25 Aug Three Ways to Help Busy Salespeople Focus

Companies are learning that people are no longer willing to sacrifice life for work. They want those pain points gone, or at the very least minimized. Work process and tools need to change with the times.

So, the question is: how do you help your account manager manage their work in this IOT world?

The answer? Enterprise Sales Support.

Enterprise Sales Support (ESS) pairs busy account managers with specialists who create a framework to manage action items, milestones and deliverables. It removes the logistical and administrative responsibilities from busy professionals who need to spend their time doing what they do best: building relationships with potential clients and strengthening relationships with existing clients by asking questions, discovering their clients’ problems and working to build solutions for their clients.

In other words, ESS helps account teams focus in an Internet of Things world so they can close enterprise sales faster. This, in turn, frees busy salespeople’s time to focus on more customers and more revenue.

Here are three ways an ESS specialist can help busy sales professionals focus in an IOT world.

1. Say Good Bye to Administration

   A ESS specialist takes the administrative side of the sale: the meeting scheduling, the phone calls, the action item chasing and other logistics. He organizes, and facilitates, regular meetings with the account manager and his teams to keep track of action items and to see what may be lagging behind. He provides frequent status updates and removes other administrative headaches, such as creating PowerPoint decks to update management and customers, running the spreadsheet analytics typically needed to make decisions on complex pricing issues and interacting with the customer project managers to ensure what they need to do gets done so the sale will proceed.

2. Hold More Strategic Meetings
   With leadership from a ESS specialist, meetings become more strategic and less tactical. The ESS specialist tracks and follows up on all action items and provides concise, clear reporting on status and risks on a weekly basis. These reports allow the account manager to provide her customer regular updates about the status of the process.
3. Streamline Organization
   Resources such as engineers, technical support and other service individuals are often involved in many accounts simultaneously and this is when sales support can really have an impact. This is because a lot of complex sales require overlay teams with many individuals who span across many accounts. These resources often don’t have enough time to dedicate to that one sale the account manager or senior sales executive is interested in and it can become very challenging to connect with them.

Trained specialists bring all of those different pieces together, ensuring the right people with the right skills are in the room together to check off completed action items, discuss strategy, consider next steps and determine if other resources are required. In some instances it’s as simple as gathering issues and taking them back to the appropriate people to get answers.

More Time to Focus

Soon, generally in less than three weeks, the account manager realizes she has more time to focus on her accounts and make those sales.

Sales Beacon has had the privilege of managing team initiatives for some of the world’s largest virtual and remote sales forces. Contact Sales Beacon to find out more about how to improve sales productivity.