The complex nature of B2B sales structure demands Sales Managers to accomplish myriads of tasks. These tasks involve everything between coaching the team to managing customer relationships. There is perpetual pressure on the team and sales managers to win and maintain large value accounts for the organization without wasting time.
How do successful sales managers allocate their time?
According to Willis Towers Watson report, a successful sales manager spends 14% more time per year in selling activities. Apart from that “managers will spend time with lower-performing sales reps to provide extra coaching and guidance, while spending more time with better-performing members on other activities such as co-selling or performance reinforcement”
By optimizing your time, as a senior sales manager, you can achieve:
- Streamlined sales process where leads get handled faster
- More time to coach and train your staff
- Time to filter and focus on high-value targets
- Use of cleaner data and information for smarter and faster decision making
- Clear goals with a well-made plan, which saves more time
- Time to help your team prepare for a demo, first appointment, personalized marketing content etc.
- And of course, all these together lead towards better revenue!
How to optimize your time as a sales manager
1) Streamline administrative and non-revenue generating tasks
A sales manager’s principal role is to train the salespeople so that they could reach the goal. If most of your time is spent on doing administrative tasks then you need to revisit your and your organization’s priorities. You could be asked to track and report daily sales figures and provide revenue data to the CEO as and when required. In that case, don’t hold back from implementing or using tools and dashboards for non-revenue generating activities such as pulling out data and reports. Most of the times the number of reports that get generated and published doesn’t even get opened.
After all, as a sales manager, your primary focus should be to guide your team in sales strategies for acquiring new clients!
2) Keep track of time to optimize it
Start by evaluating all the meetings that you attend to ensure that next time you go to the effective ones. As a senior sales manager, you are entrusted with the task of achieving sustained sales volume, which needs elimination of distractions around you. Get an overview of where your sales team is spending time and what are the stalled deals. Such continuous evaluation will help you focus straightaway on valuable activities.
Sales managers get back time to spend on sales management activities such as resource planning, coaching, recruiting, interacting with the team members and stakeholders.
3) Utilize data to manage your time
Allow data to show you the entire picture of your sales pipeline so that you with your team can focus on formulating strategies to acquire high-valued accounts. Nothing can give you better impact than having data-driven predictions and sales forecasts.
Data will help you manage resources and time allocation adequately to ensure timelines and key milestones are met!
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