How To Leverage the Power of Project Management to Drive Sales revenue?
Sales and project management: How can they come together? Aren’t they two different components of a business? 🤔
In reality, in many areas of sales, we use project management even if we’re not fully aware of that. Let’s take the example of the sales cycle, which we explained in this article written by Ghaya khamassi. The sales cycle can be viewed as a project that needs planning, setting goals, leading a team, and implementing techniques that would allow you to make the best use of your resources. Not only that, other sales processes involve project management such as customer relationship management, launching a new product or enhancing an existing one’s features, and using marketing automation. (Which reminds us! We have talked about marketing automation in depth in another article. 📖)
Moreover, you do need similar skills to succeed in both, such as communication and management skills.
So, how can we leverage the power of project management to drive sales revenue? What’s the secret to a project’s success?
To answer these questions we invited Shakila Kamatali, Learning Facilitator at Africa Leadership University and Co-Founder & Project Manager of Girl District in our 21-day bootcamp (Which by the way you can register to from this link.)
We’ve put together a Success Kit for you to go through and use in your project, as shown below 👇
#1: Setting SMART goals
SMART goals are specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound. Once you’ve achieved this, pass them to stakeholders. Involve other teams that can support you within the project.
#2: Creating a project plan
The first thing to do is listing all the things you know you’ll need to do to achieve your goals. Next, find a template or tool to fill the specific actions to be conducted and the assigned team member. Categorize the different actions and their priority in the project implementation.
#3: Sticking to a schedule
At this stage, you’re ready for an official project kick-off with your team or with your client. You want to make sure that everyone is brought into the steps, that you’ve listed everything you need to do, and that your final deadline seems realistic. You might want to add some critical milestones to ensure that as you go along, you’re hitting some critical deadlines and key responsibilities that need to be taken care of.
#4: Communication flow
This is important whether you’re working with your team or with your client. It’s not enough to just know that tasks are done. If something is at risk that needs to be communicated, and if you’re progressing, that also needs to be communicated. If you’re noticing that a lot of tasks are getting off track or people are blocked, that can help you make better decisions to shift your plan.
#5: Retrospective
Now, it is important to reflect on your project and see what went right, what went wrong, what could be improved, and what you would like to try for next time. You can ask these questions:
- Was our goal clear?
- Did we hit our goal? If not, why?
- Do we have realistic deadlines?
- Did people have clear instructions?
- Do they have enough time to work on the task?
- Are we assigning tasks to the right people?
To sum up, selling is a project. Thus, it is important to use the project success toolkit we presented in this article. If you want to learn more, don’t hesitate to contact us.
This article was written by Ghaya khamassi — Skills21 alumna.
