Effective sales management needs a common language

Over a coffee a friend who is an international organisational consultant shared this quote with me by Ed Schein, Senior professor at MIT,  ” we do not think about what we see, we see what we are able to think about and talk about”.

That got me thinking about the organisations that I have worked for, and worked with, and their approach to sales management.  The link with Ed Schein’s quote is that a plank of  management success is good communication.  Now I assume that you are like me in that your formal education did not cover the vocab required to effectively manage sales, or anything else for that matter.  It would be hard to do that as each industry, and even organisation, has their specialisms which leads to ‘company speak’.   Actually I need to go further here and say that even within organisations the sub-elements are likely to create their own local lexicon.

For a very small company with just a couple of sales reps the need to have a formal sales management lexicon may not be that high, but once that sales force grows beyond that their are significant benefits is creating an end to end sales process with associated lexicon.  These benefits are:

• Better customer experience

• Clarity about opportunities

• Clarity about pipeline

• Less time spent in the sales management process

Now if you are a big corporation you will be able to afford to bring in consultants who will build you a sophisticated, and hopefully effective, sales management system.  However,  if you don’t have the budget for consultants, and assuming you are experienced in your own business, it is perfectly possible to build a sales management system.  Here are the things that need to be considered:

• The story of a sale.  Right from the glint in its parents eyes, to the customer actually getting value/satisfaction.

• The opportunity.  What are the key elements that describe an opportunity?

• Validity.  What are the three or four questions that will test the validity of an opportunity.

• Pipeline description.  What stages do you want to mark in the progression of an opportunity?  How are odds of a win assigned?

There is a lot more that can be considered, but just looking at those four will be a good start.