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How Activities Management Benefits Manager

Manage or Not to Manage

One of our clients just lost 4 sales people. Reason – because the manager wants them to report their sales activities. Naturally sales persons don’t like data entry or paper work. So, do the manager need to manage their sales activities?

What is the Best Approach?

Generally, manager provide direction, let sales know the expected results.
For High flyers – who have consistent meet or exceed sales targets – give them all the freedom to get their job done. These group of sales know what works for them and what it takes to get the expected results
For Under performers – Not getting the sales goals and need to be told what to do. Get the new people.

Activities Management

We may not always be able to get the high flyers. So, large proportion of the sales are in between these two categories. And we know very well that sales come from activities. No activities no results!
Yes, most managers still need to manage activities of their sales persons but activities management is not only about setting goals of how many calls, how many appointments etc

With the activities data managers can derive some of the useful sales metric:

How long it takes to close a deal
How many appointments to close a deal
Closing rate – how many leads eventually become customers

With this analysis the manager will be able to:

Identify shortcoming (such as presentation skill, product knowledge, effectiveness of meetings etc.) and provide measure for improvement
Advice the sales to focus on potential deal not the dead wood

Additional information gather during the sales activities

There are many information (about the customer, the competition) that sales can gather during their engagement with customers. For example, if the sales closed a deal of supplying 1000kg per month to a customer. Did he know the actual total demand of the customers? It may be 10000kg per month. So why customer buy from others? What the customers value most? Price, service, advice…

Sales must be informed the value and purpose (to them and to the management) for keeping activities records.