Your Second Month in a New Sales Leadership Role: Developing A Successful Sales Strategy
You’ve just finished your first month as a sales leader in a new role within a distribution business, and you’re coming up for air, reflecting on what you’ve learned so far and beginning to outline your sales strategy.
Our latest resource offers insightful advice from our own chief revenue officer and other sales leaders who have been here before.
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at what you should do in your second month as you develop specific action plans to grow your sales pipeline.
Create An Effective Sales Strategy For Targeting Your Best Accounts
Many distribution teams find it’s more profitable to focus on growing sales among existing accounts than to identify new target customers. If your primary strategy is to increase sales among existing customers, you’ll need formal upsell and cross-sell processes to help your sales reps recommend complementary products.
This can be difficult for distributors with thousands of SKUs and specific product pairings.
“The biggest challenge is that there’s just no good way to push critical cross-selling opportunities to a rep,” said Debbie Paul, a partner at Distribution Strategy Group.
This is where business intelligence and artificial intelligence can help. AI can analyze purchasing data, revealing patterns in products frequently purchased together. Your sales team can use these insights to recommend certain products to customers based on their unique purchase history. With the right CRM, they can even add these products directly to quotes or emails.
The combination of BI and AI can also help your team identify the best products to sell to new locations. If you have warehouses near a customer’s location you’re not currently shipping to and the right BI tools, you can easily see which products you have on hand and compare those to products the customer has previously purchased for other locations.
Improve Your Sales Process
As a new sales leader, optimizing your sales process should be one of your key initiatives.
Start by clarifying roles and responsibilities. When roles are unclear, some team members take on too much and become stressed while others become disengaged. Ask your inside and outside sales reps if their current duties reflect their job description and what additional tasks they’ve inherited since taking on the role.
What activities do they do that result in the greatest impact on your revenue?
What takes up too much of their time but brings little to no value?
Are they spending a significant amount of time on reporting or forecasting?
As you look for improvements, determine critical points when customer-facing team members should pass along information to others and when they should take action.
How should your marketing team notify a sales rep about a customer who clicked on a product email or responded to a promotional offer?
Who should create quotes?
When should a customer service rep notify a sales rep about a question from a customer that warrants a larger, more strategic sales conversation?
Automation is essential for improving efficiency in lead nurturing, follow-up tasks, and order management, freeing up your sales team for higher-value activities. Here are some automations and workflows that could benefit your team:
Web Lead Routing
Every time a prospect fills out a form on your website, notify the right sales rep to ensure timely follow-up. This keeps your team responsive and improves your chances of converting the lead.
Open Email Notification
Set up notifications to alert your sales reps when a customer opens or clicks an email.
Buying Cycle Notifications
With predictive AI-powered workflows, such as buying cycle insights, your CRM can analyze customers’ past purchasing patterns and notify reps when they are approaching a reorder window. This timely outreach helps prevent missed sales opportunities.
High-Value Deal Notifications
Automate a workflow that notifies your team when a deal exceeds a certain value, triggering tailored follow-up strategies to nurture these high-potential opportunities and move them through the pipeline.
No Activity Notifications
Set up alerts for accounts that have been inactive for a defined period, such as 30 days, enabling your sales team to proactively re-engage customers before they churn.
Quote Follow-Up Emails
Automate quote follow-ups after three days of no action, and include tasks for sales reps or sales managers to call and check in. Automating this process ensures that no quote falls through the cracks, helping boost conversion rates and improve sales performance.
Abandoned Cart Follow-Up
Integrating your eCommerce platform with CRM allows your team to track abandoned carts. Set up tasks for reps to follow up with customers who left items behind, recovering potential lost revenue.
Thank-You Emails
After every purchase, set up an automated thank-you email that comes directly from the sales rep. This not only fosters a strong relationship but can also encourage customers to leave positive reviews, enhancing your brand presence.
Late Order Notifications
Keep customers informed about potential delays by setting up notifications to alert sales reps when orders are running late. Timely communication helps manage expectations and maintain customer satisfaction.
Evaluate the Pros and Cons of Your Sales Technology
As a new sales leader, understanding how well your team’s current tools support their sales efforts will be crucial to building momentum in your first 90 days. Examining both the benefits and limitations of each piece of technology—from your CRM and business intelligence software to eCommerce integrations—will reveal where upgrades or adjustments could enhance your team’s productivity and increase revenue. Examine each system, beginning with your CRM, and how your team is using it today compared to how you ideally want to use it. This will help you determine what additional features you may need.
1. Determine Key CRM Features and Functionality
Your customer relationship management (CRM) software should be optimized for your sales team’s needs, especially when it comes to tracking and prioritizing daily tasks and sales goals. Some factors to consider:
- How easily can different customer-facing team members share information, such as who has opened a marketing email, what needs the customer expressed in their last meeting with a sales rep, and which customers have outstanding invoices?
- How easy is it to create automated notifications and tasks?
- How accessible is your CRM to sales reps on the road? Does it include a mobile app that gives reps access to their daily tasks, notifications, and customers near their location?
- Does your CRM offer industry-specific insights like top related products and customer reordering patterns?
- How well does it support your outbound sales strategy, inside sales teams and marketing? Does it allow for seamless handoffs between these teams?
2. Assess Your BI Tools and Reporting Processes
Business intelligence is essential to a data-driven sales strategy, but some BI platforms require a lot of manual effort to extract insights. Ask:
- How much time do your sales reps spend gathering data? Teams often spend hours gathering and compiling data for monthly reports that may already be outdated by the time they’re ready. Evaluate whether these insights can be automated and made in real-time with a BI tool tailored for distribution.
- Which metrics should be easier to measure? Your team may find it hard to track metrics like top products or top customers without manually exporting data from your ERP and compiling it into a custom report. Consider a BI solution that integrates with ERP and CRM data to provide real-time visibility into key sales metrics like top product trends or low-margin accounts.
- How are you currently tracking sales performance? Can your sales reps easily see how their sales compare to their monthly or quarterly targets at any given time?
3. Evaluate the Integration and Efficiency of eCommerce Platforms
With eCommerce as a growing revenue stream in distribution, you need technology that bridges the gap between online and offline sales. Ideally, eCommerce insights should flow into your CRM so sales reps can see what customers are buying online, what items they’ve left in carts, or which products they’re viewing most often. This data can help personalize sales interactions and improve the effectiveness of cross-selling strategies.
4. Simplify Quote Creation Workflows
Efficient quote management can make a big impact on customer satisfaction and sales cycle speed. If generating a quote involves multiple steps and communication with other departments, your team may be wasting time that could be spent selling. A CRM that integrates with ERP data allows sales reps to generate quotes quickly, with real-time pricing and inventory levels at their fingertips.
5. Use AI to Automate and Optimize Sales Processes
If AI isn’t already a part of your technology stack, introducing it strategically could elevate your team’s performance. AI can analyze customer purchasing habits to suggest products they’re likely to need next, enabling reps to anticipate customer needs and present relevant upsell opportunities. White Cup’s AI-powered CRM provides predictive sales forecasts and alerts for upselling opportunities, reducing guesswork for your team.
Focus on Training and Upskilling
Based on your assessment of the team’s capabilities, roll out training programs that focus on areas like relationship management, consultative selling, and data analytics. With the use of business intelligence (BI), your team should be equipped to make data-driven decisions that will enhance their ability to identify high-value opportunities and close deals more effectively.
It’s essential to ensure that all sales leaders, from regional to divisional managers, are aligned on the same revenue goals, customer strategies, and performance metrics. This will establish a unified front and ensure that each leader is driving their team toward the same objectives, reinforcing overall growth strategies.
Here are a few relevant skills to consider focusing on:
Consultative Selling
Consultative selling focuses on building trust, using active listening, and providing value in customer conversations. When a sales professional asks good questions to understand customers’ needs before pitching a product or service, it leads to more authentic conversations and more profitable, long-term relationships.
Developing Deep Product Knowledge
Half of all B2B buyers have done enough research to identify the right solutions before they ever reach out to a sales rep. With more information available to customers than ever before, a deep understanding of how your products and services meet customers’ specific needs is an extremely important sales skill.
Through targeted questions, every sales rep can deepen their knowledge of product-solution fit, and customers are more likely to keep the dialogue going.
Using eCommerce Insights To Drive Offline Sales
Online sales now account for 20 percent of sales for distributors, according to Distribution Strategy Group founder Ian Heller. That number is only expected to grow over time.
Your sales reps may not be leading the charge when it comes to eCommerce, but they should be part of the overall strategy. A siloed approach to offline and online sales leads to missed opportunities for both channels. Your sales team should be able to use data from your website, including completed and attempted purchases, to drive more relevant conversations with customers.
That might include calling customers to see if they have questions about an item they added to their cart, or sending follow-up emails recommending products related to something they recently purchased.
Empower Your Inside Sales Team
In distribution, your inside sales team plays a pivotal role in building relationships with existing customers and ensuring high satisfaction and retention. To succeed, inside sales reps need comprehensive, real-time insights into customer behavior, buying patterns, and product needs. They also need strong communication with your outside sales team. Here are a few ways to ensure they have what they need.
Ensure They’re Focusing On The Right Priorities
Inside sales reps should prioritize their efforts on top accounts, focusing on high-value customers who are crucial to long-term growth. They need to know which products each customer frequently buys, their typical reorder intervals, and related products that could add value to their purchases. Good business intelligence allows inside sales reps to offer timely recommendations and proactive support, increasing the likelihood of upselling and cross-selling.
Make Customer Data Accessible and Actionable
Your CRM should serve as the single source of truth, allowing inside sales reps to easily view a complete history of customer interactions, order frequency, and past communication. It should also make it easy for them to share relevant details with other team members or receive notifications when they need to reach out. The right CRM facilitates smooth handoffs between teams, allowing any team member to notify another or create a task so nothing is overlooked.
Help Them Use AI for Personalized Recommendations
AI can help inside sales reps go beyond simply filling orders and become trusted advisors to your customers. By analyzing buying history, AI-driven recommendations can surface top related products or identify when a customer is likely to need a reorder. These insights ensure reps are always one step ahead, suggesting the right products at the right time to boost order value and reach revenue targets.
Get More Expert Advice For A Winning Sales Strategy
Looking for more insights as you develop your sales strategy?
Join us for an upcoming webinar where we’ll discuss this in more detail with two longtime industry veterans, Kate Nied, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at American Refrigeration Supplies, and Frank Heenan, Group Vice President of Epicor.
Space is limited, so register now to save your spot!