How to Prepare Your Sales Force for Changing Business Lifecycles

Companies spend a lot of time and energy hiring and managing their sales forces. But, how much time is spent on helping your sales reps grow and evolve to suit the changing needs of your customers and your audience? Businesses live in a state of flux. Needs and requirements change over time, and the selling landscape changes with it. Managing the sales force is important, but so is preparing your team for the changing lifecycle of a product/service or business. This includes altering the size of the sales force, the responsibilities of the sales reps and their degree of specialization. Here is how you can prepare your sales force for changing business lifecycles effectively.

Don't Ignore Change

Once sales reps and managers hit a sweet spot with their processes, they often get too comfortable and don't bother to look deeper. As a result, they change their sales structures only when major events force them to. This could be anything from a failure to meet targets to a change in a competitor's strategy, or a new product launch or meager. What managers and businesses need to understand is that business is always changing. There are certain seasonal and cyclical changes that businesses go through, along with other unpredictable changes throughout the year. For example, if you specialize in B2C sales, your business is going to boom during the holidays, so you need to plan for the peaks and the drops. However, B2B business climates experience a lull in activity during the holidays. All businesses have cycles, and, by working your sales around it, you will stay profitable.

The Four Stages

There are four factors that change over time, which business owners need to take into account.

• The size and structure of your sales force,
• The roles that the sales force and individual sales representatives play.
• The degree of specialization each rep requires, and
• How to divide territories, responsibilities products and tasks among your sales reps.

These factors are important because they determine how well your team can respond to new sales opportunities. This, in turn, determines overall performance and profitability.

How Salesvue Helps

Salesvue is native Salesforce application that captures, analyzes and reports data as it happens. Salesvue uses the data in the Salesforce CRM to provide managers with real-time insight on conversion patterns, how many calls/contacts it takes to get someone on the phone, how many conversations it takes to get an appointment, how well each individual sales rep is performing, how well the team as a whole is performing, etc. You can identify trends and patterns, see how your business is evolving and what needs to change. Salesvue helps you grow your business, while also helping you adapt to changing business lifecycles.