Sales Laundry

Archive for April 24th, 2009

Who is managing your sales force, your Sales Manager or your compensation plan?

If you said your compensation plan, the good news is you are in the majority. The bad news is your sales could likely improve 15-20% with a solid Sales Manager steering the ship.  Neil Rackham , in his book Rethinking the Sales Force: Redefining Selling to Create and Capture Customer Value, would say 17%.

When I find a Sales Manager that is giving honest effort but is not effective, it is usually because of one of these reasons.

1. The Sales Manager was your best sales professional and is still your best sales professional. Management? What management?
2. Most companies have a training program in place for new sales professionals and executive management, but few utilize any formal training for their Sales Managers. As a result, Sales Managers have no tools to help them manage the revenue production arm of the company, and run solely on gut instinct.
3. Sales Managers have a responsibility to complete a myriad of reports every week, with consequences for not getting them done. There is usually no compelling reason to make time for training or coaching exercises, and as such they don’t get done.
4. The Right Now. Sales performance is often measured on 30 day – 90 day increments on products and services with sales cycles that are much longer. No one dares to take their eye off the sales ball long enough to build in team development time.
5. The Sales Manager compensation model is out of line with company and/or the sales teams defined objectives.

Here are the first five tools I drop in my tool box when I am headed out to fix Sales Management related problems.

1. Put a “sales Manager” instead of a “Sales manager” in charge of your sales organization. Having the wrong person or personality type in the Sales Manager role is more often than not a significant part of the problem.
2. Train your Sales Manager. If you don’t have the budget, think of what an additional 15%+ in sales could do for your business.
3. Build training metrics into your Sales Manager performance measurements and make sure his/her workload will allow time to get the job done.
4. Build a model of continuous improvement into your sales process, making sure you do not shortchange your sales team’s growth and long term revenue potential for short term sales targets.
5. Align the Sales Manager job and compensation model with company goals to make sure a Sales Manager is watching and responding to the objectives and issues that are important to the company. Tie your Sales Managers compensation to the sales team and/or the sales professionals he is responsible for.

I want my Sales Manager to take care of his customers (the sales professionals he is responsible for) and keep the road clear of obstacles that might prevent them from doing their job.

I want my Sales Manager to be my eyes on the front line, making sure we are allocating our sales resources in the most efficient way possible to engage prospects and that he has and will use his authority to make necessary changes on the fly.

I want my Sales Manager continually engaged in enhancing or reinforcing the skill set of the sales team and identifying new ideas and best practices discovered by one sales professional and incorporating them into the entire sales team.

Put your Sales Manager to work growing your business instead of growing the stack of paper in your in-box. There is typically not another person in your organization that can have as much immediate impact for the dollar on your front line sales team as a well trained Sales Manager.

Have any Sales Management best practices or unique signs of spotting trouble?  I would love to hear them.

Image courtesy of  lumaxart