The Top 10 Sales Management Innovations

With hundreds of ideas jockeying to be top of a sales manager’s mind each day, what should get priority attention? What strategic moves can every sales manager make to improve team performance three, six, or 12 months from now?

These 10 innovations represent the best practices that every sales manager should be thinking about for the coming year. For 2011, put the focus on creating new customers by creating success stories. Change with the times, but never forget your DNA to success: your company’s mission, vision of the future, and core values.

1. Harness social media. In the past, companies could control the information they wanted to share with their customer base. Now the power of information is online and available to anyone. Many companies still have blinders on when it comes to social media, but the truth is that online conversations have a dramatic effect on buying behavior. A shift in thinking about social media demands executive sponsorship and clear-cut objectives.

Solution steps: Appoint a chief listening officer whose job is to identify conversation trends and engage with customers, respond to negative stories, and build thriving communities where customers can talk with each other. Start a social-media policy (check out those of Dell and IBM). Set objectives for your social-media use (for example: enhance the conversation around your brand; monitor your customers, prospects, and competition; and set alerts that let you know when major events occur).

Effective tools: Twitter, LinkedIn, HubSpot, iSell (by OneSource), Workstreamer, FirstRain, Hoover’s, ZoomInfo, InsideView

2. Strategically align marketing campaigns with sales efforts. Eighty percent of sales and marketing teams operate in separate silos. This leads to wasted time and untold losses in profits every quarter, not to mention frustration that gets in the way of mutually beneficial collaboration. In successful companies, sales and marking is aligned in a way that exploits the synergy between the two departments.

Solution steps: Define what a lead is. Often, sales and marketing teams have different definitions of this basic element. Next, create a feedback system in which marketing will know on an ongoing basis how leads are progressing through the pipeline. Schedule periodic meetings between the departments so they can review one another’s performance and results.

Effective tools: Marketo, Eloqua, SilverPop, ExactTarget, Genius.com

3. Establish a customer-centric sales process. Although most companies think they’re customer-centric, closer examination proves that they’re clinging to old steps that are out of sync with the way customers want to buy. Traditionally, companies have bombarded customers with email blasts and ads, but in today’s economy, one-way communication channels won’t cut it. Each touch point with customers represents a potential loss or gain in the way they feel about your company. What does the initial conversation with your customer sound like? Are your messages aligned with his or her needs? How well documented are your proposals? How many options do you offer? It’s vital that sales leaders get to the ground level to find out the reality of the customer experience.

Solution steps: Map the customer’s journey, paying careful attention to all the touch points customers are exposed to. Create sales-process steps that map to how the customer wants to buy, and empower your reps with a guide that helps them follow those strategic touch points.

Effective tools: Kadient’s Sales Playbooks, Breakthrough SalesPerformance (recommended reading: The Funnel Principle), eValue Prompter by ValueSelling

4. Realize ROI with CRM. When CRM systems first emerged, they made promises they couldn’t always keep. Initially designed to make a salesperson more effective, they often did little more than create more busywork for reps. Today’s CRM systems have evolved significantly. When implemented properly, it’s possible to use CRM to capture a 360-degree view of the customer so that every stakeholder – sales, customer service, marketing, and finance – can see what’s happening with deals at every stage.

Solution step: Reevaluate your current CRM system. Is it the best fit for your sales team today? Will it fit your team’s needs in 2011 or 2012? Successful companies achieve ROI with their CRM systems by continually monitoring and evolving their CRM strategy. New developments from leading CRM providers, such as improved forecasting tools and better reporting, which includes social-media information, will vastly change the CRM landscape in the upcoming months. Prices for out-of-the-box solutions will also decrease, so now’s the time to make sure your investments are well spent. If not, you can likely find something better suited to your needs.

CRM solutions to watch: Oracle On-Demand, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, SugarCRM, NetSuite

5. Embrace online collaboration. Advances in online-collaboration technology have improved the quality of our virtual interactions with customers and prospects. While meeting with clients in real life will always be a vital part of the sales relationship, virtual meetings have also become an integral part of the selling process. New technology has improved the speed, quality, and experience of online meetings, which creates a greater level of customer engagement. There’s also a new breed of online sales-demo solutions that offer rich analytics so you know if and when the client has viewed your presentation.

Solution steps: If you haven’t embraced online-collaboration tools, start now. If you are already meeting with clients online, try some of the newer tools that offer video to enhance the experience. Start leveraging instant demo tools and slick presentations as an enhancement before or after a Web meeting.

Effective tools: GoToMeeting (now offering the ability to meet from an iPad), ClearSlide, SlideRocket, PGi, Adobe ConnectPro

6. Improve accuracy in sales forecasting and pipeline metrics. In the past, sales managers relied on their instincts when hiring salespeople. Today, sales managers use online testing services to scientifically appraise the talents of their candidates and cut hiring mistakes by 50 percent or more. In the past, sales managers relied on guesswork when forecasting sales. Today, they use analytics to achieve 95 percent or better forecasting accuracy. In the past, salespeople relied on their guts when deciding which lead to call on first. Sales managers can now identify exactly where the strengths and weaknesses are in their sales teams and start making decisions based on science instead of hunches.

Solution steps: Explore sales applications that offer dashboard views, which allow you to hold your salespeople accountable for the results they produce.

Analytic tools: Cloud9 Analytics, Anaplan, Right90, Landslide, SAP BusinessObjects

7. Coach for sales success. Behind every great sales team is a sales manager who has put in the hard work necessary to create a culture of continuous improvement. Winning companies such as ADP and Hewlett-Packard set up coaching systems so that mentors can engage in active sharing and learning practices with sales teams.

The old model of sales training or coaching consisted of sales managers telling salespeople, “Let me show you how I did it when I was in the field.” This approach allows the teacher to hide behind a cloud of authority while ignoring the trainee’s real needs. The new model of learning revolves around self-exploration, reality-based peer discussions, and discovery-based coaching. The role of the trainer or coach is not to play the all-knowing supersalesperson, but to assume the role of the change leader, the creator of an open-communication platform in which sales transformations are enabled, not mandated.

Solution steps: If you can capture the best practices of the top 20 percent of your sales team and disseminate those strategies to the rest of the sales team, you’ll be ahead of the game. A commitment to sales coaching is the final element to creating a system for a successful performance. Make sales coaching a top priority for frontline sales managers.

Sales experts who specialize in coaching: Richardson, Barry Rhein & Associates, ProfitBuilders

8. Leverage mobile technology. Mobile phones have turned into the digital Swiss Army knife of the sales profession. With more than 200,000 applications available on the iPhone, salespeople can use the phone as a calculator, GPS navigator, video-presentation tool, prospect-search tool, CRM solution, conference-call center, social-media tool, expense-management tool, text-message broadcasting tool, language translator, voice-to-text transcriber, and more. Soon mobile phones will manage credit-card transactions and payments through text messaging.

Solution steps: Create a plan for your mobile-technology infrastructure that’s based on a solid platform, not on a specific device. Prioritize the real-time information needs of your sales team. Create a design that will enhance sales effectiveness, as well as the customer experience

Effective tools: Ribbit, Hoover’s NearHere App, Xobni, Search2Go, Expense2GO, Selling Power’s Sales Strategizer, iClose By.com, Cisco WebEx Meeting Center on the iPhone
 
9. Focus on sales enablement. Sales enablement is a process designed to give each salesperson direct access to the collective intelligence that already exists in a sales organization. Why should salespeople reinvent the wheel every time they need to create a new proposal or prepare for a call? New sales-enablement solutions collect the best assets of the sales team – white papers, videos, PowerPoint presentations, and more – and make them instantly available to everyone in the organization.

Solution steps: Before you begin automating sales enablement, create an inventory of all sales-intelligence assets, and then create a blueprint that maps typical buying scenarios. Visualize the customer journey across each touch point, and then list all resources needed at each step of the sale.

Effective tools: Altus Learning, SAVO, iCentera, Sant, Kadient

10. Improve sales performance and compensation management. Salespeople tend to devote the most attention to the practices they’re compensated for. In most companies, however, the compensation-management and sales-management systems are not aligned – which means that companies often reward salespeople for the wrong behaviors or for a performance that’s not necessarily in the best interest of the company. That’s where sales-performance management comes in.

Solution steps: Salespeople should receive more rewards for sales that represent higher long-term profitability to the company. If a $1 million sale only creates a 2 percent profit, then the commission should not be as high as a sale that yields a margin of 30 percent.

Effective tools: Xactly, Callidus, Makana