Excellent sales management has a direct impact on sales performance. According to Harvard Business Review, 69 percent of salespeople who exceed their annual quota rate their sales manager as excellent or above average. Yet, very few organizations can claim to have consistently outstanding sales management.
In fact, most organizations make a small handful of critical sales management mistakes.
It is tough to scale a business without effective leadership, and this failure is at least partly to blame for declining sales effectiveness across the industry.
Sales management is both an art and a science, and is often underestimated. An effective manager must master an enormous number of skills and prioritize their time across a myriad of management, selling, and administrative activities. They must run team meetings, as well as one-on-ones. Conduct deal reviews, account planning sessions, territory planning sessions, and onboarding sessions. They must know how to assess sellers’ competencies and coach to their needs, motivate their teams, and all while managing the business, rolling up forecasts, and delivering reports.
The front line manager is your organization’s critical multiplier. Improve sales management capability, and sales results will naturally follow.
We start by helping our clients build a comprehensive understanding of their business, from frontline to senior leadership, in order to define the appropriate role of the sales manager. We partner with management teams to build a customized management cadence for managing both the business and the team in a consistent, effective manner. This cadence:
We use custom playbooks and highly interactive management workshops to ensure sales leaders are equipped to learn and apply the skills they need, including how to identify coaching opportunities within the management cadence. We pair playbooks and training with supportive tools and technologies to help management run their sales organization effectively and efficiently.
Our clients consistently experience highly leveraged benefits including:
Sales management represents a significant leverage point on your sales team. Never neglect sales management in your sales improvement programs.
Rachel Cavallo is a principal with Symmetrics Group and resident expert on sales management and coaching. Across industries, Rachel has proven her ability to quickly define key capabilities to manage the business of sales and what it takes for leaders to coach, reinforce, and sustain desired change in their sales teams.
Hear about the programs, tools, and training that will help your sales leaders drive the highest levels of team performance.
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