Writing about sales IN MEDIA

Leads keep coming in, managers hold meetings, send proposals. And yet deals still get stuck somewhere between “sounds interesting” and a signed contract. It’s a familiar picture for any digital agency where the sales team seems to be working, but the outcome is impossible to predict.

  The classic story: the first deals at a digital agency are closed by the owner personally. Personal connections, referrals, your own expertise, and clients show up without any sales department at all. As long as there are ten or fifteen of them, this model works great.  

Only 6% of people who visit a clinic’s website end up booking an appointment. And up to 40% of incoming inquiries get lost right at the stage of talking to the administrator.

A familiar story: a clinic invests in advertising, the phone won’t stop ringing, and inquiries from the website keep coming in one after another. Then it turns out that a third of the calls went unanswered, half of those who booked never showed up for the consultation, and patients who received a three-month treatment plan from the doctor simply vanished after the first visit.

If you run a medical center or handle marketing there, this picture is probably familiar. Advertising brings in inquiries, the phone rings, patients write in messengers. But some of them never book an appointment, some book and don’t show up, and some make it to a consultation and then vanish without a trace.

A sales manager holds a team meeting, and the classic question comes up: how many weeks should it take before a new hire starts selling?

The owner looks at the sales department and asks a simple question: how many clients, leads, and active deals should one manager handle so the department works at full capacity without people burning out within three months. The Head of Sales usually answers intuitively, relying on numbers from past experience or advice from colleagues in other markets. This is how the sales plan for one manager turns into guesswork instead of a management tool.

The main question for any employer building a sales manager’s compensation structure is how much to pay guaranteed, and how much to tie to results. This is the core of the salary vs commission in sales department debate: too high a base salary kills the link between effort and income – the person earns roughly the same salary whether or not they hit the plan. 

In a typical CRM, everything looks simple: you have a deal, so the money is coming soon. But if your company manufactures equipment, metal structures, or components, two to three months – sometimes half a year – can pass between the client’s first call and the shipment of the finished product. This is exactly why sales forecasting for a manufacturing company needs a different approach: you have to clarify the technical specification, prepare a quote, go through a tender, agree on the contract, purchase raw materials, put the order into production, and wait for it to come off the line.  

Picture this: a manager hit the plan, sold twenty cars in a month, and the dealership still earned less than expected. Sound familiar? This is a classic sign that a motivation system for car dealership managers is rewarding volume instead of results. The issue is often not the number of deals, but how exactly they were closed. The manager may have been handing out discounts almost on autopilot, selling cars with minimal margin, forgetting to offer add-on equipment, insurance, or financing, and doing a poor job on trade-in.