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Why It Needs to Change for 2020
Retail sales, canvasser and other sales rep in wholesale and manufacturing companies usually have sales supervisor to oversee their daily operation. In the year of 2020, with the rise of globalization and at the same time the rise of localization on consumer demand, means that sales supervisors are now expected to do more than before.
Sales Supervisors and Their Responsibilities
1. Achieve Target
Sales supervisors need to oversee sales activities aimed at increasing sales. They need to hit their KPIs (Key Performance Indicator) by motivating the sales team during each sales period. A good mentoring by providing feedback and continuous coaching will boost sales team performance. When the sales team isn’t meeting its target, the sales supervisor needs to find the root cause and implement the appropriate strategy. One example is to coordinate training to improve their closing skills.
2. Analyze Data
To conduct effective mentoring for the team, the sales supervisor needs to analyze and understand sales metrics first. From all account data, market data, customer behavior, seasonal trend, and more. A sales analysis report can help uncover valuable information that can help sales supervisors in deciding their future strategy.
3. Create Forecasts
The sales supervisor needs to create and strategize sales forecasts that reflect business growth, based on previous reports. To do this, they need to understand historical data, setting the variables, and when it’s all done, they need to realistically plan out their strategy. After implementing, they also need to measure their success to determine the next plan.
Important Skills for Sales Supervisors
1. Soft Skills
The core of management skills are people. Which is why great people skills are detrimental to being a good sales supervisor. They need to constantly motivate and provide support for their team as well as pushing for team collaboration. A good sales supervisor will lead their team by offering praise, communicating effectively throughout all departments, while remaining calm under pressure.
Sales supervisors also need to understand the behavioral and psychological of sales staff to evaluate their development. Supervisors need to be able to evaluate the competence, performance, and attitude of the sales staff.
2. Technical Skills
Other than evaluating the team’s performance, the sales supervisor needs to evaluate all data and sales metrics within a deadline-driven environment. With all the data collected, they need to calculate cost per lead, sales conversion rate, gross margin, as well as continuously updated in sales trends.
To help organize this high-volume workload, most companies are integrating its current system with software solutions. Such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management), Sales Force Automation, Workforce Management, and more. Sales supervisors in 2020 have to be familiar with these tools because it organizes all necessary data in one system.
Advotics workforce management system can streamline all data input by capturing, storing, and analyzing your data, while verifying the accuracy. With more data captured from offline activities into the system, it can provide better visibility to the management on top-line, market dynamics, and geo-productivity.
Each aspect of sales supervisor skills will overlap and work itself into one another. The better they understand their team, the better they will motivate them. Then, taking into other factors and consideration such as the right strategy and market factors, the sales team will have a better chance to hit their sales goals, or even surpass it.
