How a sales manager runs the team
The sales leadership playbook: the first hour across the Team Cockpit, pipelines and checkpoints, Goals, routing rules, offerings, tags and coaching; the daily, weekly and monthly loops; the rules the CRM holds the team to; and a month in.
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Sales leadership in Current is anyone with the Sales Manager role, a workspace admin (who starts with CRM access and leadership switched on), or anyone whose profile carries the sales-leadership flag; the CRM treats all three the same. Leadership sees every company, opportunity and rep, sets goals, approves campaigns, administers pipelines, offerings and tags, runs coaching, and signs off commission. This playbook is the first hour, the loops, the rules the product holds the team to, and what a running team looks like a month in.
The first hour
- 1Sales home: the Team CockpitThe money row and the team's pace, the leaderboard across the sales team, wins and losses split by motion, and goal tracking rolled up, with a toggle to your own day. If your reps are grouped into teams under Users & roles, your views open focused on your team with Everyone one click away.
- 2Opportunities: pipelines, stages and checkpointsFour built-in pipelines that cannot be archived, because quotes, renewals and expansion look for them by name; add your own. Put a checkpoint on any stage so an opportunity cannot land there without an amount, a close date, or whatever you ask for; decide whether opportunities may skip columns or move backward; and let quotes move cards for you. Current Sales OS sets the whole process up in one pass. A custom field on a pipeline is retired, never deleted.
- 3GoalsA target for any rep or the whole team in any month, quarter or year, with the pace tick that says where they should be today. Fill a fresh period from the last one; only empty cells are filled. Commissions, accelerators and President's Club all read these same numbers.
- 4Leads: routing rulesWho gets the next lead and in what rotation. Rules are read top down and the first match wins, so narrow rules go above broad ones, and a rule can be scoped to one intake form and match on an answer. The response timer runs from 15 minutes to 24 hours in business hours. Automatic re-routing ships off; Log only lets you watch what it would have done first. An unrouted lead alerts you rather than disappearing.
- 5Whitespace: offeringsThe offerings across the top of the grid are yours to manage. The Email seats offering is required, because it defines the seat count.
- 6Settings → Tags and Settings → Email signatureTags have one management surface: rename, recolour, merge, delete, with the counts of companies and contacts carrying each one. Send-as identities live under Email signature: a shared mailbox a sequence can send from, with its own From name, signature and booking page.
- 7Commissions: plansAssign each rep a plan from the templates or build one. Statements assemble themselves monthly from won opportunities, linked quotes and goal attainment.
- 8RoadmapsSales → Roadmaps is every partner in the workspace with the state of their plan, not only your own book: what is awaiting a decision, whose plan has gone stale, and the money approved for this fiscal year and next. It is the fastest read on whether the team is planning work or only reacting to it.
- 9CoachingThe roster with follow-through trends and overdue flags, a prep view per rep, and a session record whose promises land on the rep's My Day and Microsoft To Do.
- 10Real sendingCampaigns reach only your own team until a Tenant Admin connects a sending domain under Integrations → Email (Resend) and switches on real sending. Sequences and account-manager campaigns can send from each person's own Microsoft 365 mailbox without it.
Walkthroughs for leadership
Lead routing, build a list, save a first campaign, build a sequence, open a whitespace opportunity, build a first business review, convert a won quote, build your first dashboard, put a dashboard on a TV, and schedule a report. Each one ends on a real rule, list, campaign, dashboard or schedule. Start them from Learn Current, in your profile menu or behind the ring beside What's New; you are offered the ones your role can run.
The daily loop
- The Team Cockpit: the money row, pace and the leaderboard. Your morning brief carries a team summary with each rep's pace, open pipeline and at-risk account count.
- Approvals. A campaign above 25 recipients, or one flagged marketing, waits in a queue only leadership sees. Once approved, the approver and the time are locked to the record; a change afterwards means cancel and rebuild, and a duplicate is approved from scratch.
- Escalations: every open renewal inside 90 days of close with a defense score under 40, across the whole workspace.
- Unrouted leads, which alert leadership instead of vanishing.
- Opportunities that should have closed: an opportunity on a Won stage that is still open, or one past its close date (see "Closing an opportunity: Won, Lost, and the celebration").
The weekly loop
- Coaching 1-on-1s from the roster. Walk in with the prep view (the AI brief, a pipeline review, win-loss takeaways, churn risk, renewals, goal pace), leave with promises, and watch the follow-through trend next week. Private notes are private in the database, not only on the screen.
- Pipeline review, Raw then Weighted, with the movement rules doing the tidying: an opportunity that skipped a column or moved backward was either allowed by your rule or refused.
- Reports, the Sales category: pipeline, forecast, opportunities by type, MRR movement, the scorecard, whitespace and the book, all on one date range with a comparison. Schedule the ones you read, weekly or monthly; every recipient's copy is computed as that person.
- The renewal war room: the 90-day defend list, each renewal's dossier, its defense plays, and the recurring-only profitability verdict with the MRR that would reach your green target.
- Whitespace: the Revenue opportunity band, and a campaign targeted by offering coverage.
- Roadmaps: the Stale plan and Awaiting a decision filters, read across the whole team. A stale plan is already a to-do for its account manager, so this is a check that the to-do is moving, and the approved figures for this fiscal year and next are the earliest read you have on next year's number.
- The Team tracker on Commissions: every rep's month as it happens.
- Users & roles: the onboarding roster for new reps (the journey phase, walkthroughs run, screen tours seen), and Teams if you regroup people.
The month
- Statements are due the first Friday of the following month and pay on the 7th by default. Edit or split a line only with a disclosed note; approve to lock it and produce the PDF and CSV; return it with comments if it is wrong. You can never approve your own statement; another leader or a Tenant Admin must. A correction after approval becomes a clearly labelled adjustment line.
- Goals for the next period, filled from the last one and then adjusted rep by rep.
- President's Club, the annual leaderboard, reads the same goals.
- Business reviews: the library shows which partners are due. A new review starts fresh and nothing carries forward on its own, so bring last quarter's open items over deliberately.
- Next year's budgets: each partner's roadmap holds a figure per fiscal year with its own confirmed date, so the year ahead is planned from what partners actually said rather than from last year plus a percentage.
The rules the product holds the team to, and why
- Leadership reads and administers everything; an account executive reads everything and writes only their own book. Ownership changes go through you (assign, reassign, add co-owners), and an account executive can claim only an unowned prospect with no active contract. A Tenant Admin can give an account executive, project manager or engineer Full CRM on Users & roles, which opens the whole CRM on every account, website leads included (they see every lead but routing never assigns them one), without opening commissions, coaching, goals, approvals or the team's performance views. Changing who owns a company, an opportunity or a lead, and deleting a teammate's opportunity, stay with you. Enforced on the server.
- A sequence sends from its owner's mailbox or from a send-as identity you created, never a third thing. Re-pointing a live sequence changes the next email of everyone already in it. Replies exit contacts on their own. A mailbox sends up to 250 sequence emails a day, and a true one-to-many send belongs in a campaign.
- Renewal opportunities are created for the account owner about 90 days before a recurring agreement ends. One whose agreement your PSA no longer lists as active is hidden by default unless someone has touched it; the Ended renewals filter on Opportunities shows them, and nothing is deleted or marked lost.
- The profitability verdict judges the recurring contract only; projects and one-time work are their own rows. Leadership and workspace admins can open See lines behind vendor cost. The per-technician breakdown and raw cost rates stay with Tenant Admins.
- A checkpoint never reaches backward: an opportunity already past the stage is not flagged. Syncs, HubSpot and quotes move opportunities without answering, because they report something that already happened. Closing and reopening are always allowed.
- A tag an audience still filters on cannot be deleted, only merged, because stripping it from an exclude would widen a send. Deleting a company needs a typed DELETE, is leadership only, and never touches a company that came from your PSA.
- An opportunity closed by a sync rather than by a person never mints commission.
- A Strategic Business Review is built by the account manager, a sales manager, or someone with Full CRM, and the account manager gets a notification the first time anyone other than them saves one. Its pack never names a vendor to the partner.
- A partner never sees the CRM. A project manager or engineer who has been given CRM access can read it and cannot write to anyone's book, unless a Tenant Admin also gave them Full CRM.
What good looks like after a month
- Every rep has a goal for the period, and the Team row adds up to the number you told the business.
- Every stage that matters has a checkpoint, and no opportunity on the board is missing an amount or a close date.
- Every intake form routes somewhere, and no lead has gone unrouted.
- The escalation list is empty, or every renewal on it has a play and an owner.
- One dashboard hangs on the sales floor screen, and one Sales report reaches your inbox every week.
- Last month's statements were approved on time, none by their own owner.
- Every new rep on Users & roles reads Week 1 or later, with the opportunity walkthrough done.
