Sales Management (The Brian Tracy Success Library)

Brian Tracy

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780814436301
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

The pressure surrounding the sales manager is intense. Given the task of recruiting, managing, and motivating a top team of high-performing sales professions, so much of the sales manager's success is dependent on others. Or is it?Sales expert Brian Tracy has spent decades studying the most successful sales managers and professionals in every industry. In this indispensable pocket-sized resource, he has encapsulated 6 key characteristics of a winning sales team. In Sales Management, he distills these simple but powerful strategies so that sales managers can learn how to: • Select and recruit sales champions• Establish clear objectives• Inspire singleness of purpose• Motivate people with the right incentives• Develop winners through continuous coaching and training• Conduct game-changing performance reviews• De-hire poor performers• And moreDon't leave your success as a sales manager in the hands of others. Learn today how YOU can increase your sales team's effectiveness, improve their bottom line, and advance your own career in the process.

ONE

The Role of the Sales Manager

The number one role of the sales manager is to generate the sales that are essential to the survival of the company. The sales manager achieves these sales results by working with and through other salespeople.

One of your most important jobs is to determine the level of sales you want to achieve daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually. Establish these goals as your targets and then work back to the present day. Decide what you will have to do to hit those targets in those time spans.

To hit your sales quotas, you will have to plan, project, and organize people, resources, budgets, and promotional materials. You must determine the plans of action that you will follow to get from where you are to where you want to go in terms of sales results. The better planner you are, the more successful you will be, irrespective of what is going on in the marketplace.

Another major responsibility you have is to communicate and motivate. You get your work done through other people. Their results are your results. You need to be able to give your people the information, resources, and incentives they need to get their jobs done.

Your next key function is to measure results. One of the most important business principles is this: “What gets measured gets done.” If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. If you don’t measure it, it’s probably not going to get done at all. That’s why you need clear objectives, standards of performance, and assigned responsibilities for every person.

Choose the Right People

Perhaps your most important job is to select, recruit, and hire good salespeople. Fully 95 percent of your success will be determined by the quality of the people you hire in the first place. We will talk about your selection of salespeople in detail in Chapter 3.

You must teach, train, develop, and build your salespeople so that, no matter how long they stay with you, when and if they leave, they will be more competent, capable, and effective human beings than they were when they arrived.

Your final major responsibility is to determine the resources necessary for you to accomplish all of the above. Your job as a sales manager makes you responsible for setting and achieving sales goals. This means that you have to determine the sales plan, the training materials, the budgets, the rewards, the incentives, and the sales campaigns. You also have to organize the work and prepare forecasts in each case.

Sometimes, some of these jobs will be done for you, and sometimes they will be your responsibility alone, but at the end of the day, results are everything. You have to determine the products you are going to focus on. You must decide which customers and markets you will pursue, how to promote your products and services to those customers, and what sales methodology you will use to give yourself a competitive advantage in today’s market.

Finally, you have to bring your whole team together, explain the entire “plan of battle” to them, and then provide them with all the resources they need to go out and win sales in tough markets.

The Factory Model

This is a concept that you can use in planning and organizing for success as a sales manager. With this method, you view your sales department or sales team as a factory. Just as a factory has raw materials that come in one end and finished products that come out the other end, your sales organization is similar. Your “sales factory” has inputs that include your trained and competent salespeople; money for advertising, promotion, and incentives; desks, chairs, and other resources to support your sales staff; and products and services to sell.

Inside the sales organization, like a factory, certain processes take place. The purpose of these processes is to produce sales results. The job of your salespeople is to use all of the resources or raw materials that you make available and translate them into sales in the current market.

Create Value

The two primary activities of a sales manager are first, to create value, and second, to generate revenues. You should spend 80 percent of your time creating value and generating revenue, all day long.

Almost everything else you do, including and especially dealing with email, social media, messages, and phone calls, are diversions or distractions taking you away from creating value and generating revenue. In the final analysis, your ability to get sales results will be the single most important determinant of your success.

ACTION EXERCISES

1. What specific results are expected of you in your position as sales manager?

2. Of all these results, what is the one result that is most important for you to accomplish, right now?

TWO

Build a Great Sales Team

All work is done by teams. Your job is essentially that of a team builder and a team leader. All teams depend on the peak performance of each team member. Your job is to assemble a superior team first, then to bring every member on the team up to top performance. Your goal is to build the best sales organization you can and to win in competitive markets.

Top Sports Teams

A sales team is like a sports team in many important respects. By applying the same principles that top sports coaches apply to win championships in their leagues, you can build a championship sales team as well. Top sports teams exhibit six key winning characteristics.

1. CLEAR COACHING AND LEADERSHIP

On a top team, everyone knows who the boss is. This is the person who “calls the shots.” Of course, democratic and participatory management are essential for building and maintaining high levels of motivation and morale. But for a crack sales team to perform well, everyone has to know who the coach is. As the sales manager, you are the one in charge. You are the person who sets the standards and calls the plays. Too much democracy does not seem to work in running a sales team against tough competition in a difficult market.

2. COMMITMENT TO EXCELLENCE

As Vince Lombardi said, “Winning is not everything, but wanting to win is.”

Top sports teams, like top sales teams, are on the field to win—to achieve high levels of sales and outperform their competition in the market. They are not working just to get through the day. Top salespeople, like top sportsmen and sportswomen, want to win championships and get the bonus money, prizes, and rewards that go along with success.

Perhaps the best motivator of all, in sales or in sports, is the desire and determination to “be the best.” Unfortunately, if you do not make a clear spoken commitment to be the best with your salespeople and your team, you will unwittingly slip down into mediocrity. If you do not decide to be in the top 10 percent or 20 percent of your industry, you will automatically end up in the bottom 80 percent. Only a commitment to excellence motivates people to give their very best to their jobs, in sales or in sports.

3. OPEN COMMUNICATION

In top sports teams, there are no games and no politics among the players. Everybody tells everyone else what they think, all the time. There are no secrets, no sulking, and no hidden agendas. There is no game playing behind closed doors, and no politics or manipulation. In a top sales team, information flows up and down continually, with an open-door policy on your part. You make it clear that you are completely transparent. If people have any questions, they can come to you directly and you will answer them straightforwardly and honestly.

Psychologically, to perform at their best, people need to be able to talk to their bosses, to ask questions, and to get feedback. Top players need to feel that they can express their concerns to their managers without fear of disapproval or criticism.

4. INTENSIVE PEOPLE-DEVELOPMENT FOCUS

Top teams focus intensely on training their players continually, day in and day out. They are always helping people play better at the sport. It is the same with excellent sales managers. They always encourage their people to improve. Top sales managers insist on continuous personal and professional growth and development.

The sales training budget is key to people development. Sales & Marketing Management magazine did a study into the sales training practices and budgets of the top 20 percent of profitable companies in every industry. What they discovered was quite surprising. The best companies train new salespeople for six to twelve weeks, and often more, before they put them into the field. Thereafter, they invest an average of $6,000 per year per salesperson in ongoing training.

What top companies and top sales managers have discovered is that the return on investment (ROI) from sales training is ten, twenty, and thirty times greater than the amount they invest. The more money they pour into sales training, the higher their sales and profitability.

5. SELECTIVE PLAYER ASSIGNMENTS

On excellent teams, people are assigned to a position where they can make the greatest contribution to the overall success of the team, based on their special talents and abilities. In sales management, some of your people will be best at selling one product or service and some will do better with other products or services. Some salespeople are excellent in going out and finding new business, while other salespeople are equally excellent in maintaining customer accounts and upselling existing customers into purchasing more and more of your products or services.

The best coaches on a sports team move their players around to find the positions where they can perform at their best. Your job is to move your salespeople around so that they are working in the right jobs, selling the right products and services, to the right kinds of customers for them, so they can perform at their best as well.

6. A HEAVY EMPHASIS ON STRATEGY AND PLANNING

One of the most important things that you can do, and that nobody else can do, is to plan for the activities and sales results of your team. Sit down each day and think about what you could change, improve, or do differently. What have you learned recently, and what actions could you take to improve individual or team performance?

To quote Vince Lombardi again, “To build a championship team, you must become brilliant on the basics.”

Your job is to build a team that is brilliant on the basics. The good news is that the better reputation your sales team has for being well trained, and the better sales results they get, the easier it is for you to attract more and better people.

Remember our old friend the “Pareto principle,” the 80/20 rule. It says that 20 percent of your activities account for 80 percent of your results. The very best sales managers think continually about the 20 percent of the basics of building a winning team that make all the difference.

ACTION EXERCISES

1. Think of yourself as the general of an army in combat, determined to win against a determined enemy (your competition). What is your plan of battle?

2. What specific resources and training does your team need to win against your competitors? How can you provide these resources to them?

THREE

Select Champions

Recruitment is the starting point in building a superior sales team. Most problems experienced by sales managers originate in the recruitment of inappropriate people for sales positions in the first place. Selection of the proper salespeople is one of the most difficult tasks you have, but it can account for as much as 90 percent of the success of your sales organization. You therefore need an established selection procedure.

Select Slowly

As ...