The biggest frustrations of sales managers

The sales manager can be one of the toughest jobs. In many ways, you have a great responsibility - but you have to depend on the success of your team. You are requested to play the role of manager, business analyst, trainer, therapist, counselor, and so on. No matter which combination is yours, you will always face ups and downs of it. They'll be times when you will be impressed and grateful for the things that are going well, and those less pleasant moments of anger, sadness, even frustration. But what is bothering you the most? And most importantly, what will you do about it?A study on LinkedIn tries to answer the first question - and the results are as follows: the biggest disappointment among the respondents is that salespeople do not follow the sales process. Such a result is not surprising. But the truth is that even other listed frustrations (accurate forecast, pipeline with useless opportunities, start/completion of sales activities and opportunity is stuck), would be greatly reduced if the sales process was clear.

There are only two reasons for this problems. The first is lack of knowledge and skills, and second lack of will. In other words, one does not know how to complete the task or is unwilling to do it. You can overcome the first reason with training and the second one is, well, harder to address.Most sales professionals are aware that following a well-designed sales process, that is easy to use, best fits their business, and solves the equation of effort-reward, is not much to think about. If you follow the process, you sell more, a fact.Sales managers need to ask themselves 10 questions when guiding their team to use the sales process:

1. Does the sales process correspond to the way our typical customers want to buy?
2. Is the sales process consistent with our industry, product or service?
3. Do all supporting departments within the company understand the sales process to the extent that they can have a constructive conversation with the sales staff?
4. Is the sales process easy to use and is integrated with your CRM?
5. Does following the sales process help to forecast more accurately or is the sales team spending additional time for that?
6. Does the sales process have integrated measures to remove useless prospects form the pipeline?
7. Is the sales process leading sales people to successful deal signing?
8. Do you manage your opportunities using the sales process as a compass?
9. Is sales support and guarantee well integrated throughout the process?
10. Have you captured your skills, methodology and best practices in every step of your sales process?

If you can answer yes to 7 of this questions, than your sales team is probably doing a good job. If you can not do so, then do not blame the team for not following the sales process. Improve your process first.