When salespeople can work with full confidence and efficiency, they can close deals quickly and make their companies more money. But too often, the administrative responsibilities of managing their own day-to-day workflows bog them down and keep them from performing to their potential. This is a huge problem for businesses that want to drive growth and hit their revenue targets.
Fortunately, there’s a solution to this problem that can cost less than re-budgeting or hiring new employees. It’s called sales support, and it’s a key factor in helping your team perform at their best.
Sales support is an umbrella term that can include any company resources that directly help salespeople succeed without increasing their workloads. That can include anything from marketing materials to sales software and even additional sales reps. In some cases, a sales support function can also involve active market communications and marketing-oriented tasks like coordinating email campaigns or distributing press releases.
The primary role of a sales support associate is to handle the back-end, administrative tasks that are needed to manage and support all the tools that your salespeople use. For smaller organizations, that might mean setting up, optimizing, and delivering product training to reps. For larger companies, it might be ensuring that all the software tools and other products are available to salespeople when they need them.
Lastly, sales support might be responsible for finding and handing off qualified leads to the wider sales team. This can require excellent research skills and a strong grasp of your CRM metrics. It’s important to know how long it takes for a lead to go from a prospect to a closed deal so that you can compare that to your ideal time frames and see where your team may be falling short.