August 08, 2014
By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor
Being a successful sales manager means walking a fine line. You don’t want to be too harsh and drive your team too hard, lest you be labeled a slave driver. Conventional wisdom also tells us that by taking a hard approach, you may see short-term gains, but you’re likely to see a lot of turnover, which doesn’t lead to good selling. You don’t want to be too soft, lest you let the sales team walk all over you and leave them unmotivated. Being a good sales manager, therefore, requires walking a fine line and taking the “somewhat tough love” road.
You also don’t want to have to spend much time coaching, either. If you’re giving lectures and lessons all day long, your people aren’t pursuing leads and selling. Sales training courses and seminars may offer some improvement, but while they’re going on, leads are lying abandoned, getting colder.
In addition, there’s more to sales management than coaching, lecturing, admonishing and teaching. There should be a lot of listening happening on the sales manager’s side, too, according to a recent article by Business News Daily’s Nicole Fallon. After all, your sales team knows what’s keeping them from selling, and not all of the reasons they bring to you are likely to be poor excuses.
"Managers should look at underperforming sales reps and inquire about the obstacles that are keeping them from being successful," Pieterjan Bouten, co-founder and CEO of Showpad told Business News Daily. "For example, is it training or the enablement material? Can they find the right material for each stage of the sales cycle? It's important that managers understand both the positive and negative patterns so they can provide critical feedback to marketing on content effectiveness and help salespeople orchestrate better conversations."
Many sales efforts are derailed by a lack of a well thought out sales enablement program and/or lead management system. Sales personnel may not have the materials they need when customers want them. (When’s the last time you updated all your sales material and really thought about whether they’re in the right format? Are you still working with a lot of paper brochures that aren’t cutting it in the digital age?) They may be finding it hard to follow up leads because those leads are disorganized. They may be working with outdated technology that isn’t helping them to gather all the information they require before they pick up the phone. Are they still manually dialing calls instead of using outbound dialer technologies?
These questions are all worth asking, and they’re worth asking of the people who best know the answers: your sales team. They spend their days in the trenches … it’s a good idea to ask them how the battle is going.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson