In the ever-evolving world of sales, Sales Managers play a pivotal role in steering their sales teams towards success. This article focuses on the specific pain points of Sales Managers and how deploying the next generation of smart sales software offers essential features to help them gain control, create visibility, and build a repeatable sales process that leads to increased revenue.
At g2m, we are unapologetic advocates for HubSpot's Sales Hub software as we believe it's the best sales toolset for sales managers (and their teams) in the world, however this list should provide a handy general list of pain points and how to solve them.
Sales Managers: The Drivers of Sales Team Excellence
Sales Managers are the lynchpins of the sales process, responsible for coaching and guiding their sales reps to achieve their targets. However, they face distinct challenges that require precise solutions.
Let's explore the primary pain points of Sales Managers and how today's latest sales tools can be used to address them:
1. Visibility and Control
Pain Point: Sales Managers need to have a clear, real-time view of their team's performance. This includes not only tracking metrics and KPIs but also having control over the sales process to ensure it's repeatable and efficient.
How Your Chosen Sales Tool Should Help: Sales tools should equip Sales Managers with robust reporting functionality that provides insights into every aspect of their team's performance. Whether it's monitoring sales pipelines or tracking individual progress, it should deliver the visibility and control necessary for informed decision-making.
2. Conversation Intelligence
Pain Point: Understanding the nuances of customer interactions and sales calls is crucial for coaching and improving the team's performance.
How Your Chosen Sales Tool Should Help: Sales Tools should offer Conversation Intelligence features that allow Sales Managers to analyse calls and meetings. This provides valuable insights into what strategies work and where improvements are needed. With this tool, Sales Managers can fine-tune coaching efforts to enhance their team's skills.
3. Sales Engagement Tools
Pain Point: Sales Managers require tools that enable their team to engage effectively with prospects and clients while maintaining consistency and efficiency.
How Your Chosen Sales Tool Should Help: Your software should empower Sales Managers to create a highly effective team. These tools streamline communication with prospects through powerful, intelligent automation features and offer centralised content repositories for easy access to sales collateral. These repositories help reps articulate the right message at the right time and share helpful content with prospects that move them through their buying process. The goal of sales engagement tools is to reduce friction in the buying process.
4. Playbooks
Pain Point: Consistency in sales tactics and methodologies is crucial for success, and Sales Managers need a structured approach to achieve this.
How Your Chosen Sales Tool Should Help: Make sure your tools provide Playbooks that serve as guides for every member of the sales team. These playbooks standardise sales strategies, facilitate faster onboarding for new team members, and can be adapted based on evolving market dynamics.
5. Ease of Use
Pain Point: User-friendly tools are essential for Sales Managers who need their team to quickly adopt and effectively utilize new technologies.
How Your Chosen Sales Tool Should Help: Your sales tools should have been built with ease of use in mind, reducing training time and costs. For busy sales teams and their managers, having an intuitive interface ensures faster adoption of new tools and processes, leading to improved user satisfaction and productivity.
Sales Managers in smaller and mid-sized organisations, have unique challenges and needs. Take time to find and test a comprehensive solution that addresses all your pain points by providing visibility, control, conversation intelligence, sales engagement tools, playbooks, and user-friendly features.
If you've got some time, we'd suggest checking out HubSpot's sales tools. If you need someone to talk through your specific situation and help you define your needs or simply to discuss your challenges, please book a time below.
