Question posted by Jill Myrick at the Sales Playbook Group on LinkedIn
Blue Collar Sales Response:
Having been on both sides of that coin it will be difficult to pick just one piece of advice, especially since so many good points have been made. Here goes:
Don’t ask your sales people how you can help them – you should already know.
Don’t ask them to call when they need you – you should already know.
Focus on maximizing technology (CRM, MA, etc.) to eliminate ALL manual reporting (outside the CRM) and time wasting meetings. If sales people are filling out spreadsheets, sending word docs, written call reports, or emailing updates you are not leveraging technology, your CRM is not optimized and both you and your team are wasting valuable time.
Go fight for maximizing these tools instead of hounding your team for updates.
This week alone I heard several senior level sales leaders mention, “clean up” in the field. Not one of them, all of them! It was almost as if they met prior and shared notes – and they were all from different companies. It was clear they meant administrative clean up. It was clear that the topic was a dead horse when the comments were delivered and it was certainly clear that it was the damper on an otherwise good meeting.
If you can fight to put the systems in place and maximize their automation so that sales people can quickly update leads, accounts, and calls and you can include the fields that allow you to analyze the situation you will simplify both the salespersons life as well as your own.
Then you can focus on creating a collaborative environment where you can learn to win as a team.
You do not have to settle for doing things the way they always have been. Fix the mechanics of the system, establish the proper analytics within those systems, use them yourself, and you will know when and how you can help your team.
Good Luck and Great Selling
Blue Collar Sales
