A Marketing Agency's Guide to Sales Management

Even though people don’t often think of marketing agencies as of traditional sales companies, the fact is they still function that way.

In order to thrive, all businesses (including marketing agencies) need to excel at one thing – sales management. Having an efficient sales management set up means maximizing profits for the company, while still delivering something of real value to clients or customers.

Here, we’re going to try to better define sales management and provide you with actionable tips on how to get the most from the entire process as a marketing agency, along with some useful real-life examples and resources to help you along the way.

What Does Sales Management Mean?

Essentially, sales management is most accurately defined as the process of coordination of people and resources in order to achieve the desired sales goal.

Some of the most common long-term sales goals usually include an increased number of sales, contribution to profits, and constant growth. Those goals are achieved by effectively coordinating sales operations and implementing different selling techniques.

Some of the main responsibilities of sales managers include:

Demand/sales predictions
Establishing quotas/objectives
Determining budgets
Planning, implementation, and overseeing of sales programs
Recruiting, training, organizing, and motivating the salesforce
Performance evaluation

What many people, companies, and marketing agencies fail to realize is that sales management is not so much about managing sales – it’s more about managing the people who make those sales.

That being said, we’re first going to examine some of the vital aspects of sales management, before eventually providing you with some valuable resources expected to enhance your sales management efforts (including the best sales management books and software solutions).

In this article, we’re also going to feature some of Jeremy Ellens’ unique insights on the topic. As the co-founder of LeadQuizzes, formerly a marketing agency owner, Jeremy has had substantial experience in the area of sales management.

Three Vital Aspects of Sales Management

Coming Up With a Persuasive Sales Script That Will Help You Close Leads

Before you even start thinking about creating a sales script, you need to make sure you know what you’re selling, what your pricing is, how to generate highly targeted leads, and how to get the best out of your marketing proposals.

If you’ve already done all of that, you should have positioned yourself very near to closing the sale. All you need now is a persuasive sales script that will help you close your leads.

Here’s a brief overview of the script Jeremy used with his own marketing agency:

Intro
Sales questions
Presentation
Pricing
Objection handling
Close
Follow-up call

If you’d like to see the entire script, check out this comprehensive marketing agency training. In addition to actual sales scripts, there you should be able to find everything you need to kickstart your own marketing agency.

Managing Your Salespeople

According to some studies, sales managers spend less than 10% of their time actually coaching and developing their salespeople. And that’s one of the biggest mistakes they could be making. Here are 5 tips on how you manage your sales force in order to maximize their efficiency:

1. Call recordings

These are extremely useful as they help you review and identify areas for improvement.

For instance, a salesperson might be focusing too much time on questioning and not dedicating enough time to objection handling. By reviewing a call recording, it’s easier to identify, address, and resolve such issues.

Jeremy recommends using RingCentral for making your calls as it allows you to automatically record all phone conversations and later use them in training.

2. Daily meetings

By organizing 30-minute daily meetings, you’ll be able to go through those call recordings or practice different sales scenarios to improve your salespeople’s skills. Jeremy suggests keeping these meetings going consistently as whenever he held them regularly, sales would pick up.

3. Blocking time

By having your salespeople schedule blocks of time in their daily schedule for dialing and making scheduled calls, they’ll have uninterrupted time to focus solely on that, while doing so can significantly improve your overall sales management.

4. Encourage competition

Having your salespeople compete against each other can lead to constantly raising the bar and setting new standards when it comes to dial time, number of weekly sales, close rate, etc.

5. Continuous education

Since sales is a skill that can be learned, Jeremy recommends that you and your salespeople read at least 10 books on the topic of sales and sales management. By gaining the necessary knowledge, you’ll be able to develop your own ideas on how you should sell.

Tracking Your Salespeople’s Performance

From a sales management perspective, the ultimate KPI is revenue. That’s what you evaluate your sales manager based on. And that’s what your sales manager bases their evaluation of their salespeople on.

But what is it exactly that makes a good salesperson? Jeremy says that “a good salesperson should be able to close 2-3 managed clients a week. If you use our pricing, that’s $2,000 – $3,000/week.”

While operating as an agency, Jeremy has developed his own 7-step process for measuring salespeople’s performance:

1. Determine the optimal dialer hours. Jeremy found that, for his team, 3.2 hours on the dialer was enough to generate enough contacts.

2. Have your sales team do the dials. In Jeremy’s experience, 3.2 hours/day should be enough for 80 dials. While doing so, they should be leaving messages and logging activities.

3. Have your sales team send out email sequences. Your salesperson should start enrolling the people they dialed into email sequences. Ideally, they would be sending 80 emails per day.

4. Break the correct contacts down into scheduled and the ones that were connected with on the dialer. Jeremy says he found it useful to keep track of no-shows so as to prevent huge swings each week.

5. Keep track of your team’s managed wins. From Jeremy’s own experience, ideally, you’d expect 3 closed managed sales per salesperson on a weekly basis, in order to reach $3,000 in weekly sales.

6. Aim for a 25% close rate. Provided that your marketing is pulling in the right leads, this close rate should be achievable. In case your salespeople aren’t closing at 25%, they need to either get better at selling or start making more dials and sending more emails so as to get more correct contacts to try to close.

7. Have them record the dollar value. This means only the dollar amount that they ran on the credit card. Still, keep in mind that your clients should be there for months or years if you do a good job with sales management.

7 Sales Management Books to Improve Your Sales Skills

1. Cracking the Sales Management Code: The Secrets to Measuring and Managing Sales Performance (Business Books)

by Jason Jordan

Goodreads Review: “Bible of sales management. Concise, practical, holistic – this book lays out a coherent sales operations framework which can be deployed in virtually any sales-driven environment to maximize sales force productivity.”

2. Sales Management. Simplified.: The Straight Truth About Getting Exceptional Results from Your Sales Team

by Mike Weinberg

Goodreads Review: “This book was recommended to me by a newly minted sales manager and friend. As I work at a small business, wearing all Sales hats, this book helped me to compartmentalization and prioritize my efforts in order to set achievable goals, but also helped me identify those things in my organization which are counter to sales, and potentially improve them.

A succinct, brutally honest, straight-shot of a book, that is useful for any sales professional.”

3. The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million

by Mark Roberge

Goodreads Review: “This is the best book I’ve ever read on the sales process. It gives detailed instructions on how to find the best salespeople, qualify leads, and build a successful sales team. This is not a book about buyer psychology or sales tactics, but rather, how to refine your team’s sales plans, goals, and results, leveraging technology to achieve superior performance.”

4. Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into a Sales Machine with the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com

by Aaron Ross, Marylou Tyler

Goodreads Review: “Predictable Revenue is one of the best-kept secrets in business literature. I don’t give five-star reviews often, especially for business books, but this book earns it. The authors understand the real challenges marketers and sales executives face and articulate proven solutions eloquently.

As much as I would love to tell the world about this book, I am struggling with the idea of sharing because I feel like I’ll be giving away a huge competitive advantage. Consider this is my feeble attempt to say thank you to Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler.”

5. Coaching Salespeople into Sales Champions: A Tactical Playbook for Managers and Executives

by Keith Rosen

Goodreads Review: “This is one of my favorite books on management in general, not just sales. I am a firm believer in coaching as the best way to get the most out of your employees and empower them in their positions (at least in the knowledge-worker industry), and this book contains some of the best examples I have found in how to work with your team.”

6. The Accidental Sales Manager: How to Take Control and Lead Your Sales Team to Record Profits

by Chris Lytle

Goodreads Review: “If nothing else this books gives you lots of great suggested reads. It has some good ideas and some direct tactical kind of advice. Unlike other sales career advice books, this one gives the reader a 21st century approach. I liked the advice to make your meetings more meaningful.

Rather than running down the numbers, focus on what’s working and what’s not working. Inspire conversation amongst your team instead of being a talking head because contrary to what you may think – you don’t know everything.”

7. Hyper Sales Growth: Street-Proven Systems & Processes. How to Grow Quickly & Profitably

by Jack Daly

Goodreads Review: “It is a good and quick lecture which explains you that sales are not as difficult as one thinks. It is all about creating a bond of trust and to make sales something personal one has to work with everyday all the time to achieve good results. It is like everything in life, if you want results, go and work hard to achieve them.”

Hopefully, this post will help you streamline your sales management and get the best out of it. Of course, you need to keep in mind that closing a sale is just the beginning. In addition to managing sales and acquiring new clients, it’s vital to pay enough attention to client retention as well as the entire process of client onboarding.