The sales management process is a repeating sequence: agree the sales plan, organise daily work with the sales funnel, review changes and make decisions for the next period. The head of sales connects these stages: today's actions provide material for the weekly review, and its conclusions change the team's tasks. The owner decides on the goal and resources, receives explanations for deviations and resolves issues beyond the head of sales' authority.
Friday's report shows thirty open deals again. There were just as many on Monday. You cannot tell whether the team made progress or stood still all week, and you want to bring the salespeople together every morning so they can explain in detail what they have been doing. Let's use this report as an illustrative example, not a RENTROP case study.
Extra meetings will give you more accounts of the work. But first you should find out what happened to the original thirty deals. Some closed, some moved forward, some remained waiting; meanwhile, new enquiries came in. The same total hides different events. If the head of sales does not connect them to decisions, the owner has to piece together the week themselves.
I think the starting point here is deciding how to review changes. Which events require action today, which require a decision for the whole team at the end of the week, and which change the monthly sales plan? While everything is mixed together, the team either waits too long or gets new rules every day.
Stages of the sales management process
It helps to identify five stages. Each ends with a result that the next person involved needs.
- Planning. The owner and head of sales have agreed on the result for the period; the head of sales has shown which sales they intend to achieve it through.
- Preparing the work. The head of sales has allocated the team's tasks and time. Salespeople understand which commitments to buyers must be met first.
- Daily management. The head of sales sees new events, helps where a deal has stalled and makes sure promises are kept.
- Weekly review. The head of sales explains changes in the sales funnel and distinguishes an isolated case from a recurring difficulty.
- Decision and changes to the work. Actions have been assigned to address the identified cause. If different resources or terms of sale are needed, the head of sales brings a proposal to the owner.
The cycle then repeats: the decision becomes part of the tasks, execution produces data, and the data feeds into a new review. This approach becomes useful when you can see where the work passes from one person to another. For example, the conclusion “buyers take a long time to approve a proposal” must lead to a specific action by a salesperson, and the result of that action must go back to the head of sales.
The stages of a sale work differently: initial contact, discussion, proposal, agreement and payment describe the buyer's path. The head of sales manages all these stages at the same time. So a list of statuses in a CRM system does not, by itself, answer the question of how the head of sales should work.
Planning: what moves from the monthly sales plan into the working week
You cannot simply divide the monthly sales plan by four and hand it out to salespeople. At the start of the period, the team continues existing negotiations, while new enquiries are still making their way through the process. When a sale takes a long time, this week's work will lead to payment later. If you demand only immediate payments from everyone, salespeople will focus on orders that are nearly ready and stop preparing the next ones.
Ask the head of sales to divide the week's work into two lists: what must be completed now and what must move future sales forward. The first contains specific payments and agreements with buyers. The second contains actions without which future payment will not happen: agree requirements, hold a meeting, get a decision on a proposal. Both lists take up employees' time.
The owner needs to make one substantive decision here: how much effort the team reserves for future orders when it is behind on the current month's sales plan. You cannot take this work away from the team to secure urgent payments and still demand the same flow of new deals into the sales funnel. The head of sales proposes what to postpone and explains the consequences; the owner chooses an acceptable level of risk.
Calculating the sales plan itself is a separate task. The article “Sales plan: how to spot a shortfall before the middle of the month” explains what the expected result depends on. Here, the next step is to turn the chosen sales plan into the week's work without losing future sales.
Daily work with the sales funnel: responding to events
Every day, the head of sales needs to see changes that require their involvement: a buyer has cancelled an agreed meeting, a salesperson has missed a promised response, an estimate has been delayed, a client has given a new date for a decision. These are reasons to reconsider the action on a deal. There is no need to recount every open deal record aloud just for the sake of attending a sales meeting.
If a salesperson has not sent an estimate by the promised time, the head of sales identifies the obstacle and decides how to remove it. When the buyer already has the estimate and is reviewing it until Friday, as agreed, a daily demand to “speed things up” adds nothing. On the surface, both deals are at the same stage. In the first, the team has failed to meet a commitment; in the second, the waiting period has been agreed.
That is why a deadline change must be recorded with its reason and the previous date. If an overdue “today” is replaced with “tomorrow” every evening, Friday's report will show a level of order that did not exist in the work. The head of sales will lose material for the review: they will see only the latest version of the promise.
The owner does not need to catch these changes themselves. This is part of the head of sales' assignment: distinguish between our own overdue action, waiting for a client's response and a standstill without an agreement. The article “Monitoring salespeople's work: what to check every day” explains exactly what to check in the team's daily work.
Weekly review: how thirty deals became thirty again
Let's continue the illustrative example. We are counting deals in one business area over one working week; in this example, payment completes the sale. We keep new enquiries separate from those already open on Monday morning.
- At the start of the week: 30 open deals.
- Of these, 5 ended in payment and 7 were closed after buyers declined to proceed.
- During the week, 12 new deals came in; all are still open.
- At the end of the week: 30 − 5 − 7 + 12 = 30 open deals.
The total is the same. Now let's break down the remaining deals: 12 new ones, 6 existing ones with confirmed progress and 12 existing ones with no progress. Confirmed progress here means that the buyer has agreed the requirements or moved on to discussing the contract. A salesperson simply moving a deal record further along the sales funnel does not count as evidence of this.
The twelve existing deals with no movement are not all the same either. In this example, four buyers are not due to respond until next week, as agreed. In eight, the team failed to take a promised action. So a demand to “hurry all twelve along” will direct some effort towards clients who have kept to their agreements and hide our own overdue actions.
The head of sales must bring a review of the eight missed actions: which action was delayed, who should have carried it out and what prevented it. If a recurring cause is found, there is a reason to change how the team works. If the causes differ, each still needs its own decision; grouping them under the word “discipline” is too convenient.
There is another trap here. You cannot divide five payments by twelve new enquiries and call the result the week's conversion rate: different buyers made those payments. To calculate a conversion rate, you need a single group of deals whose outcomes have been tracked. The weekly review of movement answers a different question: what came in, what was completed and what remained waiting.
Decisions after the review: when to change a rule
Suppose that, in the illustrative example, six of the eight missed actions are linked to the same routine: salespeople submit estimates to the head of sales for approval only at the end of the day. By the time the head of sales responds, the deadline promised to the buyer has already passed. The other two missed actions happened because salespeople forgot to send documents that were ready. These are different causes, although the report uses the same word: “overdue”.
For the six estimates, the head of sales changes when they are submitted for approval and sets aside time to respond. With the two salespeople, they review the failure to send documents that were already ready. Requiring everyone to make more calls will remove neither the queue for approval nor the forgotten document.
You also need to decide when to assess the change in the routine. For example, the head of sales takes the next ten comparable estimates and records when each is submitted, when a response is given and when it is sent to the client. This is a proposed number to observe, not an industry standard. If the queue has gone but sending is still late, work continues at the next step. If the number of errors in the estimates has increased, the speed has come at the expense of quality.
Until this observation is complete, you should not change the estimate format, the approval method and the promised deadline at the same time. Otherwise, the head of sales will be unable to explain which change helped. The exception is a discovered error that is already harming the client: it is corrected immediately, without keeping the experiment running for the sake of the report.
Monitoring the process: the summary the owner receives
The owner benefits from a short summary that preserves the connection between events, the cause and the head of sales' action. Below is a completed sample based on our illustrative example. You can give it to the head of sales as a requirement for the weekly update.
Movement during the week: there were 30 open deals, 12 came in, 5 were paid, 7 were closed after buyers declined to proceed, and 30 remained. Of those remaining: 12 are new, 6 existing deals moved forward, and 12 existing deals showed no movement.
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Of these 12 deals, four are waiting for the agreed date of the buyer's response. In eight, we missed an action: six estimates were held up awaiting approval, and two completed documents were not sent by salespeople.
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My decision: I am moving the submission of estimates to an earlier time and setting aside time for approval. I am reviewing the two failures to send documents with the salespeople separately. For the next ten comparable estimates, I will show the timing of each step and any errors that occur.
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No decision is needed from the owner at this point. If I cannot fit approvals into my working hours, I will bring a proposal on which other work to hand over or postpone before promising new deadlines.
The last line is needed even when there is nothing to ask for. It shows that the head of sales has considered whether your involvement is needed. A message saying “Here are the figures, what are we going to do?” hands the entire job of finding the cause and choosing an action back to you.
Judge whether this routine is in place by the evidence in the work: the summary names the cause, employees' tasks have changed, and time for approvals has appeared in the head of sales' calendar. It is too early to promise revenue growth based on one such message: the first thing you can see is whether a specific delay has been removed.
Where the process breaks down and what to assign to the head of sales
If daily difficulties are resolved but the same error keeps coming back, the link between an individual deal and a broader decision is being lost. If a new rule has been announced but the tasks remain the same, the link between decision and execution has been lost. If the owner learns about an obstacle only after the reporting date, the head of sales has held on for too long to an issue they have no authority to resolve themselves.
To get started, an assignment covering one area of work is enough:
Within three working days, prepare a procedure for daily monitoring and weekly reviews of our main business area. State which events you deal with immediately, which you collect as the basis for a broader change, and which you bring to me. Attach a completed summary of deal movements for the last full week and one decision based on its results. Propose a date for assessing this decision and a sign that will tell you whether to keep or change it.
Three days here is the deadline for preparing the procedure and the initial data. If the record of changes is missing, the head of sales clearly notes the gap and starts collecting it; events must not be reconstructed by guessing.
When the owner constantly has to put together these summaries and make sure action is taken, they need to hand over the work itself. At RENTROP, turnkey sales management is designed so that the owner stops being the main head of sales.
If most of the time goes on checking that work gets done, the team takes on monitoring the sales plan, salespeople and stalled deals as part of the same service. It is a question of who keeps the sales team working every day when the owner is busy with other tasks.
Friday's report can still show thirty open deals. But now the movement and decisions behind that number are visible: the owner no longer has to bring the team together to go through its working week all over again.