If you move away from the level of specific tasks, processes and detailed responsibilities, you come to the overriding question: „What is sales management in a bank or savings bank?“
„Understand sales“
Sales management must understand and know sales in their own organization. This includes the relevant markets, customers and customer types, as well as the products offered. In addition, of course, the desired and lived processes, above all the sales process and, last but not least, the people involved. Only in this way can it succeed (both in terms of content and acceptance) that sales management represents sales as a whole to other stakeholders in the organization. (Incidentally, this expressly includes healthy lobbying for sales!)
Organize binding collaboration
In connection with sales management, one often speaks of a driver function, which is semantically not entirely correct. The drivers of employees can only be the managers of these employees. Sales management only has the task of organizing binding framework conditions for cooperation in sales. So it is a management tool, not a management unit. However, in order for the desired cooperation to be actually organized in a binding manner, it is necessary that there is generally accessible transparency about the initial situation and the target image. Only if everyone speaks of the same thing and subsequently also wants the same thing, just then an increased commitment is actually possible.
Drive change
With the existence of a sales management unit, the rest of sales, the market, and the operative sales of products and services to end customers are to be concentrated. Sales itself has the task of working in an implementation-oriented manner, while a conceptual focus is placed on sales management. Not only for resource reasons, but also due to the distance to day-to-day business, it is only natural if necessary changes, for example in the form of projects, are significantly accompanied and also driven forward by sales management. Of course, this does not take place in a vacuum, but in close cooperation (in the sense of the target image) with sales – especially with the management of sales.
Tell the truth
A large part of the organisation’s expectation pressure is unloaded in the sales department, for example in the form of increasingly ambitious goals. Sometimes this also leads to the fact that if goals are not achieved, the culprit is often searched for. The pressure is sometimes greater than the sportsmanship. Now of all, sales like the least when it couldn’t achieve its goals – it feels like a failure after all, even if it turned out to be a remarkable result in the end. But the sales department probably likes it even less when third parties or outsiders (for example, controlling or overall bank management) point this out. This makes sales management all the more important as an internal sparring partner who has to tell unpleasant truths from time to time as part of the team in a protected space. The whole thing, of course, in a constructive-critical manner and, above all, in good time, so that sales management also acts as a management tool here.
Vertriebsmanagement 