Understanding your manager’s role

Welcome to Kara’s four-part “Manage your manager” guide. Each section will have a different focus, but in general, our guide aims to help you structure your objectives and communicate clearly with your manager and team, guiding you to sales success and improving workplace relationships.

Today’s chapter is about understanding the role of your manager in your company. In our previous chapter, we talk about managing your sales manager, but this chapter will help you understand more about their role and help further communication between you and your manager even more. And, if your goal is to ever be a manager, knowing and understanding expectations can help prepare you. And we also have a secret: robots can help. But more on that below.

Salespeople sell, managers forecast

Just as your job is to close deals, a manager’s job is to anticipate them. If your manager is crazy about the CRM, this will help you understand why. It’s their job to know everything about each opportunity — both lucrative deals and lost ones. This is what helps them forecast the goals and earnings of your company. If you, as a salesperson, don’t give them all the information, the company’s forecast will be off.

You and your entire company rely on forecasting, or predicting how much money the company will earn (managers do this). The earnings of a company are directly related to things that greatly affect all employees — salary raises, how many people to hire, and projects to build. If you don’t provide accurate data, the forecast will be off. So now that you understand why your manager needs all the information, make it easy for them, and let them know.

Offer up the bad news along with the good

While your job as a salesperson is to live in the present, managers must live in the future — and it’s your job to help them. We know that a manager’s job is to forecast, but there’s a big reason why it’s so important — and that’s the bottom line or ROI for your company.

It’s essential you’re honest with them about when a deal is going wrong, or about a missed or lost opportunity. They’ll need to amend their forecasts, and this will avoid trouble in the long wrong.

So don’t hide the bad news from your managers. They’ll respect your honesty, which could also save them from getting into trouble with their managers, too.

Robots can help

Now that you have a better understanding of why it’s so important to keep your manager in the loop, it all comes down to implementation. And knowing why you have to enter every single piece of info in your CRM doesn’t make it any less tedious or annoying to do so.

But robots can help. AI-related technology provides the ability to streamline and support repetitive tasks, making sales processes more efficient. Using AI improves the quality of CRM data while automation and mobile technology simplify and reduce salespeople’s interactions with the CRM throughout the day. AI assistants can open up space for a new kind of manager-salesperson relationship and a new way of thinking about productivity in sales.

Take our app, Kara.

Kara is an app that syncs seamlessly with CRMs. We all know that CRM systems are oftening lacking when it comes to the needs of salespeople. But Kara can help salespeople order and prioritize the most important tasks. The app uses up-to-date, weekly resorts that focus on objectives and automatically feed directly into your CRM. 

Kara is a to-do list that syncs with your calendar so that you can work on time management and prioritize key tasks in between meetings. Custom analytics will show you where you’re focusing your time and efforts, helping you to make the right choices for your business and yourself. It allows you to reorganize your priorities and decide where you need to focus your time.

Bottom line

Understanding your manager’s role is half the battle. Once you get used to being honest with your superiors, they’ll have more respect for you.  Then, your relationships will improve. And, CRM data entry and organization will be a lot easier if you can use apps such as Kara to help.

Make sure to check out the other articles in our “Manage your manager” series.

Photo by Microsoft Edge on Unsplash