Sales Management and Bhagwat Gita

Most of the Sales Managers try to manage their Sales team in a very strange way. Hire them, give them targets and follow up with them for reaching goals. I think we need to revisit this notion of Sales Managment.

Let’s first analyse what does Sales Management mean. Everyone is clear about Sales.What does Management mean? Management means something that can impact; something that is in your control which you can change or cause to change.

Now here comes the real challenge. Can we manage Sales Results (revenue)? I mean Sales Revenue is the fruit of the activities that we do right? We apparently cannot control Sales Figures. It’s absolutely out of our control.

That explains why the job of Sales Manager is always full of stress and pressure. They are trying to manage something that is not manageable. Sales Result is the outcome of your activities. You can manage activities. But does managing activities will result in the desired sales you want? Maybe No.

Activities can be managed; Results cannot be. It’s obvious as far as Sales Management goes.

Sales Management & Bhagwat Geeta

Not surprisingly, this matches to one of the most famous and important teachings from Bhagwad Geeta. However, the problem is how do we manage Sales Activities in such a way that chances of getting desired results (Sales Revenue Targets) increase dramatically.

Activities can be managed; outcome cannot be. It’s obvious, and you don’t need my article to know this. But there is something between the activity and outcome. There is something in between which cannot be precisely managed but it can help you to reach your result in a more structured way.

कर्मणयेवाधिकारस्ते  मा  फलेषु  कदाचन ।

मा  कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा  ते  सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि ।

That brings us to the obvious question. What is in our control and how it is related to the result and how do we manage it. Let’s divide entire Sales Management into three parts:

1. Sales Activities: Something which we can manage.
2. Sales Results (or Sales Revenue): Desired or planned outcome which you want.
3. Let me keep this suspense until some time now.

Let me explain this in little more detail.

Sales Activities:

All the calls, Meetings, Visits, steps taken and tasks done in the sales process. It can include training of the sales team also. Sales activity parameters are things that are used to track and quantify the daily doings of the Sales team. So the parameters that you use to measure Sales activities can be:

1. The number of Calls/Visits made per Sales Person.
2. Percentage of Sales Person using Tools (e.g., CRM, etc.) provided to them correctly.
3. The number of accounts handled per Sales Person.
4. How many Proposals sent, Followups done in time, etc.

Sales Results.

In fact, the sales results can be influenced by many other things which are way beyond the organisation or company. Eg: the economy, customer decision-making process or some offer by a competitor, etc. There are many other parameters which affect the result. External factors which effect Sales Results are much more than internal factors. There are many parameters which Sales Managers track to measure Sales Results; some of them are:

1. Total Sales achieved.
2. Revenue Growth.
3. Gross Profit.
4. Customer Satisfaction Index.

CRM can give you lots of information. But how you capture insigthful intelligence and convert it to results is the key