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Sales is the lifeblood of any company, and yet too many companies still can’t honestly say they have a good handle on what is going on with their sales teams most of the time. The problem is especially troubling when it comes to high dollar/high value complex deals with enterprise clients. The cost of complex sales is high; long sales cycles, large teams, travel, etc., can all contribute to these costs.

However, those costs pale in comparison to the price an organization pays for not rigorously managing their sales teams according to a consistent, well-conceived sales cadence. If sales organizations don’t operate according to what is known today as a tightly integrated sales cadence that defines how and when the sales process rolls out and also captures vital information that can be leveraged to quickly respond to changing solutions, they will miss opportunities and lose more than they should.

Here are a few factors which you should consider when working to implement a consistent cadence:

• How to track customer contacts, in order to make sure sales opportunities and cycles aren’t missed and customer relationships aren’t being neglected.
• How to implement a unified strategy that creates a consistent sales culture adopted by every member of the team.
• How to make sure all the right data is getting into the right hands at the right time.
• How to align and evaluate the metrics to make sure everyone is on the same page and comparing “apples to apples”.
• How to make sure that teams separated by geography and working on different opportunities within the same account are adhering to the same standards and coordinating their efforts.
• How to more effectively coordinate sales efforts with marketing, finance, and executive leadership.

Ultimately, sales cadence will involve adjusting internal processes for the whole organization, and will probably hinge on learning how to redeploy or redesign the organization’s CRM in order to more efficiently track, manage and organize information across all divisions. However, in addition, the sales manager will need to concentrate on imparting a new vision to the whole sales team, one that is built on communication and collaboration as the teams pursue a uniform process based on a well-defined strategy to manage larger and more complex opportunities.

Here are some questions that the sales manager must ask and answer in order to move his sales organization in this new direction:

• Is the sales team participating with the rest of the company to improve the overall health of the business, or are we off in our own little word?
• What steps must be taken to align our activities with the rest of the company?
• Are sales efforts integrated and coordinated across all teams and accounts? If not, where is the disconnect and what can be done about it?

Questions like the above and many more help organizations build the right sales management system. Because each industry, market, company and sales team is unique, there aren’t standardized “right” answers to these questions. The important thing is to ask the right questions and let the answers guide you to the next steps – and the next set of questions and answers – you need to pursue. The important thing is to immediately take whatever action is necessary to embrace these changes and move your organization forward. In today’s whirlwind economy, failure to change – even failure to change fast enough – equals failure, period.