There are always high expectations when it comes to sales, and teams can be competitive both internally and externally. However, treating sales goals as projects can help teams figure out how to best focus their energy to help deliver results for the company as a whole. While sales goals aren’t traditionally “projects” per se, they can be treated according to timelines and expected goals much in the same way a development project, for example, can be. Therefore, having a project manager as part of a sales team or having a team manager act with a project management mindset can help team members define their roles and assist the team in the larger goal of hitting company-wide targets for growth.
How Sales and Traditional Project Management Complement Each Other
While a project management lifecycle often consists of four main steps (initiating, planning, executing, and closing), a typical sales cycle has five main components:
- Prospecting
- Connecting
- Researching
- Presenting
- Closing
Each phase of the sales cycle needs to have a tangible goal as well as a deadline and review period, which align with a typical project management setup.
Sales activities are similar to project tasks and, as such, need to be carefully managed by project managers. Project managers can help sales teams find efficiencies and hone in on tweaks across the sales cycle through monitoring, remediation, and optimization. By focusing on project management best practices, project managers can help make sales more predictable, add visibility to the sales process (to weed out what’s working and what’s not), add context to events, and reinforce team member accountability.
Helping Sales Teams Succeed
As a project manager, your goal is to help your team succeed. This means you’ll need to create structures that help sales teams do their job more effectively. Team members need help meeting their sales targets, and a project manager can make their jobs easier by:
Initiating Time Management Solutions
Project managers that can manage their time (and the time of their team) efficiently will be more effective at keeping tasks and milestones on track. Luckily, there are plenty of tech options that can help project managers understand projects at a macro and micro level by looking at each team member and how they are using their time. Time management platforms can help a project manager understand:
- Who’s working on what
- How long it takes someone to finish a specific task
- When a milestone or task is due
- If a milestone or task is behind schedule
- Where, collectively or individually, most time is spent
- And more
There are dozens of options available, from Clockify to Evernote to Asana.
Time management may also allow managers to see inefficiencies in sales better. That way, they can find creative ways to stop bottlenecks or adjust approaches that will help sales teams hit their targets.
Clarifying Tasks and Making Task Management Seamless
Bringing on some sort of task management software such as Asana, ClickUp, Monday, or Wrike will help your teams understand what they need to do and keep track of tasks, no matter how big or small. There are also larger CRMs, such as Salesforce, that can help manage tasks and clients. These allow your team to enter in details about past communications, set reminders for follow-ups, and create a clearly defined roadmap of each qualified lead from first contact to first sale.
As a project manager, it’s essential to follow up with your team, individually and collectively, to ensure tasks are being completed, follow-ups are happening, and the correct information is recorded regularly and accurately. This makes it easier to track and measure the number of leads and where they are in the sales funnel.
Baking Collaboration Into Sales Teams
If a sales strategy is working for one person or one quarter, that’s essential information an entire team can benefit from. Therefore, as important as it is to have a bit of a competitive atmosphere within a sales team, it’s even more important to impart knowledge across the department so that everyone can benefit. The more collaborative you can make the sales team, the faster newer team members can stretch their wings. Figuring out what works should be a team sport.
Nurturing Effective Communication
The best way to nurture collaboration is to create a team that has an effective communication strategy. Whether that means building communication channels on an app such as Slack or having standup meetings regularly where top performers share their biggest wins or secret practices, encourage open communication and team-wide sharing to help bolster numbers and build better sales pipelines.
Helping Sales Team Members Project Manage Themselves
Salespeople don’t need to be made into project managers. However, guiding them towards understanding the basics of project management will help them better manage their time and energy. Assisting a salesperson in, for example, adopting more effective time management in their sales cycle will help them be more efficient with their prospects. Showing them how to integrate task management into follow-up protocols will also assist in ensuring that warm leads don’t fall through the cracks or that re-sales are more likely to happen. Teaching team members valuable organizational skills that are second-hat to you as a project manager will ultimately give them the tools they need to make the most out of every lead they are given.
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