The Complete Guide to Sales Team Management

Managers, what are you doing to manage your sales team right now? Even if you’re a sales rep reading this, this team management guide will still help you. Managers and reps alike have a responsibility to their team to use the best strategies and tools out there to secure success.

So take a few minutes to read our guide and share below what you’re doing right now that works or doesn’t work for your team. 

What is team management?

Sales management is a key portion of the sales process. According to Salesforce, “Sales management encompasses hiring, training and motivating the sales team, forecasting sales and setting sales goals, and developing effective strategies for managing leads and increasing sales. Sales is the primary benchmark of success for many companies, so having an effective sales management process is paramount.”

The Guide to Quality Sales Team Management

Map your sales territories and track routes

Territory management and route planning is a big part of successfully operating a sales team, and doing it wrong wastes time and loses deals.

Using an efficient territory mapping software makes it easy to draw out areas, assign them to reps, and visually track their progress through those areas. You’ll be working areas intelligently, efficiently, and quickly.

A good territory mapping tool should do at least a few of the following:

• Map your customers to strategically incorporate them into your canvassing.
• Track progress through the area and maximize opportunities.
• Allow you to view previous canvassing results and follow up on missed leads.

If you do a great job mapping your sales territories, you’ll still fail if you don’t plan your routes to prospects to be the best route possible. Map tools like Google Maps and Apple Maps can usually get you where you need to go but it requires a lot of data input. To avoid this, get a sales app that has built-in map capabilities. We won’t lie, SalesRabbit is your best option out there but if you want all the information for other D2D sales apps, check out our free buyers guide download. 

Track sales reps activities

Just like you track your sales territories, the activities of sales reps should also be tracked. We don’t mean micromanage your reps until they go crazy, rather we suggest you focus on their numbers for the day that are displayed in apps like SalesRabbit. Managing outside sales reps can be tough because you often have no idea how they’re spending their day. Are they working their entire area and are they doing it strategically? Or are they enjoying free WiFi at the local McDonald’s? If you don’t know, you can’t improve the situation.

A great sales rep tracker solves that problem by giving you data on the performance and whereabouts of your rep. Which takes us to our next part of the team management guide. 

Be transparent about stats and rep performance

All good managers (and reps for that matter) should be constantly aware of what their team is doing and their sales stats. Team messaging apps like Slack, Google chats, WhatsApp, Voxer, even SalesRabbit are helpful to keeping sales teams in the loop at all times, share important company updates, incentivize team members and more. 

In addition to using team messaging apps, rep leaderboards is a newer tool a lot of successful teams use. If you’re not familiar with what rep leaderboards are, they’re a digital board that ranks each member of your sales teams numerically based on key performance indicators (KPIs) like: number of doors knocked, closure percentage, people contacted, etc. Using a leaderboard tool will do the following for your team:

• Internal culture of healthy competition between reps.
• Improved job satisfaction.
• Trackable metrics to see how they are improving.
• Improved continual rep performance.
• All Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) available in one place.
• Rewards for top performers.

Take control of your team management now

As you have probably figured out, SalesRabbit does all of the things listed above for quality team management. If you’re interested in talking about any and all of these tools with us, schedule a demo with us now. 

Share below what your current solutions are for team management, we want to know!