What are the 3 biggest mistakes LSPs make in managing their sales teams?

What should they do instead?

Great sales management in the language services industry is more crucial than ever.  I got to wondering what prevents LSPs from achieving the consistent and sustained sales growth they desire. I came up three initial questions that I decided ask my colleague, Thomas Edwards.  Thomas has extensive industry sales management experience and I was curious to hear his answers.  I’ve decided to share his responses with you in a series of posts, starting with my first question:

What are the 3 biggest mistakes LSPs make in managing their sales teams and what should they do instead?

Mistake #1:     

When the operations team is at capacity, there is a tendency in our language industry to instruct the sales team not to bring in any new business.

The reason this is a mistake is that sales is a continuous process – like a well-oiled machine with definite cycles and steps – which range from research, prospecting, reaching out, cold-calling, meeting on video conference or in person, understanding the prospects’ pain points and crafting a solution, analyzing assets, quoting, answering RFIs (Requests for Information), answering RFQs and RFPs (Requests for Quote and Requests for Proposal) and closing. Think of it as an automobile engine that needs to be re-started once it stalls or is turned off for the automobile to go. Keep on selling!

Mistake #2:      

A lot of founders and senior managers in the language services industry are not salespeople and to some extent may even resent sales as they don’t like selling or being sold to themselves. Therefore, there is a tendency in many small and mid-sized companies not to assign a quota (or a target) for their sales and account managers.

Not having a quota makes it difficult for the sales professional to know what to aim for. Sure, they can use their best judgement and sell. However, without a clear goal it is easy to get distracted and go from flower to flower – like a butterfly – and achieve very little.

Think of the sales team goal and individual sales contributors’ sales quotas just like you would think of a translation project budget and schedule. Without those, a project would not get done by a deadline and could potentially cost a lot of money to produce. So, go ahead and assign a quota for your sales folks.

Mistake #3: 

We should not think of the salespeople as enemies of the company and the operations team. Keeping that team separate and not fully included in the company can foster tension, lack of motivation and poor performance.

Having collaborative tools like a CRM (Customer Relationship Management software) where information about the sales process, pipeline and forecast and the status of prospect and customer interactions, and status of individual sales opportunities are visible is key to fostering good understanding of what the sales department is doing. Exchanging information and strategies through an Account Plan between team members who interact with customers is also very beneficial to foster collaboration between sales and operations.