Sales: actual picture
In order to increase the level of competitiveness companies should pay more attention to improvement of their activities. One of the most important directions of company development is sales. Most companies use advanced technologies in management and automation, optimizing business processes in these spheres.
Sales managers spend a lot of time to discuss how to enlarge the volume of sales or what to do in order to fulfill the sales plan; how to sell new products and services. Usually sales plans are fulfilled, the volumes of sales of new products and services are enlarged, but all this generally happens thanks to certain operational procedures. However, strategic points of effectiveness are receded into the background.
Using such an approach a company can have a sustainable development, especially, if we take into consideration market development. However, at some time an unexpected drop in sales happens. The reasons of it are involvement in tactics and disregard to the strategy.
Consequently, a well organized process of sales is only a part of success of a company. The basic part of it is searching of new customers, sales and closure of a deal. And it is highly important to provide a proper functioning of all these parts of the business process.
Nowadays there are two opposite approaches to organizing of sales processes:
- Specialization of sales managers according to each stage of the process. Development manager is responsible for finding of new clients, sales manager – for sales, sales manager assistant – for processing of documents.
- Providing of flexibility of manager responsibilities. This approach supposes that managers are able to provide all stages of the process.
The second approach is more effective as it reduces time from the first to the last stage of the process.
Why the process approach?
Process approach is more effective, because such improvements as business process optimization can be provided. Some companies try to improve the process of sales by means of increasing of the number of managers. However, it is much more profitable and even easier to provide sales business process optimization in order to increase effectiveness of sales department. Increasing of the number of sales managers is not that much effective, because they lead to the growing of expenses.
Efforts to solve the problem by creating of extra departments of marketing and development without constructing of cross-functional business processes are also not highly effective.
Business process optimization, management and continual improvement is not the easiest, but the most effective way to provide sustainable development of the company.