A key to your success is project management. If you don’t have this as a competency, then add it to your career management plan. If you know project management, you’ll be able to create something from nothing.

Creating something from nothing is my specialty. I get bored maintaining things, but love the act of creating new things like projects, programs, and departments. My training in project management has served me well over the years. In one of my former gigs, I was once asked to create new day-to-day sales management and channel management functions, adding to my existing Marketing department responsibilities.

Whenever I’m asked to create departments, I outline the major work blocks of activities, and then drill down into smaller and smaller tasks, until I’ve defined department functions, jobs in the new department, each job’s role and responsibilities, and standard performance measures and reports. Below are examples high-level functions that eventually were defined into jobs and job duties.

Assess and analyze

• Assess and analyze past performance for sales team, individuals, and sales cycle
• Audit webinar follow-up of marketing leads to sales, review performance to date, review previous year’s sales performance, identify sales issues in sales cycle, and post mortem on close lost deals

Function, roles, and responsibilities

• Define what day-to-day sales management is, executive roles, sales team members role
• Identify management oversight as it pertains to weekly calls to each sales team member, performance measures reports, and management team reports

Alignment of departmental function

• Document management team strategy
• Specify how the new sales operations functions align to management team strategy, align to channel management, and align marketing support to sales management

Identify my responsibilities and deliverables

• Create sales plan for sales team (Sales Situation Strategic Positioning, Sales Objectives, Sales Forecast, Sales Model as defined by management team, Sales Budget, Timeline, Key Success Factors, Next Steps) and individual sales team members
• Identify required reports
• Document new process on how sales team members will be expected to adjust their individual work flow to accommodate new reports required by key stakeholders
• Identify new management oversight details like weekly calls with each sales team member
• Set up and maintain sales reports for weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual review

Individual sales team member’s performance measures

• Identify Salesforce.com reports to be used in monthly performance measures
• Identify key measures for individual reports
• Update monthly board/management team reports with additional measures that shall be monitored.

Repeatable reporting process

• Update the sales standards document with new sales management requirements and reports and prepare message to communicate to sales team
• Create report templates, and start assessing and analyzing the data
• Marketing team working on Salesforce.com’s key reports and metrics so reports data can be add to monthly board/management team report and the new individual sales team member performance measure reports

Transition plan

• Outline the transition plan with target dates for hand-off and messaging to sales team members.

While these are high-level work blocks of activity, the above activities resulted in the creation and execution of a new department that defined new goals and objectives for a sale team, created new job functions for sales operations, and established a process for department and individual sales performance management.

Smart Lemming tip: learn project management skills that are transferrable to creating and managing everything from projects, new programs, departments, or new businesses.

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