Sales Management Systems & How To Implement Them

What is a Sales Management System?

Effective sales management systems provide a complete system of best practices to achieve predictive forecast & pipeline management – high quality revenue intelligence. The key to success is a standardized process that all revenue leaders, frontline managers, and reps can follow. Having confidence in the data starts with strong adherence to sales processes. Improving in this area is as much a change management for the team as it is a tool to facilitate these improvements. The best success stories have leaders set a directive, lead by example and regularly inspect progress. Revenue teams need tools that provide a system to support making change easier and faster to adopt as teams learn new disciplines. 

Common Problems With Sales Management

• My CRM data hygiene does not allow an accurate view of my pipeline
• My team is inconsistent in how they inspect pipeline and report to leadership
• We continue to have opportunities slip and need more alarm bells to identify risk

When to implement a Sales Management System?

It’s all about learning repeatable disciplines and a consistent and rigorous approach to managing your book of business with the outcome of closing more revenue. It would be a mistake to think that software alone can solve what is really change management and enablement. Far too many organizations are technology rich but process poor. Change is hard, but with the right tools you can build a foundation of process improvement that will positively impact your bottom line. 

Assess where you are as an organization from a pipeline adherence and forecast perspective. Build standardized processes and views that give the Board, revenue leaders, front line managers, reps, and rev ops the same view of the business. Encourage an execution culture where all personas understand how to measure the business, lead by example, and set regular cadences to inspect progress. This rigor will help the team advance in areas that were previously overlooked due to missing processes and tools to organize the steps needed for success.

In all cases regardless of how an org forecasts, a sales management system helps standardize the pipeline management and inspection process to address hygiene issues and validate where opportunities are in the sales process. This way all managers follow the same procedure, ensuring trust in the data to make accurate predictions about the business. 

Once pipeline management is addressed, organizations can move on to the next steps on their path to predictive forecast improvements. Different organizations have various levels of maturity. Some examples include:

1. Using SFDC to role up all open pipeline and use weighting to predict
2. Stages to drive forecast probability to improve weighting
3. Forecast category to manually set oppportunity probability – using rep/mgr input
4. Spreadsheet to overcome SFDC gap to manage judgment
5. Use of software-based forecast solution to make the spreadsheet process faster/repeatable
6. Predictive Forecasting
7. Predictive Forecasting – Driving Improvements through analysis

Sales management systems help build new disciplines with your team so that when coupled with the right technology, your organization can become truly predictive and more effective at closing revenue. To do this effectively leadership must be involved by setting directives, leading by example and communicating the importance of change management to meet organizational goals.