Inside Sales Lead Management Featured Article

Any sales organization hoping to succeed needs to keep its salespeople focused on selling. While that’s generally the job description, it’s not always reality. In fact, salespeople and their managers often find themselves spending their days doing anything but.

“Often, salespeople and front-line managers get bogged down in forecasts, reviews, hiring and recruiting,” wrote Rachel Clapp Miller of Force Management in a recent article for Business2Community. “In fact McKinsey Global reports that salespeople spend less than half their day selling.”

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the less time salespeople spend actively selling, the worse off the organization will be. The companies may have good intentions – they want salespeople to be as trained and educated as possible about the products and services they sell – but often, the bottom line is that these tasks become time-consuming. It’s therefore in every company’s best interest to make it easier for their salespeople to sell.

“This means providing them with sales consumable information that they can access and execute with their prospects and customers,” wrote Miller. “The tools they use in their sales planning and execution processes should be practical and repeatable. If you don’t have a mechanism that enables your sales team to drive efficient pipeline, forecast accurately and effectively move opportunities through the sales process, you can guarantee your team will spend more time with organizational logistics than with their opportunities and customers.”

For most organizations, sales automation solutions that make it easy for sales personnel to find the information and contact information they need can help pay for themselves in increased revenue, as can automation solutions that make it easier for managers to do their jobs. Miller notes that it’s in a company’s best interest to develop a solid operating rhythm that allows managers and front-line salespeople to begin “speaking the same language” and helps everyone get clear on the benchmarks needed to be successful.

Lead management solutions such as those provided by VanillaSoft can help put data – necessary to support the foundation of the sales process – into easier-to-consume and manage formats, particularly thanks to integration with customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. The solutions can automate scripting and outbound calling, and allow managers and salespeople to prioritize and score leads. Lead integration, distribution and customizable work flow capabilities take the juggling out of the sales process, and ensure that salespeople don’t need to act as part-time research analysts before they can begin selling.

Automation can provide dramatic improvements in the sales process. Sales professionals can spend more time selling and less time shuffling paperwork or toggling between applications. Companies simply can’t succeed if salespeople aren’t allowed to do their jobs.