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How Eight Interacting Strategies Drive Synergistic Success
THE SALES MANAGER POSITION is the most challenging in the salesforce, possibly on the planet. I've been there and done that, and can vouch for its challenges. That's why 50% of new sales managers fail within the first two years! This book will enable every sales manager to become more successful with accompanying rewards, glory, and satisfaction. Most sales managers are enthusiastic, hard-working, and love the job, yet they recognize the pain and challenges that handicap results. The book is for experienced sales leaders, rookie sales managers, top sales executives, sales trainers, ambitious salespeople dreaming of promotion, and students with sales management learning objectives.
Most sales managers supervise a team of 5ā10 salespeople who act like āLone Rangersā targeting accounts to achieve sales quota. They often lack proximity to the sales manager, operate on their own, are driven by different motivations, sell to unique prospects/customers, have a range of skill levels, unique personalities, individual behaviors. Bringing each to 100% quota is a huge job in itself, but most sales managers struggle in a chaotic environment of interruptions, hiring and firing surges, finding time to accomplish slippery priorities, handling customer problems, driving hard to satisfy management pressure.
Every sales manager certainly recognizes the dynamics and demands of the job and the challenge of accomplishing more in less time to achieve goals. However, success cannot be gained with the huge number of tasks, challenges, pace, emergencies, and a widespread sales team if goals and actions are managed piecemeal. Strategies to the rescue! Most sales managers crave a more organized, efficient process, and it can only be accomplished with strategic applications.
As you may know, a strategy is long-term; starts with a goal, planning, a process, and steps; provides a track to run on; and offers an organized solution. The eight strategies in this book, which often overlap, can solve the sales manager's biggest problems and enhance overall leadership. The words āTurbo-Chargedā in the title promise that the strategies have speed, efficiency, power, and significant values to help drive your success and that of your sales team.
This book is not a magic formula for doing the sales manager's job. But it is an added guarantee for professional success. Learning the strategies will help you organize, target, and accomplish high-value priorities, use new ideas, tools, and skills that go hand-in-hand with each strategy. They also demand that you improve some skills and abilities in order to make them work.
These eight exclusive strategies have evolved from Porter Henry & Co.'s 75 years of research, training tens of thousands of sales managers and salespeople, and my own successful sales manager/sales training experience. Each chapter, except this one and the last (your Toolbox) contains one or more strategies designed for targeted, ongoing application as a dynamic process with accompanying tools to keep you on track and avoid the daily traps. The book is literally your exclusive sales manager course, in easy-learning format, to enhance your success. These strategies will help you stay organized, enable you to capitalize on your talents, keep on track, dramatically achieve your goals and increase your sales team's performance.
NO ONE EVER SAID THE SALES MANAGER JOB IS EASY
This book is about positive solutions, but before I get into the strategies and their successful application, it's important to look at both sides of the job and fully recognize the challenges the strategies help you overcome. Ask any first-line sales manager about his or her job and you'll quickly learn that it's the ābestā but most challenging of all positions. The rewards are usually great because they are based on the sales manager's performance. The opportunity is huge, and the sales manager is responsible for revenue, and often profits. The dream side of the job offers visibility, recognition, and reasonable freedom from headquarters' intrusions.
On the down side, it's one of the most challenging, difficult, and frustrating positions in today's salesforce. In spite of being the most critical job in the salesforce, the pain is exacerbated by a variety of interacting obstacles and traps. Unfortunately, top sales executives, who once were the first-line managers, quickly forget what it was like in the trenches and usually fail to recognize that the key to sales is not the sales team, but the manager who drives it.
Gary Hardy, former sales executive leader for the DOW Chemical Company, clearly defines the importance of the first-line sales manager:
WHERE IS THE PAIN?
In most cases, the first-line sales manager lacks proximity to the majority of his team, so salespeople and account managers operate out of sight most of the time. Spotty supervision, coaching, and management are performed on the run via email and telephone, and are supplemented with infrequent, task-packed visits. This is not a very good scenario for determining who needs help, who's fully motivated, who's struggling. With a large span of control, it's an awesome job to drive successful team performance, often with an overwhelming workload of headquarter and customer problems.
The ādevilā is in the salesperson, as well. Most salespeople are reasonably independent, aggressive, risk-taking, confident, high-energy people. Consequently, the good ones are on the move and often reluctant to ask for help. To compound the challenge, they are all specialādiverse personalities, varying experiences, different motivations, and personal needs. Each sales rep operates in a territory or account segment that is unique. Ostensibly the sales team members perform the same job, but the above characteristics and other factors make each salesperson remarkably different.
Unfortunately, management often takes a cavalier attitude about the sales manager job. At 40,000 feet (in the executive tower) the waves on the beach look flat, but on the sand, they're often huge, breaking over the head of the sales manager with a resounding crash. This lack of awareness is extreme for the newly promoted first-line sales manager. As a result, most sales manager learning is done on the job, or at a three- to four-day orientation focusing on procedures and products. There are a number of reasons for this: many successful sales organizations delay formal training (since they often promote one manager or a few at a time), send the manager off to a generic management course (with nonsales executives who have different problems and issues), or neglect her altogether. The bottom line according to the Association for Talent Development (ATD) is that only 11% of companies offer their sales managers extensive training.
The popular feeling is that the job is largely intuitive, and since most first-line sales managers are promoted from the sales ranks, they should have a good feel for the job and the capability to grow into it. Nothing could be further from the truth. The best salespeopleāmanagers-to-beāoften shoot from the hip (albeit accurately); are risk-takers, comfortable managing themselves and their accounts; have strong selling and relationship skills, soft or no analytical, supervisory, management, and administrative skills. As indicated earlier, they are suddenly placed in a chaotic, strange environment and challenged to manage people, events, plans, and problems. Even proven sales managers hired from outside the company offer huge risks without the proper orientation and ongoing training.
While it's imperative to grasp the big picture, most sales managers are reactionary and busy. They don't have the ability or time to drill down to the āsubwayā level and determine what's really causing a problem or situation. Instead, they jump into action to rescue the failing salesperson (often too late) before he goes down the proverbial drainpipe. Quite often, in the need for speed, sales managers focus on revenue rather than performance symptoms (actual causes) and identify a problem when it's beyond correction.
THE INDIVIDUAL CHALLENGE TO BECOME A SALES LEADER
In spite of the huge obstacles, there are solutions that provide management with all the improved results: sales growth, minimum sales team turnover, and a deep bench for developing future sales executives (sales leaders!). The job of first-line sales manager needs a mandate: ātrain to relieve the pain.ā While some salesforce positions can get by with standard or even mediocre training, the complexity of the key sales manager position, and challenges described, requireādemandāthe ultimate in sales manager development. The cookbook recipe is simple to comprehend, but difficult to execute, and should be an ongoing challenge/priority supported by:
- Leading-edge content: strategies, tools, skills, abilities, processes
- Continuous learning and practice to apply concepts, exchange ideas
- Access to timely sales data, along with ongoing coaching, reinforcement
- Constant follow-up to ensure that strategies and skills are applied correctly and improvements are being made
This book will provide world-class strategies and āhow toā ideas, but you are the only person who can apply these concepts to your job, and work toward becoming the ultimate sales leader that you deserve.
Doug Willner, director of training for Medimmune, Inc., underlined the challenge:
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