Sales executives play a critical role in shaping the culture and strategic direction of sales departments at companies. Therefore, it is vital that you find someone suitable to your company.
To achieve this goal, look for candidates with strong leadership experience from prior roles – this will enable them to set an uplifting environment in your sales department.
Marketing
Sales executives formulate marketing strategies to increase revenue and market share. This requires creating an in-depth profile of their target customer, including company size and psychographics; outlining product benefits that address customers’ pain points; outlining purchasing procedures; as well as setting up training and onboarding plans for new sales team members as well as compensation and rewards plans to motivate them into continued top performance.
Unifying Marketing and Sales functions can help to break down siloes and cut back on wasted time sharing information and ideas between departments. For instance, salespeople with quotas to meet may have little motivation to provide information or insights to marketers when they could instead spend that time meeting prospective customers instead. To address this issue, senior managers can offer incentives that encourage salespeople to provide insights voluntarily such as short information forms or reviewing call reports or CRM data without demanding too much of the salesperson’s time.
Customer Service
Customer service strategies are often undervalued by sales executives, yet they can be an essential element of business success. Customer retention is an integral component of running any successful business and poor customer service is often one of the main causes why customers leave companies. Implementing customer service tactics such as training your team on best practices or analyzing data to identify trends and automate reports can help sales executives deliver consistent levels of support to their customers while simultaneously increasing morale through processes like cutting paperwork or automating repetitive tasks through technology.
Management
Sales executives set the pace for all sales departments and can have an immense influence in shaping an overall company’s strategic vision and work environment. Therefore, it’s vitally important that when hiring sales executive candidates that you make sure they’re long-term investments; otherwise you could end up with someone bouncing from job to job regardless of their impressive resumes.
Sales managers set sales goals and determine the most efficient ways of reaching them, analyze reports and customer surveys, create budgets and forecasts, as well as establish prices and contract terms. Furthermore, they provide guidance and training to their sales teams while motivating them to meet sales targets at peak levels – which requires strong communication and negotiation skills as well as in-depth knowledge about the products or services being sold.
Negotiation
Sales negotiation is an integral component of the sales process and can help companies increase their win rates. If a rep can successfully negotiate lower delivery costs or contract terms that improve company finances, this will have an immediate effect on revenue generation.
As a sales executive, it is vitally important that you are familiar with various sales negotiation strategies. These may include product value negotiation and understanding what needs and desires your client is willing to give up in order to complete a deal.
An error that sales professionals commonly make when negotiating is failing to identify decision-makers. Failing to do this may lead them down a path where they quote prices or lay out timelines in front of people they should not. Understanding who decides matters allows negotiations to become more beneficial to both sides and prevents concessions that will later be rejected by your counterparty. Furthermore, ask for budget before commencing negotiations!