When considering how to boost your revenue and grow your business, what comes to mind? Evolving your product line? Reaching your audience in new ways? Launching a brand awareness campaign?

Have you ever considered the team working to sell your products? Specifically, the managers who lead your sales teams? These are the folks who oversee the team that communicates directly with your prospects and customers on a daily basis.

Although your product line, buyer personas, and brand awareness are important, sales managers are uniquely critical to the success of any business. They have the potential to unlock huge returns that impact the business’s revenue and growth.

Think about it this way: If you’re a sales manager and you help each of your 10 reps sell 20% more, you’ve essentially just "created” two new salespeople. Sales managers are uniquely powerful when it comes to boosting your bottom line.

In this guide, we’ll cover the reasons why getting sales management right is so important. We’ll also discuss some sales management processes, strategies, and resources to help your team become high impact players for your business.

Sales managers do this by implementing sales management processes, strategies, and objectives to help their team hit or exceed their targets and goals.

Sales Management Process

Sales management isn’t a linear process — everyone’s strategies and responsibilities look slightly different depending on their team, products, and resources. (We’ll talk more about these throughout this piece.)

Generally, sales managers manage at least four main components: people, strategy, activity, and reporting. These are the four "steps" of the sales management process we’ll cover below.

Sales Hiring and People Management

A sales team is only as good as their manager, and in order for he or she to lead an outstanding team, they need to first hire outstanding people. The first part of the sales management process is hiring a solid sales team. This involves writing strong job descriptions, interviewing eligible candidates, and working with HR to create fair sales compensation plans.

This stage also applies to people management. This involves sales training and coaching, as well as team-building and morale-boosting activities.

Sales Strategy Development and Management

Sales managers are responsible for setting the vision and strategy for their sale steam. One critical part of this is building the sales process that their team will follow. This process keeps the team aligned and working toward the same goals by following the same steps, ultimately creating an autonomous, well-oiled machine.

Developing a sales process will also allow management and to identify inefficiencies and notice where their team can improve.

Sales Activity Management

Next, sales managers are responsible overseeing the day-to-day activity of their sales team — from prospecting to close. This involves celebrating wins, understanding losses, and advocating for the team as a whole.

Sales management is just as much as the people as it is about the sales. This means that managers should keep a close eye on daily sales activity and address issues and wins when necessary.

Sales Reporting Management

The last step in the sales management process is analyzing and reporting on sales activity. Like with a sales process, sales managers should also create a systematized reporting process so their sales team knows where and when they’re being measured as well as how they can improve. This process could include reporting on win rate, average sales cycle, and lead-to-opportunity conversion rate.

Sales managers are also responsible for using this data to forecast future sales revenue and update team standards and goals.

Source - Read More at: blog.hubspot.com