To babysit or let him go:
about close collaboration
with a sales manager

Have you seen those packets that were overlooked, without finding a purpose for them, and now they fly around, swaying in the wind, waiting for someone to finally find a use for them?

Sometimes a sales department consists of several sales managers and a managing founder who can't keep an eye on everything happening in the department. And it's understandable. In general, they shouldn't have to.

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

Now let's examine which areas in the sales process the founder can't control, resulting in a significant loss of profit. And that's something to address!

Task setting and monitoring in the sales department.

These activities consume a significant portion of the founder's time. But detecting an unfinished task in time through check-ins means avoiding a major waste of resources. For example, you set a task: "Run north and meet in a week." However, after a week, it turns out that:

Some team members 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 results that don't align with the expectations set at the start of the race. If you dare to calculate all the expenses for that week, you'll find that most of the time your task was carried out incorrectly or not at all. Don't torment yourself—don't calculate how much money you lost that week.

Conclusion: Monitoring task completion minimizes losses—not to zero, of course, as the human factor and unforeseen circumstances are unavoidable. Therefore, at the very least, have a team leader responsible for these activities.

Budget planning and 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. In addition, there are forecasts, expense optimization, and the implementation and modification of incentives. Oh, owners should definitely know about that.

Calculating expended resources

This includes your database and how it burns—something that's always challenging to estimate. Here's a little puzzle for you:

Condition: You set a goal to attract X clients with a Y check, and the team achieves the plan.

Question: How many companies declined? How many companies in the CRM are marked as "Closed"? How many of those who declined are permanently lost? In our team, we categorize them as "Deceased" or "Closed business," how about you? (About how commercial offers die)

Undoubtedly, this puzzle is very complex, but solving it is crucial.

If the B2C sales funnel can involve hundreds of thousands of customers, in B2B, at best, it's in the thousands. When the team experiences a high rate of rejections but still achieves the plan, it may seem like everything is fine. However, it's important to understand that behind this sweet illusion lies significant database burnout. At some point, the team will hit a ceiling, and the results will inevitably decline. The burnt-out database, oddly enough, needs to cool down. It's a period when you shouldn't touch it at all. Remember: entered, received a rejection, didn't handle it promptly—step aside and temporarily deactivate that segment of the database.

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

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