Have you lost a sales manager?

Have you, as a sales manager, ever lost those packages you overlooked, couldn't find a purpose for, and now they're flying around, swaying from side to side in the wind, waiting for someone to finally find a use for them?

Sometimes, the sales department consists of several sales managers and the overseeing founder who can't keep an eye on everything happening in the department. And you can understand them. In general, they shouldn't have to.

To prevent your package from ending up in the pile of forgotten packages, let alone aimlessly wandering the streets, you need a system. Transparent conditions and established processes can help build a functional and efficient system. Believe me, the team will appreciate it. After all, all sales managers are waiting for someone to invest in them: experience, knowledge, time.

Now let's discuss which areas of the sales process the founder can't control, resulting in a significant portion of the profits being lost. And it shouldn't be that way!

Task assignment and monitoring in the sales department.

These activities consume the lion's share of the founder's time. However, detecting an unfinished task in time through a check-up means avoiding a big waste of resources. For example, you set a task: "Run north and meet in a week." But after a week, you find out that:

Some of the team ran.
Some didn't run.
Some ran in the wrong direction.
Some stopped as soon as questions arose.
What do you end up with? After a week, you have a result that doesn't align with your expectations at the start of the race. If you dare to calculate all the expenses for that week, you'll realize that the task was mostly executed incorrectly or not executed at all. Don't dwell on how much money you lost during that week.

Conclusion: Monitoring task execution minimizes losses, not to zero, of course, but to a minimum (human factors and unforeseen circumstances are always present). So, at the very least, find a team leader for these activities.

Budgeting and budget control.

It's always necessary to control the team's revenue. You also need to ensure that this revenue aligns with your goals and KPIs. Additionally, there are forecasts, expense optimization, and the implementation and modification of motivation. Ah, the owners should definitely know about all of this.

Calculation of expended resources.

This includes the database and its depletion, which is always challenging to estimate. Here's a little puzzle for you:

Scenario: The goal was to attract X customers with a Y check. The team achieved the plan.

Question: How many companies declined, how many companies were marked as "Closed" in the CRM, and how many of those who declined are lost for good? (In our team, we categorize them as "Deceased" or "Closed the business," what about you?)

Undoubtedly, this puzzle is very difficult, but it's crucial to solve it.

If the B2C funnel can involve hundreds of thousands of customers, in B2B, at best, it's in the thousands. When the team receives a high percentage of rejections but still meets the plan, you may think everything is fine. However, you should understand that behind this sweet lie, there's significant depletion of the database. At some point, the team will hit a ceiling, and the results will inevitably decline. The burned-out database needs to cool down. During this period, you should not touch it at all. Remember: if you approached, received a rejection, and didn't handle it promptly, step aside and temporarily exclude that segment from your database.

Important note: The process of working with the database, its reserves, and potential requires consistency, which, as a rule, the owner cannot provide.

Keep this in mind when building your system so that all your packages are filled with useful things.