Jakub Tabędzki, CEO Clorce Poland: Salespeople like their job very much and don’t like being disturbed in their work

When managing sales departments, what difficulties can be encountered most often, what affects the efficiency of the team’s work?

From my experience in team management and working with salespeople, I can say that the main problem is the difficulty in communication between the sales department and other departments in the company: with logistics with the warehouse, with orders, with accounting. One of the worst things that can happen from the point of view of an employee is the need to reach for many systems on which individual departments work and at the same time the need to combine these information, often outdated during the day, into a whole. As a result, the employee is forced to direct a large amount of work to backoffice activities, and not to the commercial activities themselves.

The lack of a unified sales and communication system in the department causes a decrease in sales and a decrease in the quality of services, and can often also lead to employee burnout.

How, then, effectively optimized commercial backoffice activities save the time that a statistical salesperson spends on replenishing CRM and how big savings can it generate both financially and in terms of time?

The system, which is a coherent communication system for the entire company, working on online data verified in real time, allows you to organize the work of the sales department. The main issue that should lie at the heart of the decision-making process on the chosen direction and the purchase of the system is the possibility of integrating work at different levels and in different departments to avoid repeating the same process in front of the employee we mentioned earlier.

Let me quote one of the implementations carried out by our company: the sales department generates an invoice and enters it into the accounting system. After closing the accounting system, the employee opens the courier company’s website or application and is forced to enter the same data again. Again, he repeats the same steps generating documentation for the client. This is where the need to optimize back-office processes in the company is born.

Unfortunately, many companies, despite the increasing degree of digitization and the emphasis on introducing innovative production methods, are still forgetting about the optimization of commercial processes.

The working hours saved as a result of optimization obviously translate into profit.

So where do such errors in the implementation process come from, especially in the case of companies that are market leaders?

Well, the answer is quite trivial, most often in companies during such implementations, rank-and-file employees, salespeople are not asked about their feelings, but only orders the use of a system that is the best solution from the point of view of the manager. From the point of view of a trader, the matter is often completely different.

Working with one of the premium brand dealers for whom we designed the system, it was such that the entire preparation process was done “manually”, all documentation regarding the sale of the car was done in paper form, while at the end of the week, the employee entered this data into the system, as it were reporting backwards.

Apart from the fact that the employee performs the same activity twice, the entire system is also problematic from the customer’s point of view. Very often, unfortunately, there are implementations in which the tools do not facilitate work, but are only an additional reporting tool. Working with sales departments, we often hear the sacramental sentence uttered by salespeople “should I sell or fill CRM?” The answer should be: “You have to sell because it fills the CRM.”

In a properly functioning implementation, such a system should be a tool in the process in which the trader works every day, facilitating data segregation.

Working with one of the largest distribution companies in PL over the last year, we received information from employees that every day they spend more than 2 hours on reporting, so converting this time into working time, it is clear how much it affects the company’s finances.

For example, with 10 hours a week devoted to reporting and with 10 employees, the cost of an incorrectly carried out implementation based on poorly selected tools is about PLN 10,000 per month. It is practically a full time job.

Annually, in medium-sized companies, losses resulting from incorrectly carried out implementations reach up to PLN 300,000. zloty.

There are cases of companies spending tens of thousands on advertising and without proper implementation of the sales system, they do not get any return on this activity.

Therefore, I always emphasize that the chosen system and its implementation, in order to be effective, should not be a reporting system, but should be an integral part of the daily work of a given trader.

Finally, I would like to emphasize that I always strongly encourage every entrepreneur to audit the sales processes in their company and look for solutions on the market that will help optimize your commercial activities.

Jakub Tabędzki CEO Clorce Polska (Salesforce Partner), EV and electromobility expert practitioner, founder of the Tesla P0D PRĄD platform and www.teslawynaje.pl/

Passionate about technology and engineering, co-creator of the www.wsparciedlaszpitala.pl system, which not only brings together over 700 medical facilities, but also as an IT solution, fascinated the global giant of the industry in the Silicon Valley. CEO of one of the most dynamically developing software houses implementing solutions supporting the management of the sales process and back office work