What Do My Sales People Do All Day and How Do I Manage Them?

By: Barry Hinckley
Date: 11/1/2005

As a lifelong salesman, I can tell you it's tough to manage salespeople. We pay salespeople a small amount of money to find opportunities, build bonds and deliver a message. If they are successful at the first three tasks they get invited to the dance. We pay them more money if they politely fend-off the other suitors and win the dance competition. But when we ask them to keep a diary of the moves they use in pursuit of the prize - the answer is usually, "You don't pay me to take notes, you pay me to win business."

Good salespeople generally have strong personalities and look at the world and its challenges as an individual competition. They don't think in terms of team. This doesn't necessarily make them selfish, just self-reliant. So naturally, they really don't care how the guy next to them is doing and team goals are secondary to their own goals. Remember, unlike a hockey team, whose goal is to score and win as a team, we pay salespeople to score and win as individuals. This is the prevailing mindset of salespeople and sales teams.

Stepping back from this reality, all owners and managers will tell you that of course individual contributors are key, but to properly manage and grow a sales organization, a team approach must be taken. Strong companies are built on the back of strong sales TEAMS, not individuals. Teams are built on process and structure, very often things salespeople avoid. So the question remains: "How do I learn from the individual salespeople so that both they and the team can benefit?" It is the age-old question - what are they doing all day and how are the good ones successful?

It all comes back to metrics. Unfortunately, the traditional sales and recruiting databases rely heavily on compulsory note-taking and data entry for management metrics. The good salespeople will always find this bothersome (see thoughts on this above) and many entry-level salespeople will get mired down in them and miss the real goal of getting business in the door.

Fortunately today, Web-native technology has enabled the advent of "workflow natural" relational databases. Leveraging a highly configurable interface, not previously possible with traditional client-server technology, an enterprise-level Webnative solution (commonly referred to as "On Demand" technology) can bring the entire desktop and workflow of a salesperson or recruiter into one interface. Because all activity happens in one place and database, including email and dialing, the activity of the producer is accrued passively as people work, and the need to "double back and write down what you did," is eliminated. Furthermore, the inherent technology and architecture of Web-native solutions allow companies to react quickly to the changing demands of business with easy third-party application integration, and of course, detailed user interface adjustment...without writing any code.

Every company owner and manager owes it to themselves and the salespeople or recruiters they manage to consider enterprise-level Web-native data management solutions. There is massive power in deploying a "workflow natural" solution that consolidates all desktop activity and will passively pull together most of the metrics you need to build and scale a sales team. If you need help in identifying the real Web-native solutions from the Web-enabled imposters...give me a call.

Barry Hinckley is the Founder and President of Bullhorn, Inc. He can be contacted at 888.298.4556 x 101, or by email at barry@bullhorn.com.