Frontline Sales Management: How to Systematically Drive Sales Team Success

A frontline sales manager’s mission is to attain team quota, which is usually a large number that’s split by a team of individual sales reps. If all reps attain their individual quotas, the manager’s number is also met. Simple, right? Ha! It’s not as easy as it sounds. 

Why? Because every single sales professional has his or her own unique history, experiences, habits, methods, goals, aspirations, personality, etc. Some will excel in certain areas while others may struggle. To be consistently successful, a frontline sales manager must not only be skilled at identifying the strengths and weaknesses of individual team members, but have the ability to coach for incremental improvement. And if that’s not difficult enough, the manager must also foster an environment that breeds loyalty and guards against rep turnover.

The Kite Framework covers the four Ps of effective frontline sales management, all of which are measurable and should be tracked:

1. Plan
2. Process
3. Priorities
4. Problems
   
   

Plan

Planning is expected of reps at both the account and opportunity levels. It can be measured across three key areas:

Qualification:

Account Qualification: If the rep is staring at a list of 100 accounts, it’s important to know which ones to go after, which requires research and planning.

Opportunity Qualification: Is the deal winnable and worth it? Not every opportunity is worth spending time on, especially at the expense of doing something else that’s a better use of your time (opportunity cost — pun intended).

Sometimes you choose not to go after the deal because you looked at the requirements and you know your company gets their tails kicked 9.9 times out of 10. That deal may not be winnable. On the other hand, you may have a perfectly-winnable deal, but the deal size is small. Knowing it’ll take just as much time and effort to close that small deal as it would a larger deal, it may not be worth it, depending on how you’re performing already that year.

Value:

Account: Once you’ve done your account planning, you’re now outbounding into the account. To outbound successfully, you must come to the table with the right value proposition that’s based on the challenges you found during your account research.

Opportunity: Once an opportunity is on the table, the rep must have a plan on how to win the opportunity. It all begins with crafting a plan that focuses on solving the prospect’s challenge(s) at hand, FIRST, before going into all the other reasons why this prospect should do business with your company. Without this kind of planning and concentration, the rep is at risk of the prospect losing focus or getting lost in the details.

Communication:

Initial Communication (Account Planning): Once a rep, SDR, or BDR has the value proposition down, it’s all about communicating that value proposition effectively as part of their outbound efforts. Basic personalization doesn’t fit the bill any longer.  It’s not about just dumping your feature list into an email. It’s all about planning to show how your solution can solve very specific problems your prospect is facing, based on your thorough research.

Prospect Internal Communication (Opportunity Planning): Your champion is now singing your praises internally, but how well? Is the champion saying the right things and sharing the right collateral? Arming your champion with the right way to communicate your value propositions internally can be the difference between winning and losing. Ensure your written communications are forwardable. Reps should think about who might lay eyes on a piece of content or collateral and plan accordingly by asking themselves, “If the CTO saw this, what would he glean or if the CMO saw this, how would she interpret the message?”