I recently spoke to two entrepreneurs from two separate companies, who had recently hired new sales managers. In both cases, the new managers had the right skills but still failed to have an impact on their sales force.
Recruiting a new sales manager can help address declining or inconsistent results. However, in order to succeed they must be able to provide consistent coaching and support, while holding each sales person accountable to what they need to do to succeed.
The primary role of a sales manager is to unleash the potential of their sales people. Unfortunately, they are often forced to spend the majority of their time putting out fires and attending internal meetings. Even meetings with their own teams seem to be counter-productive most of the time.
When we conduct a sales force evaluation, we often see that sales managers have some of the right skills to help their sales teams succeed, but their effectiveness in delivering results is low. What explains this difference?
Although sales managers attend seminars, read books or blogs and learn how to improve their sales force, they rarely have the opportunity to put their knowledge into practice. While it should be prioritized, they do not take the time to “ride along” with their representatives and attend meetings with potential clients.
If you plan to become better at tennis, taking lessons will improve your technique but you also need to practice with a partner in order to perfect your skills. Sales coaching is therefore not a one-way street, but represents continuous collaboration.
It is not uncommon that sales managers do not know which strategies to put in place in order to improve sales. They have a hard time identifying who to coach – as well as how often to coach and for how long. Further, they struggle to identify the underlying causes for poor results, or how to highlight lessons learned from past failures to make sure the same mistakes are not repeated.
Managers are unable to make an immediate impact when representatives do not have confidence in them. The task will be made more difficult when a relationship based on respect is not properly established. The experience or credibility of the sales manager may also be questioned by the sales people. To cope with the problem of trust, it is important to determine the source of hostility before taking corrective action.
Another factor to consider when explaining poor sales management effectiveness is when sales people actively resist the coaching efforts by their manager. They get defensive when their comments are shared, deny that they need any help to develop and try to deflect the blame by answering along the lines of:
Here, the best tactic is to meet the objections with an open ended question: "That is an excellent point! Do you have any ideas about what you could do differently?". In this way, you include the sales person in to the conversation and allows him to share his views and minimize resistance.
Sales manager effectiveness is furthered reduced when the motivation for coaching and improvement is based solely on sales results. Instead, try to bring the sales process into the conversation as a way of making the dialogue more interesting and increase motivation. In this scenario, the sales manager could ask questions such as: "What are the opportunities that will actually lead to a new contract? Are there prospects that should simply be disqualified?"
Coaching is the most neglected element within sales management. However, one should seize every opportunity to provide feedback to the sales team. It develops trust and respect while also increasing the overall expertise and performance, which will inevitably lead to improved results. Success is not just about talent, it’s about applying the right strategy to enable your sales people to reach their full potential.
To avoid diminishing results, make sure to provide your sales manager with the right training and tools to ensure they can be as effective as possible.
Karine helps owners and entrepreneurs facing challenges such as stagnant or declining sales growth, reduced profit margins, inaccurate sales forecasts, as well as challenges surrounding sales force management and training. Working with specifics tools to evaluate strategies, systems and processes, as well as individuals in the sales team Prima Ressource improves and optimizes the strength of current sales, architectural changes in sales, sales growth initiative and much more.
Find out more about Karine Sobel, Prima Ressource on LinkedIn
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