Are you a sales manager? And is your team’s performance not where you think it should be? More importantly, are you suffering because of it?
Don’t worry. We’ve highlighted eight specific areas that are at the core of great sales management. They are all “improvable” and have real benefits attached.
So take a look and see where your skills – and you career – may benefit from an uplift!
At the end of each section is a link that will enable you to see the course content and whether it can be of help to you.
1. Your Role As A Sales Manager Is Nothing Like Being A Salesperson
You started out as a salesperson, didn’t you? It’s always good to remember where you came from and how you went through the paces to make it to where you are now. Reflect upon all the battles, the challenges, the hiccups, the disappointments.
But note how nothing we say in this round-up relates to your selling skills! And there’s a reason for that. It’s because although your ability to sell may give you kudos and enable you to lead by example, and of course to empathize with the positions salespeople are in, it has nothing to do with the core requirements of your job now!
Our
Starting Out in Sales Management course shows you make the transition and how to change your mindset and follow best practice for a smoother and more successful ride.
2. You Struggle To Deal With Common Day To Day Problems
The thing about a sales department is that every day is different! On bad days, you may look across at the accounts team and envy how calm and controlled things are. But you know it would bore you to death. The challenges you face will include finding the right people, giving them the right training and coaching, keeping everyone motivated, looking at commission structures, maintaining consistency ... and managing conflict!
The key problem lies in the fact that many sales managers aren’t too sure how to address these challenges. They may rely on intuition or experience to solve some of them or they may take coaching themselves so they can get the ball rolling.
The good news is that you can overcome all these challenges. You simply need to approach them logically, and with an end goal in mind.
Our course on
Sales Management Tips and Problem Solving will give you guidance on how to deal with the day-to-day problems you face.
3. You’re Perplexed By The Different Personalities In Your Team
Many sales managers find it quite hard to comprehend, and manage, all the personalities in their team. Understanding them and then structuring everything right in order to utilize each one to the max may require understanding your own personality first.
It may also involve holding more meetings, sitting down with each person, and working out where they are coming from.
As human beings, we tend to believe that everyone we communicate with will understand our meaning – our personality, even – so why wouldn’t your salespeople think the same when they communicate with you?
Deciphering everyone’s personality can be quite the task!
Our
Creating an Effective Sales Team. course will help yu understand the factors that make a sales team effective, and how to structure a star team.
4. The Process Is Confusing
Some sales managers like to do it all themselves, delegating little to no work at all to their team. Others give everyone a free hand, and let them do their own thing.
These are opposite ends of the spectrum, and because they share a complete lack of process, both are nowhere near where you need to be!
When there’s a lack of process, you can bet everyone will be going in circles. At the end of the day, your team will find someone to blame (preferably you!) and you may very well find it convenient to blame your team when the higher-ups start asking questions.
Without a proper process in place, you’ll never know whether the actions you take are working. Or whether some actions are actually working but others aren’t. If you have a formalized sales process in place, your team can focus all its strengths and efforts on activities that not only generate but almost guarantee the best performance.
Our
Creating and Automating Your Sales Process course shows you how to set up and manage a highly effective process for your team.
5. Everyone Uses Their Own Selling Methods
This can cause a lot of problems, especially at some time in the future. It may be true that each of your salespeople may have a method that works for them, but no one will be on the same page for long. And if they’re on vacation, off sick, or they resign, who’s going to pick up the business?
The answer is to establish a standard approach to selling, which everyone follows. This doesn’t just tailor the selling methods to you product, company or market, but it enables you to cover for absences and changes by swapping people out.
And as an add-on, if you use what we call “Battle Cards” you will standardize responses to common questions – and make them easier to deliver.
Our
Choosing Your Selling Techniques and Using Battle Cards course enables you to do just this!
6. Your Salespeople Never Have The Right Information To Hand
Even the most skilled salespeople will not be able to perform to their full potential if they aren’t given the right information.
But how do you know what the right information is? How much information does your team actually need on the product or the business, for example? And of course we need to balance what’s important for the sale (the product’s features and benefits), and what may be sensitive and of use to competitors (like how many we sell).
Our
Enabling Your Sales Team to Win course gives you great insights into this, along with a host of tips to help you get started.
7. Sales Forecasting Baffles You
Sales forecasting is much more than just a routine chore. It’s the cornerstone of great decision making and informed management; it keeps you and your team on course.
Unfortunately, sales managers are often at a loss when it comes to putting together a sales forecast. This can be the case whether they’re new or experienced: a mental block can be difficult to shift! Some often take the easy (but hopelessly inadequate) road of using the forecasts of individual salespeople and adding them together...
When it comes to generating forecasts, you need to consider a number of factors. Many variables affect sales projections, including economic conditions, team numbers and dynamics, changes in products, competitor actions, and so on. You need to take great care with your forecasting because it’s how you’ll be measured in the future!
Our course on
Sales Forecasting & Managing Expectations shows you how to do this, with a three-layer system to manage the expectations of management and your team, as well as preserving your own “sanity check” on what happens!
8. Using KPIs Is A Mystery To You
KPIs (or Key Performance Indicators) are an essential guide to performance for any business, in any aspect of its operation. And this is especially so in the field of sales. KPIs can be seen as the vital signs of a business’s health, as they show the ‘pulse’ of progress the direction of growth.
One of the main challenges faced by many sales managers isn’t that that’re unaware of what KPIs are, and what they mean in a general sense.. It’s not that they don’t know what their own KPIs are. It’s that they don’t know whethether their KPIs are the best for their own situation; and whether the way they track them is the best way to do it.
That’s one hell of a handicap to have...
Every sales manager needs to identify some of the challenges around setting KPIs, like data quality and accuracy, communication and alignment, data integration and management, and a lot more.
Our course on
Setting Sales Targets & Using KPIs to Smash Them should set you in the right direction.
Where Do You Go Now?
Well, we’ve given you a rundown of what we consider to be the eight most important areas on which to focus if you’re going to be a great sales manager.
Believe us, we seen too many sales managers who have launched into their role on the back of a stellar performance in sales ... and been trapped in a situation that they can’t quite fathom. It’s in their nature to refuse to accept defeat (it’s their resilience and perseverance that have got them this far, isn’t it?) But what to do in this alien land?
Even if you’re successful and riding high, take a careful run-through of the eight areas we’ve covered. Pick out what you may feel you’d like to improve. Think of areas that seem OK now but may throw up a problem or two in the future. Click on the link at the end of that section to see whether you feel it could help.
We create courses to help people develop themselves and do well. Our Sales Management courses have been written based on many years of real world experience, fixing problems and finding out what works in a multitude of situations. So we hope we can help you, too!
