Keys of the Commercial Leader.
In a globalized world, the different activities almost always border on the need to trade or sell to some degree. The market is full of professionals who “fell” in the need to start selling. Selling is inherent to all activities because we always depend on third parties who accept the results of our functions, the student who presents his work, a thesis, the professional who delivers a report to his boss, etc. We are always processing a “sale”. In a more direct role, the commercial activity that incorporates sales, among other things, is not only that, it usually has a degree of intuitive inspiration on what to do, what to sell, how to do it?
What to sell? How to sell?
But clearly there is proven methodology in organizations that have already established guidelines for this. It is very easy to get lost in the sea of activity that surrounds a sale and very simple to be ineffective. On this point, it is necessary to do a professional benchmark and thus find out what are the critical activities of a successful business leader. We can mention a few but they are based on the correct identification of a business model, the design of what we do, how we do it and for whom we do it, the idea embodied in a model allows us to identify the added value of our activity for the end customer and that gives us a route, focus, orientation.
Keys of the Commercial Leader
This is where the search for the appropriate sales force for this model arises. Defining the profiles of a salesperson is not an easy thing, much less the search, which is why eliminating the uncertainty gaps with the model is so critical. The next stage is the generation of clients, prospecting, quoting, negotiating and closing in a continuous cycle of feeding a large business tube, the so-called pipeline, funnel in the traditional literature. The concept is simple, I must assume that the probabilities that the final sale will always be a percentage of all the prospects or leads that I have registered, it would be an exceptional case if all of them were billed, but the usual thing is a measure that each business must determine, for example, of 10 businesses entered, I close 3 or 2, the conversion rate is around 25%.
CRM, customer relationship management. What are we talking about?
This tells me that if I need a monthly billing number, I should always have that number multiplied by 4 in order to reach my goals. And since sales cycles also vary, in order to have one, two, three more months of billing that I need (and my commissions!) I must feed this tube today.
They will understand that when the business requires dozens of prospects, managing this becomes very complex. But for that there are systems such as a CRM, customer relationship management, acronyms that mean customer relationship management. There are a number of programs, some simple and others very sophisticated, where sellers must leave their daily activities, calls, emails, quotes, reminders, meeting schedules, etc. On the one hand, the system provides updated reports and, on the other, support from agenda that reminds meetings to direct mail and cell phones, so as not to miss any opportunity.
Integrating a variety of managements is the key
This activity consumes a lot of the leader’s time when salespeople are not used to registering.
This is how the day of the commercial leader is consuming. But there are still other management tasks with other teams, such as marketing, which must be given a series of inputs, guidelines, documents to carry out its work and generate lead capture campaigns, positioning of the company in new markets, loyalty, etc And finally there are the coordinations with the logistics areas, which today have become a very relevant link in the customer’s shopping experience, positively or negatively affecting all the activities previously carried out, therefore, having an alignment Clear delivery policies, guarantees, changes and returns should always be on the commercial leader’s radar, since all this is part of the commercial leader’s keys.
