The Serious Part
The Managers Room
This section contains some clear no-nonsense guidance on the basics of management, from clear and transparent ethics, to performance management and dealing with politics.
The Managers room is place where sales mangers can get advice and air their views, and aspiring or just plain interested field sales people can get an insight into what goes on ….
Being a Sales Manager has never been tougher. A raft of issues including ever more demanding goals, sophisticated customers, aggressive competition, foreign sourcing and employment law (to name just a few!) contribute to the stress of the modern Sales Manager Director.
On top of that many Managing Directors and CEO’s still consider selling to be something of a ‘black art’ and are unwilling or unable to bind the organization behind it’s most important undertaking ~ the selling message.
As the leader of your organizations sales function you have arguably the most important role in the business. They can design it, make it, market it … but if there is no distribution the net result will always be misery.
So how do you make it work?
Your time has to be split between customers and your internal commitment but we often spend too much time in the office. Ideally 80% of your time should be with your team and customers. If things internally genuinely need your attention you can sometimes spend as much as 50% of your time in the office, but don’t let it become habit forming. The Sales leader that loses personal touch with his customers is the one who will find himself out of a job.
Focus on the basics.
The selling message ~ why should anyone buy from your team and more importantly how you are team getting that message across? What tools do they have and what are they saying, exactly.
Reach vs Frequency ~ Whilst theoretically planning how your team spend their time is easy, those of us who have spent a lot of time on the road know it’s probably he toughest thing to accurately and consistently. You have to rely on them to do ‘the right thing’ whilst knowing probably only 20% of your team have the knowledge, experience and inclination to get tit right.
In simple terms, given a fixed number of people, you have to optimize how many customers they visit and how often. Your team will often plead the frequency angle because they like to build relationships, and are soon spending too much time with customers who have become their friends.
If you try and ‘reach’ too far, frequency drops and competitors step in.
Reach vs frequency is the single biggest strategy you have to get right.
Training and development. What model do you use?
Put simply each individual in your team will have a degree of knowledge, certain skillsets, and a number of attributes that together, will contribute to their success.
Your level of expectation in each of these areas should be clear and preferably documented. How to improve should be explained frankly and truthfully. Each individual in your team needs to believe that they will improve in their time working with you. Otherwise, inevitably, your only motivator will be how much you pay them. That in itself will not improve their performance and you will come under pressure to make changes ~ or be changed …
The reporting model you use is key to your success. Whilst we of course need to know the numbers, it’s almost more important to record the ‘activity profiles’ of your most successful people. What do they do each day.
As you build a profile of ‘best practice’ you can narrow the margin of ‘error’, and begin to isolate your weakest performers. Their issues can then be addressed individually and their performance improved.
It has been said that no salesperson ever set out to fail, and that there are few bad salespeople, but many bad managers. I’m afraid this is theory that we subscribe to wholeheartedly.
If you would like a free and confidential consultation, please contact us and we will arrange a one hour session (Worth £200) during which you can talk to one of our experts and get the solutions to some of your issues.
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