5 Different types of sales activities: A deeper understanding
Sales teams inevitably face challenges, but successful teams possess the skills to overcome them. The key to a high-performing sales team lies in their ability to concentrate on sales activities that are truly impactful. To understand these valuable activities better, let us look into:
- What are sales activities?
- Different types of sales activities
- Call management
- Opportunity management
- Account management
- Territory management
- Salesforce enablement
What do sales activities mean?
The routine actions carried out by the sales team to accomplish sales goals and generate business outcomes are referred to as sales activities. These activities may include sales planning, cold calling, and emailing. In the book “Cracking the Sales Management Code: The Secrets to Measuring and Managing Sales Performance,” Jason Jordan and Michelle Vazzana offer a complete structure for grasping the association between sales activities, sales objectives, and business results. To gain an understanding of the contents of this book, read our summarised version of “Cracking the Sales Management Code.”
What are the different types of sales activities?
Sales processes rely on a variety of building blocks that contribute to sales activities. These activities enable the sales team to classify, assist, and cultivate their leads, ensuring that their sales pipeline continues to progress.
The various types of sales activities that occur on a daily basis are classified into five distinct groups namely:
- Call management
- Opportunity management
- Account management
- Territory management
- Salesforce enablement
Call Management
Despite technological advancements, there is no substitute for a traditional phone call when it comes to sales. This is why call management remains a crucial aspect of sales activities. To help you gain a better understanding, we have compiled a list of activities, sales metrics, and tools associated with effective call management.
Activities:
The fundamental sales activities linked to call management are careful planning, execution, and analysis, which can significantly impact the results, including the effectiveness of sales calls.
Metrics:
- Pre-call planning: The majority of call management metrics assess the pre-call planning activities, including adherence to the call planning process and utilisation of call plans. Data for these metrics are gathered through salesforce surveys, sales manager observations, and reports generated by sales planning tools. Some of the associated metrics include the percentage of representatives engaging in call planning, average talk time, call plan usage, and several others.
- In-call: Certain sales metrics evaluate the sales team’s in-call performance, such as the number of questions asked, sales representative talk time, and other indicators of salesperson conduct during the call. These metrics are most accurately obtained by observing the sales reps in action.
- Post-call: Metrics linked to post-call activities include the proportion of calls with debriefs and the number of calls logged into the CRM system. These activities usually require manual intervention to capture this information.
Tools:
A successful sales call necessitates a series of queries to be responded to by the sales reps. Some of those questions include:
- What are the call objectives?
- What are the customers’ likely needs?
- What information does the seller want to learn?
- What questions should the seller ask?
- What topics should the seller and the customer discuss?
- What objections might arise?
In conclusion, cooperatively working together between sales reps and sales managers can lead to successful call management. This cooperation allows for control over particular sales goals and helps to achieve successful business outcomes.
Opportunity management
For a moment, think about your company’s approach to managing sales prospects. Do you know if the leads in your pipeline are feasible? Are you aware of the crucial leads your team ought to prioritise? If the answer is “No”, an effective opportunity management system ought to be set up. Opportunity management allows your sales personnel to evaluate, devise, and evaluate a multiphase sales pursuit.
Activities:
The process of opportunity management involves a variety of activities. To begin with, the salesperson collects necessary information about the customer, business, competition, and other external factors that may affect the opportunity. This data can be obtained from online sources, interviews, yearly reports, and industry publications.
The second step is to qualify the opportunity to ensure that it is worth pursuing by assessing it against the predetermined criteria.
Thirdly, a sales strategy is created, including decisions on how to coordinate selling activities with the customer’s buying process and its respective stages. With a solid strategy, the salesperson can close deals quickly and manage opportunities successfully.
Lastly, the strategy must be implemented. The entire organisation must adhere to the strategy and carry it out in order to make the opportunity a success. Unlike call management, opportunity management is a cyclical process. By executing the strategy properly, feedback can be obtained on how to enhance the strategy for future sales.
Metrics:
Measuring the effectiveness of opportunity management requires evaluating metrics such as the number of opportunity plans accomplished, the rate of eligible opportunities, and so on.
Tools:
The opportunity plan serves as a helpful resource for salespeople in navigating the opportunity management process. It can provide direction in tackling queries concerning the opportunity, including:
- What is the nature of the opportunity?
- Is the opportunity qualified?
- Who are the participants in the buying process?
- What is important to them?
- Who is the competition?
- What are our competitive strengths and weaknesses?
- What will we offer the customers and why?
- What mise we do to win?
- What are the steps in sales?
- Who should be involved in the sales process?
- Where are their responsibilities?
Pipeline management encompasses both opportunity management and call management. The only way to advance your pipeline is to organise and monitor the metrics attached to these two processes.
Account management
Bain & Company have stated that retaining an existing customer is seven times more affordable than acquiring a new one. To turn your current customers into key accounts, you must implement an account management technique. The purpose of this plan is to boost sales and maximise the long-term value of a particular set of clients.
Activities:
Essentially, the account management activities are designed to tailor a company’s go-to-market strategy to each customer, requiring careful analysis, planning, and execution at the individual account level. Generally, the account management process consists of the following steps:
To examine the customer’s operations, it is important to become familiar with their long-term plans and near-term objectives that your products or services can satisfy or with which you can find creative solutions. Once you are cognizant of the customer’s demands and you have connected your company’s interests to theirs, you can create a plan to accomplish these objectives. Finally, it comes down to carrying out that plan without any errors.
Metrics:
There are two types of metrics in account management: account-planning metrics, which ensure plans are in place, and account-facing metrics, which track interactions between the company and its customers. Examples of account-planning metrics include percentage account plans complete, and number of completed business plans. Account-facing activity metrics include number of activities per account and number of interactions per account.
Tools:
An account plan is an important resource for account management. It helps the salesperson or the account team to establish their account objectives and come up with a plan to accomplish them. Some of the common inquiries include:
- What are the customer’s strategic initiatives?
- How can we help the customer accomplish them?
- What do we want to get from this account?
- What do we need to provide in order to obtain it?
- Who are the key stakeholders in the account?
- Do they consider us friends?
- What do we need to do in the upcoming month, quarter, year, or longer?
- Who from our organisation must be involved?
Territory management
Managing territories is essential for cost containment and maximising revenue. It involves categorising customers based on various criteria such as industry, size, or location.
Activities:
Territory management helps streamline the sales process, optimising the efficiency of how salespeople use their time and resources. While call management, opportunity management, and account management all seek to improve sales performance when interacting with customers, territory management is focused on maximising the number of quality customers that a salesperson can interact within the given time and resources.
Territory management includes activities like:
- Prioritise your customers: Utilise the company’s existing customer focus goals to decide which customers should be prioritised.
- Define the territory: Allocate the territories to each salesperson.
- Design customer call patterns: This determines who should be contacted.
- Execute calls: Carry out the specified call patterns according to the plan and adjust them depending on any alterations in the situation.
Metrics:
Metrics that can be employed to gauge territory management include the customer count per representative, the account count per salesperson, the mean number of leads issued to a salesperson, the sales calls per representative, and the activity volume per rep.
Tools:
Unlike earlier management activities, territory management activities are done on a regular basis and typically by a centralised team. These activities call for thorough quantitative analysis which can be accomplished with the aid of advanced analytical tools.
Sales force enablement
Aberdeen’s research suggests that successful sales force enablement tactics lead to 32% higher team sales quota attainment, 24% better individual quota accomplishment, and 23% greater lead conversion rate. To facilitate the effectiveness of the sales force, sales force enablement includes providing guidance, instruction, and resources to increase their proficiency.
Activities
Sales force enablement is a collection of tactics that an organisation utilises to improve its sales force’s capability to perform. These tactics cover the methods taken by the salespeople, the systems that back up their efforts, the objectives that are communicated to them, and much more.
- Structure the organisation: It is essential that salespeople have access to the resources required to execute their roles with productivity and proficiency.
- Recruit and hire: Recruiting and hiring are essential to the success of the sales force and the organisation’s ability to reach the market. It is important to find the right personnel to ensure success.
- Train your sales force: In order to adapt to carrying out sales operations, it is necessary to gain the experience and techniques needed.
- Coach individually: Coaching assists in honing a salesperson’s skills in accordance with their distinct learning requirements.
- Equip your salespeople: Employees can be equipped with resources to enhance their selling activities, including tools and job aids like presentations, proposal templates, and more.
- Assess the sales force: This can be achieved through the use of various tools and approaches.
Metrics
Using metrics to gauge various aspects of sales force enablement, such as organisation, recruiting, training, coaching, tools, and assessment can provide useful insights. These metrics may include the number of reps assigned per manager, recruiting spends per FTS, number of training hours, percentage of time spent coaching, and percentage of salespeople assessed. As customer behaviour and competition become more volatile, it is essential to ensure that your sales team is taking the right steps to meet your organisation’s targets. If you’re looking for an expert partner to create effective sales plans, book a free consultation with Pepper Cloud.
This blog was originally published at Pepper Cloud Blogs.
