Sales managers at small businesses face countless challenges on a daily basis; for many of them, overcoming these very challenges is why they love going to work every morning. We’re blessed with the opportunity to speak with sales managers every day as a part of our quest to create sales software that improves how they and their teams work together and with customers. Below, we’ve distilled those discussions into three often-heard challenges and their solutions, in the hope that others can use the insights to tackle these challenges more effectively.
Challenge #1: Finding and Recruiting the Right People
It is no secret that with each passing year the job market becomes a bit more tumultuous as people continuously search for the “perfect job” with a “grass is greener on the other side” mentality. With this predicament in mind, hiring the right team of sales associates continues to be a top challenge faced sales managers. To overcome this challenge, be sure to keep copious success metrics and notes on all of your employees. Then, before you hire someone new, identify the most common traits among your best employees, and screen for those traits among new hires to improve your chances of finding superstars.
Challenge #2: Training, Development, and Coaching
Without the proper training, development, and coaching, it is hard to make sure that the sales associates under your management are performing at their best. However, for a busy sales manager it can be equally challenging to try and find the time needed to properly train, develop, and coach employees. Try using customer relationship management (CRM) software to help streamline and automate portions of your sales process. By doing that, you can free up time to provide your employees with some much needed support. Additionally, to spot associates that could use your help, CRM sales reports can show you employee engagement, win rates, revenue generated, and beyond so that performance is always improving.
Challenge #3: Creating Customer Loyalty
Establishing a loyal customer base is crucial to the success of any small business. In 2015 J. Crew’s failure to create a loyal customer base was heard around the world, thanks to a March article in The Washington Post, which stated, “J. Crew is learning the hard way that in an era when ecommerce has presented women with ever-greater shopping choices, customer loyalty is hard to win and incredibly easy to lose.” In 2016, take the time to truly get to know your customers, and to reach out and support them proactively. Doing so will ensure that they purchase more, refer more, and that more of them become your brand ambassadors.
Overcoming many sales management challenges starts with finding the right CRM software
Leveraging the right tools and technologies can go a long way towards alleviating most challenges small businesses face in sales management. Instead of becoming overwhelmed by the many different software packages out there, try using one easy-to-implement solution that helps you streamline and automate tasks. For example, Vtiger CRM can help you to build and track your sales process, assign deals and contacts to sales reps, automate sales tasks, and measure performance of your sales people so that you know who to promote, and who to train. And because Vtiger captures information from contacts from marketing to customer service, your sales reps will know more about them, and will be better positioned to reach out more effectively, create more value, and engender loyalty.
What sales challenges are you wrangling in 2016? Share it with us in the comments below. We’d love to explore it with you, and could even make solving it the subject of our next blog post!
