Read on to learn more about how Smartsheet, Smartsheet Dashboards and Smartsheet training can help you and your team succeed as Director of Sales.

What are Smart sheets?

Smartsheet is a software as a service offering for collaboration and work management. It is used to assign tasks, track project progress, manage calendars, share documents, and manage other work, using a tabular user interface. Smart sheets are used to collaborate on project timelines, sales and marketing workflow management, calendars and other tasks.

It is a practical tool used as part office productivity, part project management, part document sharing. Considered by many to be a central hub for how people work in knowledge work, project, sales and marketing a management .

Our 5 Top Tips for success as a Sales Director using Smartsheet

An effective Director of Sales needs skills such as excellent communication and leadership, both of which are are highly transferrable. This makes Sales a diverse career path, ideal for candidates who don’t want to be limited to one industry. A Sales Director role can be a very common stepping stone to more senior positions, such as VP of Sales and potentially, CEO.

To be a highly effective and successful Director of Sales you need to show leadership in the latest technology that gives you market insights. In addition you must be able to adopt and work with data tools that give you insights into customer and prospect data to create timely and actionable opportunities for you and your team.

Your time and workflow management needs to be well honed and ready to act on opportunities. You need to be able to inform and motivate your team of customer and prospect opportunities. And Smartsheet can help you do all that, perhaps with the help of a Smartsheet consultant.

Leadership

A successful Sales Director must exhibit good leadership, to ensure their team can sell to meet the organisation’s sales targets in a timely fashion.

More important is the leadership of the team and across the business, by shaping, coaching and motivating the entire team to success. Another part of the job of a Sales Director is providing access to customer and prospect data, ensuring that the data has integrity and is actionable. Using tailored Smartsheet Dashboards is a great way to do that.

The role is not without its challenges. Working with Sales Directors and Sales Managers across a wide variety of industries gives us at Smarter Business Processes real insights into the challenges and common pitfalls. Here below are the five top tips we offer you to be an highly effective Director of Sales.

Excellent Time Management

When it comes to running a Sales team, it’s not just your own time you need to be managing. Prioritising important tasks and ensuring your team are sticking to planned schedules and workflow management is critical when it comes to hitting targets and getting ahead. Whether you are a natural born planner or need more structured support, we are here to help. Smartsheet can assist you in that.

We can’t understate the impact that tracking and automating tasks can have on your workflow. And workflow management is one of the areas where Smartsheet excels, and we can help you with that.

For example, we can set up a Smartsheet Form to create a tailor made activity log. Team members receive automated reminders for each task, and Sales Managers can use this to capture all your team’s tasks in one place and use automated notifications to stay on track with deadlines.

Speeding up communication and reducing your reliance on email should help you to keep your team’s workflow (and yours) running smoothly.

Know Your Market

Whether you are selling software or soft toys, houses or house plants, an understanding of your industry, and clients’ needs is crucial!

While some Sales Directors may have a marketing team to work alongside them, it is still beneficial to be across industry and product trends, and to have a solid understanding of how to analyse and interpret the latest marketing data. That’s where we come in.

It may sound obvious but clients frequently tell us they can’t always see the wood for the trees when it comes to marketing data. Using our Smartsheet Dashboards can help you stay on top of the statistics that matter, and help you present them in a graphical, management-friendly way.

A Smarter dashboard can help you slice and dice your data in live dashboards. Our analytics smart sheets can also be customised to offer performance metrics reporting live data in real time through API integration.

Motivate Your Team

 A successful Sales Director needs to lead a confident, well trained and innovative team. According to one Article in Sales Readiness Group, Effective sales managers should spend 25 – 40% of their time coaching their staff. But is coaching the only way to motivate a team?

In short, no it isn’t. We’ve learned that listening to your team is as important as coaching and training. Not just to get their feedback, but to hear their ideas on how to improve. We’ve seen time and again with our clients that tools and apps which enable collaboration and creative thinking across departments can help solve problems and streamline work processes.

Enable tailored views of your customer and prospect data. Using Smartsheet you can tailor the views that individual team members have of their customer and prospect data. You can ensure these Smartsheet dashboards integrate with SQL and Oracle databases to ensure your Sales dashboards have real data integrity.

We realise this can be easier said than done on a busy week juggling meetings and sales targets. Talk to us today about how we can help you create Smarter Dashboards.

We will design a Smartsheet Form to help share ideas and gather feedback from your team. We work with Cloud based solutions to ensure all your data is available to you in real time.

Communicate Efficiently With Your Clients

Any good Sales Director will tell you that client relationships are key. However, in your role of a Sales Director, finding the best way to keep track of client communication is an ongoing challenge. Industry estimates show that over 91% of companies with more than 10 employees use CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) software.

Do you use a CRM tool?

A CRM is a tool to record and analyse any and all interaction between a Sales Director, their team and their customer base. This can be in the form of calls, emails and meetings, whatever client interaction you feel is relevant to your business.

Any basic CRM system can provide this for you, but what if your needs change over time? Or if you need something more bespoke?

Our team of consultants can build you a customised CRM in Smartsheet. Need it handle large amounts of data? We can build a Smarter Dashboard implementation that uses a SQL database to store as much as you need. We can also create and implement tools that help to…

Track Your Client Journey

From initial contact, to after sales care, it is important to have a clear understanding of your customers’ experience, and be able to track their journey with you from start to finish. Are you delivering on your client’s expectations? Does your team provide satisfactory after sales care?

By working with cloud based platforms, we can help build systems that provide data in real time. This means you can manage multiple teams from one location, enabling you to track progress and identify weaknesses in your pipeline.

Case Study – Project Tracking Solution

Read our case study here for one example of how we provided a project tracking solution to the team at SIP Build UK.

Succeed as Sales Director with Smartsheet

Whether you are managing a large team and need to organise Smartsheet training workshops or just starting out, never underestimate the importance of having the right tools for the job in hand. From managing client relations, to tracking sales targets, don’t be afraid to find creative solutions to streamline your workflows and get the results you need.

CONTACT US – today for support as your Smartsheet Consultants.

Further Reading

Looking for more inspiration on the most effective tools to meet your goals?

Take a look at our blog on the best tools for Project Management.

We reflect on the importance of Productivity in a previous blog.

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