Ineffective Sales Management

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.

• Promoting superstar salespeople, regardless of management skills (despite the fact that fewer than 15% of superstar salespeople succeed as managers)
• Failing to adequately train sales managers in the skills they need on a daily basis
• Neglecting to support sales management with proven methodologies, tools, and technology

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:

• Addresses needs at all levels of the business: Pipeline, forecast, territory, account, opportunity, sales activity, etc.
• Takes into account both planning and execution activities
• Spans annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and as-needed actions and goals

• Captures the right metrics and goals that move the needle
• Includes all types of team interactions: Team meetings, 1-on-1’s, pipeline/forecast reviews, field coaching, etc.

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:

• Consistent operational discipline across sales managers
• Effective rhythm, expectations, and metrics for operating, monitoring progress, and interacting with teams
• Better leverage of management time
• Tailored management and development that accounts for variance of skills and experience on the team
• Greater accountability among sellers for sales performance

Sales management represents a significant leverage point on your sales team. Never neglect sales management in your sales improvement programs.