To excel in sales, one must first excel in sales management. Many companies' poor sales performance—such as sluggish product sales, piles of accounts receivable, unmotivated salespeople, and high sales expenses—is not due to incorrect sales strategies or lack of effort from salespeople, but rather to inadequate sales management.
Sales Taboo #1: No Sales Plan The basic rule of sales is to formulate a sales plan and sell according to that plan. Sales plan management includes not only how to set a feasible sales target but also the methods to achieve it. Specifically, it involves: analyzing the current market situation and the company's status to set clear sales targets, collection targets, and other qualitative and quantitative goals; preparing budgets and budget allocation plans based on these targets; and assigning specific personnel, responsibilities, and timelines.
However, many companies have a series of problems in sales plan management: for example, no clear annual, quarterly, or monthly market development plans; sales targets are not based on accurate market opportunities or effective resource organization but are made up arbitrarily; sales plans are not broken down by region, customer, product, or salesperson, making them impossible to implement; branch sales plans are the result of bargaining between branches and headquarters; management only gives salespeople target numbers without guiding them on how to implement plans; and many companies never quantify the various tasks in the sales plan to each salesperson, so salespeople cannot develop specific sales activity plans based on their assigned targets and tasks. Some salespeople even don't know how to formulate their own sales plans. Without a clear market development plan, sales work loses its direction, and various sales strategies, plans, and measures are not coordinated, budgets are uncertain, personnel are not assigned, sales activities lack spatial and temporal concepts, and there are no monitoring or effectiveness checks. In a competitive market, the company's sales efforts are like a wild bull charging into a fire, crashing around until it ends up battered and bruised.
Sales Taboo #2: No Process Control "Only results, not process"—not supervising or controlling salespeople's actions is a common problem in many companies. Many companies manage their salespeople's actions very loosely: they announce a sales policy, then release salespeople into the market like pigeons, waiting for them to bring back orders and develop markets.
This leads to a series of problems: salespeople act without plans or assessments; their actions cannot be controlled, so sales plans have no guarantee of realization; the sales process is not transparent, increasing business risk; salespeople work inefficiently with high sales expenses; sales skills do not improve, and team building is weak.
"No pain, no gain." Without effective management and control of the sales process, there will be no good performance results.
Isn't Haier's "3E" management method—managing every salesperson's every day and every task—an important guarantee for the smooth development of Haier's sales work?
Sales Taboo #3: No Customer Management A grain of wheat has three fates: first, it is ground into flour and consumed, realizing its own value; second, it is sown as seed, producing a rich harvest and creating new value; third, due to poor storage, it rots and loses its value. This means that with proper management, the wheat realizes its value or creates new value for humanity; with poor management, it loses its value.
Similarly, if a company manages its customers well, customers will have sales enthusiasm, actively cooperate with the manufacturer's policies, and strive to sell products; if management is poor, it leads to sales risks. However, many companies do not effectively manage their customers, resulting in an inability to mobilize customer enthusiasm or control sales risks. Common problems in the sales process, such as customer disloyalty, channel stuffing, and piles of accounts receivable, are all results of poor customer management.
Sales Taboo #4: No Information Feedback Information is the lifeblood of decision-making. Salespeople are on the front lines, knowing market trends, consumer needs, competitor changes, and distributor requirements. Timely feedback of this information to the company is crucial for decision-making. On the other hand, problems in sales activities should also be reported quickly to management so they can take timely action. However, many companies have not established a systematic reporting system to collect and feedback information promptly.
Salespeople's work results include two aspects: sales volume and market information. For the company's development, sales volume is not as important as market information. Because sales volume is yesterday's, already realized, and unchangeable, it has no significance for the company; what matters is market information, as it determines tomorrow's sales performance and market. Yet many companies neither require salespeople to collect information nor establish a reporting system to collect and feedback information promptly.
Problems in sales work are not scary. What is scary is the inability to promptly discover problems in various aspects of marketing activities and provide timely management feedback so that these problems can be quickly resolved without causing major harm.
Why do some companies have long-term inaccurate customer files? Why do some companies have recurring receivables that are not corrected? Why do some companies have repeated similar incidents that cannot be fundamentally solved? Why do some companies fail to discover serious marketing problems for a long time, only to find themselves on the brink of bankruptcy when they do? The root cause is the lack of monitoring and management of various information during the marketing process, especially the lack of timely institutionalized management feedback.
Sales Taboo #5: No Performance Assessment Many companies do not regularly assess salespeople's performance. Regular quantitative and qualitative assessments should include evaluating sales results (e.g., sales volume, collections, profit, and number of customers) and sales actions (e.g., average number of visits per day, time per visit, average income per visit, average cost per visit, orders per 100 visits, new customers developed in a period, old customers lost in a period, and the proportion of sales expenses to total sales). Qualitative assessments should include cooperation spirit, work enthusiasm, and loyalty and responsibility to the company. Assessing salespeople serves two purposes: it provides a basis for determining compensation, rewards and punishments, elimination, and promotion, thereby motivating salespeople; and it helps analyze and review performance to aid their improvement. An important part of sales management is cultivating salespeople's abilities; if they don't improve, sales performance won't increase.
Sales Taboo #6: Incomplete Systems Many companies lack systematic and comprehensive sales management systems and policies that match them.
For a company's sales work to avoid major problems, a prerequisite is that the sales management system has no obvious defects or omissions, is systematic and mutually constraining, and has corresponding sales management policies. Some companies have strict punishment provisions for salespeople who violate regulations and cause major losses, but in practice, these punishments cannot be implemented because there are no supporting systems. As a result, some salespeople who enrich themselves through kickbacks while causing huge uncollectible receivables simply leave when discovered, and the company cannot punish them.
Many companies' sales management systems are incomplete, like a "barrel" missing a plank, unable to hold water. The characteristics are: many behaviors that should be encouraged are not, and some that should be punished are not stipulated; there are no reward provisions for encouraged behaviors and no punishment systems for prohibited behaviors; rewards are not promptly granted, and punishments cannot be effectively executed.
Establishing a Comprehensive Sales Management System Practice shows that unmanaged sales has become a trap hindering the smooth progress of sales work. To sell products well, companies must establish a comprehensive sales management system.
Sales Plan Management: The core is the reasonable decomposition of sales targets across important dimensions, including product variety, region, customer, salesperson, settlement method, sales method, and time schedule. The decomposition process is both a implementation and persuasion process, and it also tests the rationality and challenge of the targets, allowing timely adjustments. A reasonable and realistic sales plan can reflect both market crises and opportunities during implementation, and is key to strict management, ensuring sales efficiency and effort.
Salesperson Action Process Management: The core is to manage and monitor salespeople's actions around the main sales tasks, focusing their work on valuable projects. This includes developing: monthly sales plans, monthly action plans, weekly action plans, daily sales reports, monthly work summaries and next month's key points, rolling sales forecasts, competitive product analysis, market inspection reports, weekly fixed visit routes, and market registration reports.
Customer Management: The core tasks are enthusiasm management and market risk management. The key to mobilizing customer enthusiasm and positivity lies in profit and prospects; the key to market risk management is customer credit, capability, and market price control. Management tools and methods include: customer profile cards, customer strategy cards, and customer monthly evaluation cards.
Results Management: Management of salespeople's action results includes two aspects: performance evaluation and market information research. Performance evaluation includes: sales volume and collections, execution of sales reporting systems, sales expense control, compliance with management, market planning, and progress. Information research includes: company performance, competitor information (e.g., quality, price at wholesale and retail levels, product variety, market trends), and customer information.
The key to sales management is comprehensiveness, systemization, and professionalism.
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