Sales Project Management: A Comprehensive Guide

In the past, the sales process was simpler. It involved prospecting, pitching, closing – rinse and repeat. 

However, with the increasing complexity of the buyer’s journey, it has become very crucial to adopt a more proactive approach, anticipating roadblocks and staying on top of deals

Every sale you work towards closing is a unique project. Each deal involves unique stakeholders with diverse priorities. 

To ensure the flexibility and efficiency of any sales process, a project management approach should be adopted. 

This post will help you understand and adopt a sales project management approach during your sales processes.

What is Sales Project Management?

Sales Project Management (SPM)  is the strategic application of project management principles to the sales process for agility, flexibility, and collaboration. It's about adapting to the buyer's journey, anticipating roadblocks, and creating a seamless experience.

The competition for buyers' attention has gotten more fierce over the years, so your team has to put in extra work to get their share of the market.

Approaching sales processes with a project management approach involves;

• Setting a concrete goal or target
• Creating a project schedule 
• Creating a project budget
• Establishing milestones
• Assigning roles
• Delegating tasks and responsibilities

What Is The Importance of Sales Project Management?

1. Improved Visibility: 

• Sales project management breaks down complex deals into smaller milestones for reps and managers to track progress. This ensures transparency and easy identification of areas of improvement
• Sales project management tools provide insight into the buyer's progress and deal velocity to ensure proactive communication and address potential issues

2. Accountability:

• Sales project management ensures that each team member understands their specific roles and responsibilities. This eliminates confusion and holds everyone accountable
• When individuals understand their impact on the bigger picture, it promotes a sense of ownership and accountability, leading to higher motivation and performance.
• Sales project management ensures that issues and updates are readily shared within the team, leading to faster decision-making and improved accountability.

3. Improved Collaboration: 

• Sales project management defines clear project goals and desired outcomes for everyone involved, ensuring everyone's efforts are moving in the same direction.
• By leveraging individual strengths and expertise, team members can focus on their specific tasks, leading to a more effective and collaborative approach.
• By bringing together different perspectives and expertise, sales project management leverages the collective intelligence of the team for effective solutions.
• Regular collaboration builds trust within the team, creating a more open and supportive environment.

4. Effective resource allocation: 

• By thoroughly understanding client needs early, sales project management helps you to ensure resources are aligned with the required expertise.
• Understanding individual strengths and team member availability allows for optimal resource allocation based on expertise, ensuring the right person for the right job.
• Tracking resource usage across projects reveals patterns and potential inconsistencies which allows for adjustments to avoid burnout.
• Sales project management involves, preparing for unforeseen changes that might require resource redeployment. This agility ensures team effectiveness even when unexpected situations arise.

5. Increased Sales Forecast Accuracy

• Sales project management breaks down large deals into smaller, manageable phases with clear milestones. This allows for more in-depth forecasts within each phase, making adjustments easier based on progress.
• Sales project management empowers you to adapt your forecast quickly based on real-time data, market shifts, and customer feedback.

8 Tips for Efficient Sales Project Management

1. Have a centralised environment for information:

Using only emails for follow-ups means endless threads and attachments. The constant back-and-forth of emails increases the chances of miscommunication and misunderstanding. 

Without a centralised source of information, you risk information inconsistency which could confuse clients and make you lose deals.  Hubforce provides a digital salesroom or workspace where you can centralise all information about a sales project to align with the buyer's goals. 

If you are using digital sales rooms for the first time, you can try Hubforce AI Builder

2. Map out stakeholders:

You don't want to be thrown off balance because you discovered another stakeholder late. It is important to research everyone involved in the buying process. List and keep track of all stakeholders involved in a centralised location. Once you have a comprehensive list, you can then categorise them based on the following 

• Level of influence: Who has the power to make decisions, and who can influence those decisions?
• Interest level: How invested are they in the project's success?
• Supportive/Opposing: Are they likely to advocate for or against your project?
• Needs and concerns: What are their priorities and potential objections to your project?
• Communication preferences: How do they prefer to receive information and be engaged?

Document all your findings in a centralised location. This ensures everyone has access to the same information and can update it as needed. Hubforce provides a centralised location to map all key stakeholders according to their priorities and responsibilities.

3. Clearly define project scope and goals:

What are you trying to achieve? Keep it specific measurable and accessible between your team and the buying team. This helps to keep everyone on track with the goals that need to be achieved. 

4. Develop a clear mutual action plan:

Establish clear next steps for each party (selling and buying) so that everyone is aware of what to do at any time. Mutual action plans (MAP) are the roadmap you build together with your client, outlining the key steps, milestones, and responsibilities each party needs to fulfill to keep the deal moving forward.

Mutual action plans improve accountability between teams preventing loopholes that could derail buyers' focus from your solution.

Tips for making your mutual action plan more efficient

• Agree on how you will communicate progress, updates, and any challenges throughout the project. Ideally, you should use a digital sales room.
• Regularly review the MAP and make adjustments as needed. 
• Be flexible and open to adapting the plan based on new information or changing circumstances.

Hubforce allows you to plan and develop mutual action plans tailored to your buyer's goals. It also has real-time analytics to help you track the level of engagement with the plan.

5. Clear communication:

Communicate proactively to identify and discuss potential challenges or concerns. This allows for collaborative problem-solving and informed decision-making before issues escalate.

Regular feedback allows adjustments and improvements based on client needs. For example, if a client's concerns shift from ROI to employee adoption, you can upload a clear onboarding and support plan to your Hubforce digital sales room for the client to see.

Proactive communication eases client concerns and anxieties by keeping them informed and engaged. This promotes a positive client experience and increases satisfaction with your services.

6. Track milestones:

When both clients and sales teams have a clear visualisation of the progress made, it could increase motivation to keep progressing.

Hubforce shows you the progress of each task. This creates a sense of achievement, exciting buyers to progress even faster towards their goals. It also helps to identify challenges and solve them proactively.

For example, if you notice that stakeholders have been stuck in a particular phase for a long time, you can follow up proactively to discover the challenge they may be facing and solve the problem.

You can also track milestones for your sales team using Hubforce. For example, if a sales rep says they are going to close a deal in 2 weeks, you can go and check their hub to confirm.  If you see that there is no engagement from stakeholders then you know that it’s not possible.

7. Track Velocity:

If you can accurately track the buyer's engagement with sales materials, you will be able to determine the speed at which the deal is progressing.

Hubforce allows you to see real-time engagement of buyers with your sales materials through live notification. You can see and track the following;

• What content was viewed
• How long was spent on each page
• Who viewed the content?
• Was the content shared?
• Who was it shared with?
• Who is the most/least engaged viewer?
• Most/least viewed content

This allows you to see what interests decision-makers at any time and how fast they are progressing in the deal. Another way to accurately track velocity is by segmenting your sales content into milestones and giving necessary access controls. As they unlock new milestones in the sales content, you can measure velocity.

8. Use templates:

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. If you set up your sales process in a digital sales room like Hubforce with ready-made templates, you can always duplicate the templates for other projects. This reduces time spent on repetitive tasks and increases your sales team's productivity.

Tools for Sales Project Management

• CRM platforms like Salesforce and Hubspot help centralise your customer data.
• It is also important to integrate buyer enablement software like Hubforce for real-time visibility into buyers' engagement with sales materials. It also provides a single source of truth for all sales information

Manage Your Sales Projects with Hubforce

Introducing project management techniques into sales processes ensures that the sales process remains agile and flexible while increasing discipline and accountability. 

Sales project management ensures that the sales process is divided into short-term goals which eventually add up to the larger goal.

This leads to a more high-performing team with well-managed resources. It also helps to adjust tactics quickly to fit the market and buyer changes. 

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