A Sales Manager has many roles, with another being a ‘performance supervisor’. View Wayne’s latest appearance on Strategic Selling Group where he explains that management means measurement of processes and procedures in order to achieve outcomes.
A Sales Manager has many roles, including Team Captain.
View Wayne’s latest appearance on Strategic Selling Group where he explains why the team captain role is vital and how it needs to be conducted. It is great advice for sales managers old and new.
Over the past few months I’ve posted a number of articles on the roles that successful sales managers must perform. I’ve written about leadership, coaching, planning, performance management, reporting and hiring. All critical roles that accomplished sales managers must master and continually develop.
But I’ve often been asked to summarise what I believe makes a sales manager successful – to sum it up in a few succinct sentences. A few sentences to summarise such a diverse and important role is difficult. But I have put together my thoughts that hopefully highlight to key elements of sales management success.
“You get the best effort from others not by lighting a fire beneath them, but by lighting a fire within”…Bob Nelson
However, let me start by sharing with you the key reasons I have found sales managers are NOT successful:
Over the years I have seen all too many sales managers focussed only on results and not what is necessary to achieve the results. The management component of a sales manager’s role is about the planning and control of work processes, but a good sales manager knows that supervision – directing their team towards success – will deliver not just better results for the team and the individual sales person, but greater job satisfaction for themselves.
Supervising the performance of your team is not just about measuring performance against targets (the results), but helping the individual salesperson understand what will help them be successful and guiding them to undertake these actions and develop the skills needed to achieve success. And this will be different for each individual. Once thorough planning has been done and your team know the sales strategy and objectives, they need to have a comprehensive action plan and the skills needed to guide them through the activities needed to achieve their goals.
“The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go with their old measurements and expect me to fit in”
George Bernard Shaw
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As a sales manager you’re not just the coach, but the team selector. You will be responsible to finding, hiring and inducting the right people into your sales team. This is always challenging and even the best sales managers cannot expect to get it right all the time.
“I’m not looking for the best players, I’m looking for the right players” – from the movie ‘Miracle’
To help find the right person for a sales team, you need to ensure you have the right factors lined up before starting the recruitment process:
It’s not uncommon for good salespeople to be self-directed and accountable individuals, which makes them naturally effective at being the ‘leaders of their own lives’. Good sales professionals are highly results-driven and competitive. These natural traits tend to see them focus on their individual performance, often with little consideration for team results. The fact that the individual success of high-performing salespeople delivers the results required by the company makes them a valuable asset, but they are not necessarily working as part of a team to achieve these results – that was surely my experience when I was enjoying my greatest success in sales. As a sales manager your ability to lead these unique individuals, and achieve synergistic outcomes is what will define your success.
Management is about doing things right, and leadership is about doing the right things.
The above definition from management guru, Peter Drucker does provide an understanding of the difference between leadership and management, what it doesn’t do is highlight, that to be a successful sales manager, you need to do the right things, and you need to do them right – you are both leader and manager. Read more →
To be effective, a sales manager must be both a leader and an manager – doing the right things, and doing things right. But what happens when your staff are struggling to do things right. This is where sales managers become coaches.
Many may argue that not all sales people require coaching but as roles and circumstances change, what is needed to ‘do things right’ also changes and often even the best salespeople can falter. This is where the manager needs to adopt the role of coach. Think of the best athletes. I know of none who have achieved greatness without the support and guidance of a great coach. Even pro-golfers and tennis players at the peak of their careers will often look for specialist coaching to help with small flaws that have crept into their game and are negatively impacting their performance.
When your sales staff have the basic and essential skills but struggle to apply them in a changing environment, this is when your role as coach is needed. You help them develop and apply their skills both for their own benefit and that of the team – this is your skill.
“A coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear, who has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you have always known you could be”
Tom Landry Dallas Cowboys coach 1960 – 1988