Sales Management Software
Augment Sales Management with Conversational Intelligence
Discover a sales management software that helps you track your sales conversation, coach your sales team and deliver your customers a phenomenal experience.
The sales team is the front line of any business. They need to connect with prospects, create an exceptional experience and persuade them into trying out your product. Today there is an acceleration in digital adoption and this has changed the way customers interact with businesses.
The times are changing
With many businesses pivoting to the work-from-home model, remote selling has catapulted into the way businesses sell today. And with video and live chats, many companies believe that remote selling is as effective as in-person selling. A COVID analysis study by McKinsey discovered that 70-80% of B2B decision-makers prefer remote human interactions. It’s not surprising that the same report observed a 41% increase in video conference interactions with sales reps by last year alone.
As a manager, it is important to stay in touch with your sales team. But with your work spread across for you, it becomes impossible to focus on your sales reps across different time zones. A LinkedIn study reports that 67% of sales managers feel that overseeing a remote sales team is more challenging than they anticipated.
With poor practices in place, your live deals are slipping away right under your nose. And that's why you need a modern sales management tool that helps you monitor sales calls, spearhead operations, and help your team win consistently.
Upskill your sales force, just like Microsoft
In 2017, Microsoft had a drastic overhaul of its sales organization to align with its evolving focus on customer success. Part of the overhaul focused on creating technically skilled salespeople. These salespeople would help customers with their cloud projects and showcase Azure's unique capabilities based on niche customer needs.
The transformation of the sales organization not only helped Microsoft redefine the way they sell, but it also paid off well. The team reported a staggering 56% commercial-cloud revenue growth in that quarter. But internally, it helped Microsoft understand why they were losing deals and what it needed to do to fix the problem.
When you have a sales team made up of talented reps but still end up underperforming, there's a larger problem to address. One definite solution is better sales management.
What is sales management?
Sales management helps sales leaders oversee how their team functions. It helps managers accelerate sales, reduce bottlenecks, identify weak spots, and set their team up to win more deals. Sales management increases the efficiency of the team and helps them adopt the best sales techniques seamlessly.
A study by Forrester states that only 48% of decisions made within an organization are made based on quantitative information and analysis.
With technology-driven management, sales leaders can cut down on administrative tasks and focus more on the team and their targets. These platforms give you real-time insights into your sales team’s performance.
The data helps sales leaders narrow down on what's working well for the team and how to incorporate winning strategies across.
Key Aspects of Sales Management
When you define your sales techniques, you set the right expectations for your sales reps. You can define how they have to sell when they engage with a potential client. With insight-backed sales management, you can easily define your sales pitch, help your team replicate the wins, and coach them on their weaknesses. Put together, this constitutes the core areas of sales management. In practice, you can break down sales management into:
- Sales operation
- Sales analytics
- Sales strategy
Now let’s take a look at what they are and why they matter.
◼️ Sales operation
Sales operation is by far the primary responsibility of any sales leader. It involves bringing together a team of skilled reps who are the champions of your culture. As a sales leader, you don't have to have the best sellers, rather your team should have trainable sales reps.
The ones who are open to learning, receptive to coaching, and put their learnings into practice. When you start building your team, look for storytellers, the articulators, the ones who are contagiously happy.
Mark Hunter, the author of A Mind for Sales rightly puts it,
“It’s not about having the right opportunities. It’s about handling the opportunities right.”
Sales operations also mean defining sales targets for the team. When your team is motivated, they go out of their way to turn leads in your pipeline into happy customers.
◼️ Sales analytics
Having a goal helps your sales reps work together as a cohesive unit. And your revenue-based goals should be achievable, not based on guesswork.
A study reports that 90% of people perform better with relevant and challenging goals.
When you have more insights into your selling techniques, you can identify how your sales reps are performing. This helps you set realistic team and individual goals.
Your sales management tool should be able to identify your team's productivity; how many calls they actively take, time per call, their strengths and weaknesses on call. With real-time insights, you can help them in crucial deal time, enabling product and soft skill training and ways to reward your team for their performance. At the end of the day, your team should be motivated by the goals you set, not overwhelmed by them.
◼️ Sales strategy
When you have a team of driven sales reps and access to performance insights, your quest for a winning sales strategy is half-done. You can define sales strategies from pitches, collaterals, down to scripts for prospecting and selling.
A DemandGen report states that 95% of buyers chose a solution provider that “provided them with ample content to help navigate through each stage of the buying process.”
Personalized content is the biggest driver of selling. With real-time data into what your prospects frequently enquire, your team can build collaterals, emails, and marketing messages around them.
While the right type of content is a good reference point for your sales team, it doesn't always seal the deal. Most of the time your team needs insights into winning strategies that work.
An article by Seismic reports that sales reps spend an average of 30 hours a month searching for and creating their own content.
A good sales management software helps you find out how the best sales reps turn calls into wins. It helps you turn your finding into a training opportunity for other reps to adapt and close more deals.
Benefits of sales management
Ineffective sales management techniques can hurt your business. Poor sales management means that all the effort in prospecting, lead qualifying, and selling is futile. And soon, this will rip your sales team apart, leaving behind sales reps who:
1. Show no drive to learn and perfect their skills
2. Are unable to improvise, empathize and convince your prospects
3. Do not have the right training and coaching opportunities
4. Do not receive performance feedback or follow up on their performance discussion actively
5. Continue approaching cold leads and end up falling short on their sales targets.
With proper sales management and governance, your team has access to personalized sales coaching. You identify mistakes early on, preventing deals from going away. Sales management helps you recognize the top-performing sales reps, reward and retain them.
Sales management empowers leaders to identify pitfalls in the current strategy and rework. It helps them uncover what your sales reps are doing better in a conversation and understand their key strengths. When you identify the potential of your sales reps, you can devise appropriate training or assign them to specific functions based on their strengths.
Build a winning sales team with a sales management software
Most of the sales leaders today lack visibility into their sales team's performance. They have to manually listen to each call to assess performance. This not only is time-consuming, but also means you require patience when the sales calls are long.
Your sales manager needs a smarter way of doing things, one that reduces the manual effort in analyzing all your sales conversations. With AI by your side, your sales management software helps sales leaders tap into metrics that matter, reimagine selling, and help reps crush their targets effortlessly.
A conversational intelligence-powered sales management software gives sales leaders insights at a granular level. It analyzes a call to identify patterns, breaks the conversation down into accessible sections, reviews key parameters, and more.
Reimagine sales management with Convin
Convin is a revenue intelligence sales management software that helps sales leaders gain insights into their sales conversations and improve the sales process. With real-time analytics, measure your team's performance and make data-driven decisions to deliver exceptional customer experience and shorten your sales cycle.
1. Get the gist of your conversations in a snap
Automatically transcribe every conversations your sales reps have had. Skim through the call to find out key areas, questions, proposed actions, and more.
With Convin, your sales leaders do not have to go through every word of what your sales reps discuss, just the important ones only.
2. Let AI assess your sales conversation
More than asking the right questions, it is always important to find out if your sales rep provided an exceptional experience. Convin automatically assesses key vitals of your sales calls.
It breaks down the performance of your sales rep, leaving you with key areas to offer on-time feedback and turn a rotting deal into a win.
3. Let your sales team chase their right leads
The right evaluation helps managers coach their team effectively. Convin lets you identify areas that your sales reps need to work on and deliver your inputs right into the products in your sales stack. With the time spent on selling getting shorter, you should ensure that your sales rep makes the best out of their time.
A study by HBR reveals that the time that sales reps spend on pre-sales and post-sales activities are both up by 15%, time spent on non-sales (admin) work is up 21%, and all of this has come at the expense of actual selling time in front of the customer, which is down a full 26%.
With real-time feedback, transform the way your sales reps interact with prospects. Your sales team becomes adept at prospecting and qualifying leads better. With better leads in your sales pipeline, your team spends their time and effort on the right prospects who are willing to convert.
4. Identify your sales rockstars
Review your entire team's performance at a stretch. Discover your top-performing sales reps and what they are doing right. Find out sales reps who are missing out and reach out to them for 1:1 coaching.
Convin also lets you compare sales reps to help deliver data-driven coaching to your sales team. With accurate data in hand, tailor your sales coaching based on your wins, not on hunches.
5. Replicate your best wins
One of the primary responsibilities of a sales leader is to ensure active coaching and high-quality onboarding. Convin lets you create a playbook of your best calls and share them with your team easily.
Don't just stop by celebrating your wins, Convin lets you scale your wins by sharing them with your entire sales team and inspiring them to learn from the best and close more deals.
6. Feedback made easy
Gone are the days when you had to rely on a string of apps to listen to sales calls, record your evaluation and share it with your team.
With Convin, your sales leaders not only can listen to sales calls, but they can also rate the calls, add descriptive feedback and share their assessment within a centralized hub. Your sales reps can review their feedback instantly and help them up to their sales proactively.
Sales management is a force that brings your sales team together. It holds your operations, analytics, and strategy in place setting your reps to win deals consistently. With an AI-powered sales management platform, you get a unified view of all your sales activity and the sales conversations your reps are having.
Convin lets you easily deconstruct sales conversations to highlight what matters and discard the ones that don't. Help your team hone their skills through active mentoring, on-time review, and empower them to turn sales calls into revenue.
Ready to drive sales management based on real-time data and not hunches?
