My 3 takeaways from "Cracking the Sales Management Code" by Jason Jordan
🔖 Summary in 3 Sentences
This book teaches you how to manage your company sales team. It shows you how sales activities link to the result of your company. It also defines the sales process and metrics you need to look at for each selling role.
🧑🏻 Who Should Read It?
Anyone who is doing sales or building a sales team.
🔑 My 3 Key Takeaways
Link sales activities with company results.
Activities can be managed - outcomes can't.
Throughout the book, we can see many examples of conversations between the sales manager and sales reps. It is easy to set a target for your team to hit, but it is hard to manage your team to hit the target. Many try by just asking sales reps to do more, and put in more hours. But what you actually need to do is to figure out what kind of sales activities will lead to the results you want to achieve. As an example, you cannot ask for the sales revenue to increase, you can achieve it by either increasing the number of sales calls per sales rep, or you can increase existing customer follow-up to upsell them depending on your company strategy.
Understanding different selling roles need different sales processes and metrics.
How could they ever design a single sales process that would be relevant for every salesperson in this sales force - let alone the entire company? They couldn't.
There are a lot of different selling roles in a company. Some of them are serving the existing customer. Some of them is trying to get new customer. Some of them are chasing the big customer. Each kind of selling role required a different kind of sales process to maximize its success. Each of them also required different metrics to understand their efficiency. As an example, for an outbound salesperson, the main metrics might be sales calls per week, but for upselling salesperson might be follow-up per week. If we try to manage them similarly, one of them will suffer.
Streamline sales process.
Our point is that it's necessary to find the right level of effort between inadequate change management and process overkill.
Having a process is important but too much process might burden the sales team. We need to find the balance between too little and too much control over the sales team. If we have too few processes we might lose control of the sales team, but if we put in too many processes it might make your sales team just a data entry machine. Always discuss and adjust with your sales team to achieve the right balance.
💭 Afterthought
This is a great book to read. Right now I'm building different kinds of channels to improve the sales of my company. I'm handling different roles such as handling inbound, outbound, renewal, and customer referrals. Each of them required a different process and different metrics to measure its success. After I read this book, it gives me a better mental model to handle each one of them. In the future, when I build my own sales team, I can handle them with better structure too.
🛍 How to Buy?
I bought this Kindle e-book on Amazon for RM73.74.
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