Sales team management: how to build a system

Sales team management is daily work for the head of sales: allocating clients and workloads, setting requirements for selling, helping salespeople and fixing problems. A system connects these actions through shared rules, clear authority and measures of results. The business owner defines what they expect from the department, and the head of sales organises the team’s work within the agreed conditions.

On Friday, an experienced salesperson is unavailable, and their client asks for clarification on a proposal. Let’s examine this situation: a colleague is ready to reply but does not know which version was sent or what else was promised. The buyer is asked to wait. You get involved, gather the correspondence, call the employee — and once again deal with sales instead of your own work.

If this sounds like your department, you understandably want to make everyone work in the same way. Write instructions, require every field to be filled in, set the same number of calls. But the salespeople will explain that clients differ, experience differs and everyone has their own way of negotiating. On this point, they are right.

But a personal way of selling and the right to leave colleagues without information about a client are different things. I believe a system should preserve salespeople’s strengths while limiting the company’s dependence on their personal availability. To do this, you need to agree what is compulsory for everyone, where employees can choose for themselves and how the head of sales changes the work when something goes wrong.

The sales team management system

A sales team management system consists of connected decisions: what result is needed, who handles the client, what rules the team follows, how time is allocated and what happens when work goes off course. It is useful to build it around the buyer’s journey: from the first enquiry to payment and the next order.

An existing sales department needs the following minimum:

Goal and acceptable terms. What the department must sell over the chosen period, to whom and within what limits on price and payment. The head of sales turns the goal into tasks for individuals; the business owner approves the commercial terms.
Clear transitions between stages. A proposal counts as ready when what is being ordered has been agreed and the proposal can be sent to the buyer. The fact that it was sent and the client’s reply are recorded separately: these are different events.
Responsibility and cover. The buyer has a main salesperson. A colleague is assigned to cover their absence and has access to the current proposal and agreements.
Work allocation. The head of sales considers promises to existing clients, the complexity of new enquiries and salespeople’s skills. These limits govern the queue of enquiries.
Data, reviews and corrections. The head of sales spots a delay, finds the cause and changes the task, workload or way of working. Rewards for employees support these requirements: helping a colleague should not automatically mean losing recognition for their contribution.

None of this requires a particular set of software. Each decision needs an accessible record: who is responsible, what has been agreed, by when and where the result is kept. A CRM system helps keep this information together. But people will need to agree on the authority of the head of sales to reassign work and how employees’ contributions are accounted for.

What applies to everyone and what each salesperson chooses

A common requirement makes sense where one person’s work affects a buyer or a colleague. In the opening situation, that requirement would be saving the current proposal before the employee leaves. This allows another salesperson to continue the conversation without asking the client the same questions again.

There is no need to require identical wording in every email to achieve this. One salesperson explains the terms in detail; another discusses them by phone and sends a brief confirmation by email. If the buyer has the information they need, the promises can be kept and the agreements are available to the team, different approaches do not get in the way of management.

The head of sales can be asked to prepare a short guide covering three groups:

Compulsory for everyone: record what the client is asking for, the current proposal, the promised response deadline and the next step; warn of any risk of delay before the deadline.
For the salesperson to choose: the order of questions, examples used to explain things, how to prepare for the conversation and a suitable time to get in touch within what has been agreed with the client.
For the head of sales to decide: changing the person responsible, involving someone to help, postponing an internal task to meet a commitment to a client. Changes to approved prices and terms go to the business owner.

Ask for a reason for each compulsory requirement: whose work or which promise does it protect? If the explanation comes down to making reporting easier, the field or action needs to be reviewed. Otherwise, discipline will start to be measured by the time a salesperson spends keeping a form up to date.

And one more thing: strong individual results do not remove the common minimum. An exception for a strong employee means colleagues will have to deal with the consequences of that person’s way of working. The business owner should support the head of sales on this requirement in advance, so that correcting the best salesperson does not turn into a separate negotiation with the owner each time.

Five enquiries each — different workloads

Equal allocation looks like a clear rule. Until it turns out that the word “enquiry” covers different amounts of time.

Let’s work through an illustrative example, not a RENTROP case study. All numbers are set for the calculation. After their current commitments, four salespeople have 165 minutes each left for new enquiries. They can all handle both types of request. During the day, 20 enquiries come in:

12 simple enquiries: 15 minutes each for the next action, 180 minutes in total.
8 complex enquiries: 60 minutes each for the next action, 480 minutes in total.
Total time needed: 660 minutes. The team’s available time is also 660 minutes.

If each person is given five enquiries without considering complexity, the result could look like this:

The first and second salespeople each get four complex enquiries and one simple enquiry: 4 × 60 + 15 = 255 minutes each.
The third and fourth each get five simple enquiries: 5 × 15 = 75 minutes each.

The first two are each short of 90 minutes; the others each have that much time free. The department as a whole has enough people. Delays are already built into specific promises to buyers.

If each person gets two complex and three simple enquiries, the workload is 2 × 60 + 3 × 15 = 165 minutes. The number of enquiries stays the same, and the deadlines become achievable under the conditions of this illustrative example.

In real work, the time needed varies, and spare time is needed for unexpected conversations. So the instruction to the head of sales is to estimate the time for the next actions and leave some time in reserve, rather than set a rule of “exactly 165 minutes”. There is no spare time in the example: any conversation that runs longer will need a new decision from the head of sales.

If only one salesperson can handle complex requests, an even distribution on paper will not work. The head of sales arranges help with preparation, changes the promised deadlines or organises training for colleagues. The business owner approves extra spending if the team cannot handle the task without it.

How help is accounted for also needs to be agreed. When the second salesperson prepares a calculation but all the credit goes to the first, the helper has a reason to avoid these tasks. The rule on participation and rewards should be agreed before work is reassigned. Otherwise, the head of sales will spend every day persuading people to do something the company itself does not reward.

An exception needs a reason and an end

Even good rules do not cover every buyer. For example, a client postpones a discussion of the proposal and asks you to come back later. There is no reason for the salesperson to call on the original day just to meet the standard contact deadline.

But a note saying “the client is special” explains nothing to the person who takes over the deal. A useful exception includes the reason, the new agreement, the person responsible and a date after which it must be reviewed. Here is a completed example, with no real client:

The buyer has moved the discussion to 15 October: they will agree the contents of the order within their company before that date. The main salesperson confirms the meeting on 14 October. If they are absent, the colleague assigned to cover does this. The current proposal and the buyer’s email are saved in the record. The prices and the proposal’s validity period have not changed.

Now a colleague understands why the client is not being called today. The head of sales can see when taking no action will stop matching the agreement. The business owner does not need to be involved in this postponement if the decision fits within the established terms.

A repeated exception is a reason to review the general rule. If one type of buyer consistently needs a different approval process, the head of sales proposes a separate route for that type. They state what determines that choice: for example, the order requires a technical specification. An experienced salesperson’s surname must not determine that choice.

The same rule breach needs different solutions

Two salespeople have not saved the proposal by the end of the day. That is where the similarity ends. One has no access to the right folder, another has been given more tasks than they can complete, and a third does not know which version counts as current. Punishing people for an empty field will not remove these causes.

Ask the head of sales to distinguish between four situations:

The conditions were not provided. There is no access, information or time. The head of sales removes the obstacle or changes the task and deadline.
They were not taught how to do it. The salesperson knows the requirement but cannot carry it out. The head of sales demonstrates with a specific proposal, then checks and accepts the next task the salesperson completes independently.
The requirement gets in the way of work. The same information has to be copied manually to several places. The head of sales removes the unnecessary copying while keeping the required result accessible.
The agreement is deliberately not followed. The conditions are in place, the employee knows how, the requirement has been explained and the breach keeps happening. The head of sales discusses the person’s performance with them and refers staffing decisions to the business owner.

The owner receives the identified cause and the action taken from the head of sales. They do not need to find out for themselves whose access is not working. How to assess the work of the head of sales is covered separately in the article “No one is monitoring this now. So what is the head of sales doing?”.

The first ten working days: a task for one area

Starting with all sales at once is risky: existing deals will continue, and the new requirements will take time. Choose an area where the dependence is already visible. In our opening situation, this is preparing a proposal and handing the conversation over to a colleague when the salesperson is absent.

Below is a task you can give the head of sales. Ten working days are set aside here for a limited launch, with no promise of revenue growth during that time.

In the first three working days, prepare rules for working with proposals: where the current version is stored, who updates agreements and when, and who takes over replies to the client when the main salesperson is absent. Separate compulsory actions from what the salesperson can choose. State which information currently has to be recovered through me.

From the fourth day, apply the rules in one chosen area. Before the launch, make sure the team has access and time; suggest what unnecessary reporting to remove. Agree with me how to account for contributions when people help their colleagues. Keep the current prices and sales terms.

By the tenth working day, show the original and new process using specific proposals: which enquiries required searching for information, how many promised replies were delayed and why, and which questions had to be passed to me. Include an example of cover and a list of exceptions with review dates. Suggest what to keep, fix or cancel.

A useful way to start assessing the result is with a demonstration: the designated colleague finds the latest version of the proposal and explains what was agreed with the buyer and what needs to happen next. The person who wrote the proposal gives them no hints. If no one was actually absent during this period, the review takes place within the team, without unnecessary contact with the client.

Then look at delays and time spent. If information has become accessible but salespeople have started missing deadlines because they enter it twice, the process needs to be simplified. If cover only worked after a call to the owner, the dependence remains. These observations determine the next change; revenue over a short period will not, by itself, show how good that change is.

Who keeps the rules in place after the launch

After the launch in the first area, the business owner has a choice: expand the process that works or first remove the limitation that has been found. The requirements should be extended to the whole department when the head of sales can maintain them in everyday work — allocating workloads, helping people and reviewing exceptions without the owner’s daily intervention.

If the owner still does all of this, they need to hand over daily leadership. At RENTROP, turnkey sales management is built around this task: the owner stops being the main head of sales while continuing to make decisions about the product, prices and budget.

On Friday, an experienced salesperson is still entitled to be unavailable. But the reply to their client should no longer depend on whether the owner can reach the employee by phone: the company must be able to continue the conversation it started.