Project and Team Management - The Top 5 Pain Points

Team Management is a massively demanding job. The work of the managers is to constantly coach their reps, assess territory success, update them on organizational changes, and develop business strategies.

Lets have a look at the top five pain points for team managers.

01. Fighting Fires
Like a firefighter, running to put out one small flame to the next is the image that has been a recurring metaphor for the organizational managers. Being interrupted from daily duties to fix small issues constantly can be incredibly frustrating, most especially for a team manager who must solve these issues from a distance, rather than in an office setting. These issues could include product ordering errors, confusion about client appointments or concerns about customer service. Although the rep lacks the authority to make final decisions, these issues can be resolved by them. It is important for managers too often reflect on how much they are micro-managing their reps responsibilities and decide what issues are appropriate to hand back to reps, so that they may focus on important issues.

02. Exaggerated Travel Costs
It is a pain for a team manager losing money and not being able to point at a cost. It’s difficult for him to understand how fuel can be costing so much after looking at a map of territories; a conversation with a rep at the end can make the manager aware that a rep is taking a “longer way” to get to clients. It can be difficult to lead reps on the most efficient routes to clients without a system of GPS tracking. Duty managers are likely to put off is relying on conversations about travel hence; having a digitized map to review can go a long way toward demystifying travel costs.

03. The Middleman between Reps and Data
Data are often needed by reps; whether that is client contact information, client history, consumer research, etc. reps are in constant need of data. Organizations that still collect and store data on paper have challenges getting that critical data out to reps on time. For instance, a luxury goods retailer will call their supplier rep if they are having an out-of-stock experience and claim they did not receive the amount of product they ordered. If immediate access to their ordering history is not granted, that rep then calls the manager to pull up this information. With small problems coming up with all their reps, a manager could easily spend an entire day pulling up data for their reps. In order to solve this issue, a mobile software solution should be implemented which allow reps to collect, share and access all their data from a mobile device, freeing the manager from the middleman role.

04. Putting Off Goal Setting
Managers of teams do not only find themselves caught up in small details as the ones mentioned above but also in other tedious responsibilities that come with the role of a manager such as handling personal conflicts between reps, managing paperwork, etc. These are part of issues that keep managers from performing a central role in coaching the team and improving sales strategy. Managers can begin to check off this list of pain points by initiating healthy team communication, empowering employees with more diverse responsibilities, and implementing software solutions into daily activities.

05. Performance is not consistent
Visualize spending precious hours of in-depth, consistent, and creative training with each new rep that joins a team. Thus, once your staff is full and trained, performance is unpredictable. A solution that tracks rep activities should be sought by Managers suffering from inconsistent rep performance. The option to have reps fill out certain digital forms before leaving a client, such as a retail audit or a competitive report is given to the managers by Activity Management tools which run on mobile devices.