How to manage a "business to business" sales team

The process of business-to-business sales is changing. Salespeople no longer have as much control as they had in the past. While they used to be completely responsible for managing allocated territories and sales results, sales managers play a much bigger role today. Their support to the team is crucial. If you want your team to be successful, follow the rules which were published on Salesandmarketing.com.

1) Choose suitable targets

Your responsibility is to make sure that your salespeople will talk with the company decision makers during the sales presentation. Select a filter which can determine which companies are  the most likely candidates for the sales success.

2) Define priorities

When a salesperson from your team deals with several sales opportunities, help  determine how much time and effort he should spend on each.  Create principles that explain how your salespeople should work with their time. They should have a prescribed way to achieve defined targets.

3) Monitor the market

You task is to get data which will help you and other leaders  monitor how customers and competitors are behaving in the market. You should also provide data about regulations and technology innovations. Thanks to this information, it will be much easier to find out what works in the market. This data should be available to everyone in your company

4) Keep sales opportunities

It may sometimes happen that priorities in a different department will delay closing a big deal. It is up to you to make certain that significant sales opportunities will be visible to management. They should know that these opportunities are very important for business. Also these sales are needed to maintain the motivation of your salespeople.

5) Know when it is important to expedite

It is you job to speed up opportunities which need to speed up but also know  when speeding up would be ineffective.

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Article source Sales & Marketing Management - a US website for salespeople and marketers
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