Sales keeps the business running, but who keeps the sales team running? The role of a sales manager is by no means an easy one. Whether you moved from rep to management or saw this as the ideal opportunity to move up the ladder, you know that managing a sales team is stressful. Just because it’s on your sales team to meet quotas, their success reflects on you.
The Many Hats of the Sales Manager
It takes a special kind of person to be a sales manager. The glue that holds a sales department together, it’s your job to deal with egos, track results, enforce policies, coach reps, and lay the groundwork for success.
For many sales managers, this also means you have to make a lot of tough decisions. It’s hard to find the right salespeople, harder to keep them, and even harder to part ways with them if they don’t stand up to expectations.
While much of the job may be tough, much of it can be incredibly rewarding. Seeing your team click, watching someone go from underperforming to blowing quotas out of the water after a bit of coaching, or noticing that you hit quarterly goals early—these are all some of the high points for sales managers.
Sales Managers Need a Clear Picture
Of course, the goal is to increase the wins and decrease the losses. In order to get there, you need to understand where you’ve been, where you are, and where you’re going.
As the sales landscape evolves and becomes more technologically enabled, the sales management landscape will do so as well. For today’s sales manager, it’s much more than revenue and sales figures.
With CRM generating more data than ever and integration allowing you to track new metrics, you’ll also need to understand how to measure it if you hope to get a clear picture. Enter business intelligence.
Business intelligence gives leaders the ability to connect data from a variety of sources, visualize it in a way that makes the most sense, and drill down to learn the why behind the what.
For example, you could start with a common sales management metric like win rate. Relatively common and easy to measure. But say you want to compare this with the number of service calls or complaints after the sale, or discover which sales reps have the highest attrition or churn. With business intelligence, you can, and you’re only a few clicks away.
ERP, CRM, and Business Intelligence: Take Control with Acumatica
As the person responsible for the success of your sales team, you want more than just data sitting in a spreadsheet. You want the information you need presented in a format for you and fellow stakeholders to make decisions about your business or react to competitive market challenges.
Whether you’re generating reports or tracking trends, the right business intelligence solution, customized for your business and unique needs, can deliver new ways to analyze—all tailored to the person who needs the information.
If you’re looking to take control of sales management, you need to be in the know. Acumatica delivers. But if you want to go even further, connecting data from even more sources, you can easily export this data to the affordable and easy to use Power BI solution.
As a leading Acumatica Partner, the Crestwood team can help you do more with your business data. Get to know more about Acumatica, our variety of Crestwood-designed add-ons including Advanced Commissions, 360 Sales View, and Inventory Substitutions for Acumatica designed to make salespeople and sales managers more efficient, and get in contact with us for more information.
