Working with sales managers, we’ve noticed that even the best intentioned managers get bogged down in the minutiae of their work: the paperwork that piles up, the high profile account that needs hand holding, the vendor relationships that need to be nurtured, etc. Although these managers struggle with busy work, they know that they need to focus their time on the critical essentials of their job.
By working with the best sales managers, we’ve identified four top priority areas that need to be worked on regularly, regardless of the industry you serve. Let’s not do busy work at the expense of the job you were hired to do: grow the sales!
As a salesperson, this is the hardest thing to do — to plan out your weeks, months and years. But as a sales manager, you are the strategic thinker for the sales team: playing down the chess board, planning out next year’s new products and services, how you will go to market, what trade shows to attend, what marketing materials will be needed, etc. Only the sales manager can do the Planning and Organizing for the sales team.
You know that you are only as good as your sales team. So you must have a regular system of meeting and interviewing new sales candidates. Even if you have a full complement of strong players, you should still spend a minimum of 5% of your time building your talent pool.
Nothing keeps your team working harder than knowing you can easily replace them. And nothing makes you look at your team with a keen eye more than having other good people who may produce well for you.
Working the numbers, reevaluating your pipeline, completely understanding where your prospects and customers come from… each sales manager really has to know the finances of the business. Accurate forecasting is the hallmark of truly professional sales managers. Nobody is closer to it than you.
Once you have an effective pipeline management system that delivers accurate sales forecasts, you need to effectively share this information. Upper management, production and service managers, and most importantly, your sales team needs this information to effectively do their jobs.
This is where the rubber meets the road. If the sales manager is only as good as his or her sales team, then only with clear coaching and development does the sales manager make an average team good or a good team great.
This is the primary role of the sales manager. Many managers easily spend more than 50% of their time working with their people — either individually or at sales meetings. Coaching and Development is an ongoing process, with each skill set learned, applied and becoming second nature before moving on to the next.
Each of these priority areas are investments in time; but like any investment, they provide a positive return. They are strategic in nature and yet deliver real tactical results. In combination, these four priority areas are what creates a great sales team that will deliver the numbers for you.
Working with sales managers, we’ve noticed that even the best intentioned managers get bogged down in the minutiae of their work: the paperwork that piles up, the high profile account that needs hand holding, the vendor relationships that need to be nurtured, etc. Although these managers struggle with busy work, they know that they need to focus their time on the critical essentials of their job.
If you are a sales professional, you are essentially in business for yourself. The most important thing you have to sell is your time. How well you spend your time will determine how much money you make.
Attracting clients through referrals is the most powerful way to build your business. When you are first starting in business, you have to prospect in other ways to get the ball rolling. And some businesses lend themselves more naturally to referral marketing than others. But most salespeople can apply the following seven step method to generating additional contacts for their business.
The key to success in prospecting for new clients in a business-to-business environment is patience. There are no quick and easy approaches, there are no silver bullets that will guarantee a whole bunch of new clients -- despite what the list companies and trade show producers promise you.
Each year over $60 billion is spent on training in the United States, particularly management training. Regardless of the quality of the content, the delivery or the frequency of repetition, management training is often ineffective in changing organizational practices.
Most of us intuitively understand that the climate of one's workplace has an impact on how people feel and on how they perform. In using the term climate, we refer to the collective atmosphere of a workplace: the attitudes, perceptions and dynamics that affect how people perform on a daily basis.
For most people, the term creativity is more easily applicable to art and music than to business. We expect the Picassos and the Mozarts of the world to experience creative breakthroughs; but we are less convinced that business people have anything to be creative about. Yet art and music can be characterized as the production of order out of chaos, and isn’t chaos the natural state of business?
Today, workshop participants have limited attention spans, so facilitators have to bring in games and accessories to keep everyone entertained. Some workshop facilitators toss out small candy bars when participants answer questions. But using experiential activities should be more than just “games trainers play”.
Western thinking is traditionally concerned with what is -- which is determined by analysis, judgment and argument. Thinking based on this is fine, just as the front left wheel of a car is fine. Such thinking works well in a stable world.
While the demand for effective managers continues to grow, the retirement of baby boomers is producing a sharp decline in the ranks of available personnel. In addition, executives are expected to be more sophisticated in order to lead new global and technological initiatives. For these reasons, careful planning for the eventual replacement of managers at all levels in organizations has gained strategic importance.
Hiring is not easy today, and it wasnʼt easy over 2000 years ago. The Chinese Han dynasty attempted to create a scientific hiring process for their civil servants. They developed detailed job descriptions for various jobs. Historical records show that the people who created these job descriptions were not happy with the results of their efforts. To their chagrin, few of those hired performed as expected.
While working with a multinational company, the question came up, “how does a British manager coach a French employee?” Other clients have asked,“what happens when the manager is in the top left corner of the personality style matrix, and the employee is in the bottom right hand corner?”Still others have asked about Boomers working with Generation Y.
A number of trends facing sales organizations are commanding executives to rethink how they do business and how they deploy sales reps.
The American Dream used to mean owning your own home. The new American Dream is owning your own business. Many people are convinced that they will never achieve total job satisfaction by working for someone else.
Research indicates that formal mentoring partnerships can be successful, especially if the right amount of structure is present. Structure includes such things as discussing expectations, agreeing on goals and outlining a schedule.
Most people experience distress from conflicts which fall into three categories: Intrapersonal (me-me), interpersonal (me-you) and personal-functional (me-job). Any one of these types of conflicts can cause energy drain.
As management consultants, businesses ask us for programs and systems to improve performance. But what about practices that hurt a business? What habit patterns cause companies to hesitate, lose momentum or seize up and no longer perform at full throttle?
How do we make the most of it's great ability? First learn how it works. How does memory work? How does concentration work? What is the best way to learn and to teach? Start your brain exploration and you will come up with some interesting surprises.