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Sales Support

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.

What is sales support?

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.

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Who is a sales support representative?

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:

  1. Customer service
  2. Lead generation and qualification
  3. Sales training and knowledge
  4. Administrative support

  1. Customer service: Sales support teams generally handle customer inquiries, provide product information, address customer concerns, and proactively resolve them. They represent a point of contact for customers and maintain positive relationships.
  2. Lead generation and qualification: Sales support also includes identifying and qualifying leads through prospect research, data analysis, and market segmentation. They assist in building a prospects bottleneck for the sales team to pursue.
  3. Sales training and knowledge: Sales support teams help train sales representatives on product features and benefits. They offer ongoing support to ensure salespeople thoroughly understand the products or services they are selling.
  4. Administrative support: Sales support assists with administrative tasks such as managing sales documentation, sales records and files, and maintaining databases.

What is the difference between sales and sales support?

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.

What is the importance of sales support?

Key reasons why sales support is important:

  1. Provide customer support
  2. Streamlining sales operations
  3. Enabling sales team productivity
  4. Improve sales reporting and analysis
  5. Collaboration with marketing

  1. Providing customer support: Sales support professionals serve as a bridge between the customer and the sales team as they address customer inquiries, provide product information and resolve queries. Sales support contributes to customer satisfaction and retention by delivering proper customer service.
  2. Streamlining sales operations: Sales support professionals assist in managing sales processes and coordination between different departments. They ensure smooth collaboration and communication, enabling the timely delivery of products or services.
  3. Enabling sales team productivity: Sales support offers valuable resources and support to the team. This involves creating sales collateral and offering training and guidance. By equipping sales representatives with the required tools and knowledge, sales support boosts their productivity and efficiency in engaging with prospects.
  4. Improving sales reporting and analysis: Sales support gathers, evaluates, and reports sales data and provides insights for sales strategies by tracking sales performance, determining trends, and analyzing the effectiveness of sales initiatives.
  5. Collaboration with marketing: Sales support teams usually collaborate nearly with marketing departments to develop campaigns, market research initiatives, and promotional materials. This collaboration ensures alignment between marketing efforts and sales, allowing for targeted sales messaging and lead generation.

What is the difference between sales support vs sales associates?

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.

Give tips to improve sales support.

Tips to improve sales support are:

  1. Enhanced communication channels
  2. Better product knowledge
  3. Collaborate with sales and marketing
  4. Implement CRM and sales support tools

  1. Enhanced communication channels: Establish clear and effective communication channels between sales support professionals and sales representatives. It fosters open lines of communication to ensure smooth collaborations and timely knowledge transfer.
  2. Better product knowledge: Develop and maintain a robust knowledge base encompassing comprehensive product knowledge and competitive analysis. Sales support professionals should have access to this information base to assist sales reps with product-related queries and provide accurate information.
  3. Collaborate with sales and marketing: Foster close relationships between sales support, marketing, and sales teams. Consistently communicate and share insights to align strategies and understand customer needs as it helps sales support be tailored to meet the sales team's specific needs and align the marketing objectives.
  4. Implement CRM and sales support tools: Use customer relationships management system and sales support tools to funnel data management, automation process, and effective sales support. It allows implementation of technology solutions that facilitate information sharing, management of work, and reporting for improved sales support efficiency.

Employee pulse surveys:

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).

One-on-one meetings:

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:

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.

Based on the responses, employees can be placed in three different categories:

  • Promoters
    Employees who have responded positively or agreed.
  • Detractors
    Employees who have reacted negatively or disagreed.
  • Passives
    Employees who have stayed neutral with their responses.

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