Manage Your Sales Team, Not Your CRM

Sales management can be grueling work. Sales leaders are tasked with driving motivation in their reps, teaching them the technical skills they need to make a sale, tracking their productivity, making sure sales outreach is in line with marketing-approved messaging and much more. To top things off, most sales organizations are working under a tremendous amount of pressure, trying to beat the clock to make monthly and quarterly sales goals.

With all these competing factors and data points, managing a sales team with the aid of a CRM system may seem like a good idea. However, sales people notoriously despise CRM systems. And, it’s easy to see why. For many organizations, CRM systems add just another to-do item on an already overworked sales team. It’s a lot of following a process, tracking every action, checking the boxes. In other words, it can be an administrative hassle that no one goes out of their way to embrace.

What is your goal as a sales leader?

As a sales leader, you may feel like you don’t many alternatives to a CRM system. At the end of the day, you must track time and progress. But what if there was an automated method to track the progress of your team and the individuals on it – a way that would cut the hassle of a CRM system and allow everyone to move faster?

Count on dashboards to track your entire sales funnel.

If your CRM system is becoming more of a hassle than a help, it may be time to evaluate dashboards as a sales management tool. Dashboards accomplish your core goal: to manage your team and demonstrate progress to your company’s leadership team. But they take things farther than a CRM ever could by making the data visual and easy to share. And, at the end of your day, your sales team is still held accountable and you’ve cut out the hours it takes for you to consolidate data or run reports.

Do the following sales dashboards fall in line with the data that you need to track?

• Lead Funnel: Yes, every CRM has some sort of lead funnel. It’s a cool little graphic that looks like a funnel and tells you the number of deals and value. But, what is it NOT telling you?
  > How long have the leads have been in each stage?
  > What is the average sales cycle of each rep?
• Top Sales Reps: Everyone knows who the top reps are. The question becomes, how easily can you quantify their production based on the behavior of their deals along the sales cycle?
  > Are top sales reps actually behavior cohorts?
  > Do you have the details to translate their success into teaching opportunities?
• Accountability: Does every rep receive an expectation report each morning?
  > Can every rep know what things they can do immediately to be more successful?
  > Is their success or failure a surprise? Do they see it coming?
• Executive Sales Report: Can you take all your sales data and roll it up into a no-nonsense snapshot of where you’re at for the day, the month, or quarter? Are you able to easily provide your executives the KPIs they count on in a format that won’t give either of you a headache?

Make an impression.

Sales dashboards reduce much of the administrative complexities that come with CRM systems. But they also serve to make a bright impression on your management team. Concise, visual reports that are easy to understand and share are a win, regardless of where your sales numbers stand.