Sales support is essential to ensure the success of an organization's sales efforts; it involves providing assistance, guidance, and resources to the sales team throughout the sales process. The primary goal of sales support is to foster the sales team’s activities and allow them to focus on generating revenue and closing deals.
Sales support is a range of practices or activities and resources provided to sales teams to help the team effectively make sales for the brand's products and services. It includes assisting sales representatives/ executives throughout the sales process, ensuring they are assigned the necessary tools, information, and proper support to achieve their sales targets, and ensuring the best quality customer service.
A sales support representative is a professional who assists the sales team by offering administrative, operational, and customer support through the sales process and closely working with sales representatives and the internal team to ensure smooth sales operations and customer satisfaction.
Various responsibilities of a sales representative are:
Sales primarily focus on generating revenue by determining and closing deals. Sales professionals directly engage with customers and build relationships with them. Sales professionals directly interact with customers as they initiate sales customers, understand customer needs and resolve them; they are directly responsible for generating revenue for the organization.
Whereas sales support primarily focuses on assisting the sales team, and the goal is to enable the sales team to perform their job effectively and efficiently by offering administrative, operational, and support throughout the sales process. Sales support professionals have indirect customer interaction and provide support by addressing customer queries and assisting with order processing.
Key reasons why sales support is important:
Sales support professionals assist the sales team by providing administrative, operational, and support to the customer. Their role is to foster the sale process and ensure the sales team has the proper resources, knowledge, and support to perform their task effectively. Sales support focuses on supporting the sales team instead of directly engaging with customers.
Whereas sales associates are directly involved in the sales process, they actively engage with customers, build relationships and identify their needs. They are primarily responsible for generating sales and meeting sales targets. The main focus is on boosting revenue by actively selling the brand’s products or services. They are responsible for prospecting, quality leads, negotiation contracts, and deals.
Tips to improve sales support are:
These are short surveys that can be sent frequently to check what your employees think about an issue quickly. The survey comprises fewer questions (not more than 10) to get the information quickly. These can be administered at regular intervals (monthly/weekly/quarterly).
Having periodic, hour-long meetings for an informal chat with every team member is an excellent way to get a true sense of what’s happening with them. Since it is a safe and private conversation, it helps you get better details about an issue.
eNPS (employee Net Promoter score) is one of the simplest yet effective ways to assess your employee's opinion of your company. It includes one intriguing question that gauges loyalty. An example of eNPS questions include: How likely are you to recommend our company to others? Employees respond to the eNPS survey on a scale of 1-10, where 10 denotes they are ‘highly likely’ to recommend the company and 1 signifies they are ‘highly unlikely’ to recommend it.