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Sales Manager – The Team Selector

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:

  • The right position – is the role clearly defined and do you know the knowledge and skills required to be successful in the role? Can you communicate this effectively to the new team member?
  • The right time – for both for the candidate and the company. Will the role be appropriate for where the candidate is in their career? Can the company accommodate this new employee at this time?
  • The right things – do you have a clear understanding of how your new team member needs to apply their knowledge and skills to be successful? Will they?
  • The right ways – will the the new team member be able to perform at their highest level while remaining in alignment with the business’s core values and the team’s culture?
  • The right fit – will the the candidate demonstrate the right attitude, behaviour and communication styles to ‘fit’ with your team culture?

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Be a Sales Team Captain

As a sales manager you need to wear a lot of hats – you are a leader, a manager, a coach, a trainer, a translator of company messages and many other things. But one role I often see overlooked is that of team captain. I believe this is one of the most difficult areas of management in sales. The ability to be the captain of a team is not found books or courses but in skilfully relating to individuals – managing relationships and interactions ‘on the field’.

In sport the team captain must not be just a competent player, they need to inspire confidence, translate the game plan into action and make changes when necessary. The must make tactical decisions, communicate effectively and handle pressure. Read more

When You’re a Sales Manager, You’re a Leader

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

Sales Manager, Leader or Coach?

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

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Sales Consulting

Sales Leadership

What does good leadership mean? Wayne gives his insight by explaining that”Leadership is the art of getting people to willingly strive to achieve team goals”.

View Wayne’s latest appearance on Strategic Selling Group for further insight on this subject or watch the video below:

 

 

Managing Sales Performance

Managing the performance of a sales team is about establishing a shared understanding of what is to be achieved at every level within the sales team to deliver the organisational goals. It’s about aligning the goals of the team and the individuals in a way that will allow each team member to achieve their respective goals while making the necessary contribution to the overall team performance.

“Your performance depends on your people. Select the best, train them and back them. When errors occur, give sharper guidance. If errors persist or if the fit feels wrong, help them move on…”
Donald Rumsfeld, American politician and businessman.

While there has been much ‘robust discussion’ in recent times as to the benefit of employee performance management and, specifically relating to sales, the use of automated sales performance management, managing the performance of your team and the individuals in your team remains an essential part of sales management.

It’s up to you, the sales manager, to inspire and enable the best possible performance of each member of your team. The performance of each individual is dependent on a complex set of variables that will be unique to each salesperson. These variables include ‘hard’ abilities such as job knowledge, skills and expertise; as well as ‘soft’ capacities such as social and emotional intelligences, attitudes and self-esteem, behaviours and habits.

Adopting a well-defined performance management process enables you to systemically fulfil your role as the team’s ‘performance supervisor’. Read more

Great Salespeople Do Not (necessarily) Make Great Sales Managers

It is often seen as a natural career progression for a high performance salesperson to move into sales management. That was certainly my experience as a young, successful salesperson when, early in my career, I was quickly ‘promoted’ into management.

However, those offering me this ‘great opportunity’ gave little consideration to the differences in the roles. It was simply assumed that as I could sell, and sell well, I would get similar results from a team of salespeople. There was little review done to determine whether I had the attributes required to be a good sales manager. In fact, in those days I expect there was little understanding of what these attributes were.

77% of the time businesses make mistakes promoting sales reps into sales management.

Drew Stevens, a business strategist and the author of ‘Split Second Selling’ discovered through his research that “77% of the time businesses make mistakes promoting sales reps into sales management. This is because many business managers believe that those who sell the most make the best sales managers.”

Drew’s findings confirm what I have experienced through my corporate and consulting life. Most high performance salespeople are not automatically high performance sales managers. In fact, the skills and personality that makes a great salesperson may work against them as a sales manager. Read more

Business Strategy Consulting

Aligning Sales Strategy with Business Strategy

Sales strategy must be aligned to the business strategy… That sounds like common sense… however Wayne claims it doesn’t happen in many businesses and their bottom line suffers as a result.

“It’s a matter of making sure that whatever the business strategy you deploy in order to win at business your sales processes should reflect that”.

View Wayne’s latest appearance on Strategic Selling Group for further insight on this subject or watch the video below:

 

Lean Selling

Lean Selling: Qualifying to reduce waste

Did you know that Businesses regularly spend up to five times longer losing a sale than winning a sale?

Wayne Moloney explains why this is so – and what we need to do about it.

In Wayne’s recent appearance on Strategic Selling Group he emphasises the need for a stringent qualification process to ensure we know our opportunity is winnable.

Wayne suggests spending more time on opportunities that have got the greatest chance of success and to help make these decisions he offers some simple qualification questions that will assist in determining if you should invest in furthering opportunities.

Business Finance Consulting

It’s Payback Time! …or is it?

Everyone facing a business investment decision, such as launching a new product, purchasing equipment, installing a new production line, building a factory or acquiring a business needs to ask themselves the following questions:

How long before I get my money back?
Which of these investments is better?

The Payback Analysis provides us with a means to answer these questions by clarifying the length of time (weeks, months or years) required for an investment to reach breakeven, before it begins returning a profit. This length of time is called the Payback Period.

The calculation takes into account Incomes, Expenses (*) and Taxes. The shorter the payback period, the better. The longer the payback period, the longer funds are locked up and the riskier the project.

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