[eBook] How sales managers can help their team increase sales

As a sales manager, your number one goal should be influencing and empowering your reps to achieve greater success.

NB: This is an excerpt from our latest eBook: 'Sales Managers: How to find new sales opportunities for your team'. To download the eBook, click here.

With mounting pressure on sales teams to meet growing targets, clear communication and expectations are essential.

Why sales teams need data analytics

For sales, knowledge is power. In this data-driven economy, you have to measure it, to manage it. Gut-based business decisions can’t compete. Data analytics gives you the power to measure business activity and act daily to optimize operations and increase profitability.

Sales reps armed with all the product, pricing and customer facts can successfully lead the conversation to not only pocket more sales but make the entire teams’ work-life easier.

With mounting pressure on sales teams to meet growing targets, clear communication and expectations are essential.

The challenge

Data. Lots of great data. The challenge is in the first word. Data. Loads of data is stored and collected in ERP systems and CRM tools all day, every day. This data is home to customer interactions – what they buy, what they don’t buy, how many times they’ve interacted with the business and so on.

For most businesses, this is where the biggest challenge of all is – consolidating the stored data to make it understandable.

A lack of technical skills

It is no surprise that often the sales team are not the most technical team in the business.

A contrast to the IT and finance teams that can usually manage extracting data from ERP systems. Sales typically don’t have these skills and struggle to access beneficial information - relying on other staff members to get it for them.

Reps are too busy to be creative

With the ever aggressive sales targets pushed on sales reps, finding the time to write the reports and do the analysis to identify missed opportunities or low hanging fruit is often a challenge. Reps are often reactive rather than proactive to declining sales as a result.

This is an excerpt from our latest eBook: 'Sales Managers: How to find new sales opportunities for your team'. To download the full eBook, click the image below: