Questions Sales Managers often ask!
As companies shift their attention from fighting the recession to getting the most from their targets, Sales Managers must keep themselves focused.
The recession and its shocks to the real economy has put Sales Managers on the front lines, as they implement sales policies and measures to help companies survive the recession. Now, as an eventual recovery begins to seem more likely, the Sales Managers’ task may become more complex.
Even for those whose companies avoided the most severe effects of the crisis, uncertainty about the future is abundant, and sales remains tough. Increase in turnover are dream for only a few relatively big & lucky ones, and a new appreciation of failures accompanies each opportunity.
So the Sales Managers’ judgement will be critical to push the management team’s thinking on the opportunities and to cast a dispassionate eye over the sales, margins, and risks of pursuing them.
Following are few of the many questions, Sales Managers often ask themselves and their executive colleagues as the new financial year approaches. Answer to these questions help Sales Managers’ decide the priorities to come out of the recession.
- How to make important decisions? - based on gut-feel and anecdotes or accurate current and historical data
- What to focus your 100% on and where to intervene to hit your number this quarter?
- What industries are strong? How does this compare to last year?
- What’s working? What’s not working? What are the trends?
- Which representative push the most? Where should we invest?
- Which deals are getting stuck in your pipeline and why?
- How big does your pipeline need to be to hit your number this quarter?
- How to analyze sales trends and track opportunities over time in monster excel spreadsheets?
- What is the repeated lost sales by individual salesmen?
- What is the value of sales lost by a particular reason? - Value of sales lost per time period (month, quarter, year) by the reason it was lost (project killed, competition, price, product feature, not interested, etc.). Identifying areas of sales and marketing improvement and overall market conditions. For example, it could be used to see how the market economy affects your sales (is project killed and price increasing over time?).
1KEY Business Intelligence (BI) reporting and analysis tool helps Sales Managers find the answers to all the above and many such questions.
Posted on May 18th, 2009 by Vikram Kole
Filed under: Business Intelligence, Emerging Trends, View Points & Perspective
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