams we see are the ones that use a system and the sales manager holds them accountable to it.