Your Sales Manager Impacts Revenue. Positively or Negatively?
Your Sales Manager Impacts Revenue. Positively or Negatively?
Great Sales Management Grows Revenue by 31%?
Sometimes as much as 43% when strategy & tactics are aligned.
The two most frequent concerns I hear from business owners are:
- My revenue forecast is never accurate.
- I don’t know how effective my sales manager is.
This blog is going to tackle the second concern because I have two free tools that can help you fix the forecast issue on your own. I wrote a book – chapter four – is devoted to helping you understand why the revenue forecast is unreliable, and how to fix it. You can grab a copy of that for free here. The 7 Critical Mistakes CEOs Make with the Sales Organization.
You can consume chapter four in about the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee. There are also six other ideas that help you turn your sales team around.
The other free resource that addresses how to fix the revenue forecast with emphasis on getting your sales leader to do the work can be found here. an eBook and Workbook for your sales leader. This will take another cup of coffee, better yet two fingers of your favorite bourbon.
I really want you to address the revenue forecast because by fixing that – you fix other underlying frustrations. Please take a look at the free resources. The information is there, step by step. If the sales leader is confused, have them ping me.
Let me share a brief story about me that will help you understand my perspective on sales managers. The first time I was promoted to a sales management role everyone was excited. The owner was going to give up the responsibility. The sales team believed I understood their challenges which I did. I was also excited, until my wife asked if I had ever managed a team of six before. Insert sound of balloon being deflated.
Like most salespeople who get called up, I had no freaking idea what to do. I had two weeks to figure it out. At least, I had two weeks to get ahead of the sales team. There were many lessons that I learned the hard way. These are the best lessons learned.
The chart below is pulled from an Objective Management Group Insights Report for a season sales manager. Seasoned = 7 years in management and 8 additional years in sales. I direct you to the last column on the right – the ideal percentage of time a sales manager should spend on the activity. You will notice that coaching, motivating and accountability to expectations account for 75%. This manager is spending 40% of her time in these areas.
So, what is coaching? Coaching is telling a sales rep what they don’t want to hear, helps them see what they would rather not see in themselves, so the coachee can be what they always wanted to be. It isn’t closing deals. It isn’t giving pricing advice or authorizing discounts.
These are the coaching attributes you should look for in your sales managers and coach them to improve upon.
- Consistently coaches
- Debriefs the reps efficiently
- Asks enough questions
- Strives for respect, not to be liked
- Able to focus on the rep in the moment
- Uncovers the compelling reasons a prospect will buy.
- Effective at understanding a sales process
- Passion for helping and coaching reps
- Doesn’t rescue salespeople
- Effective at Getting commitments from reps
- Handles joint calls effectively
Formal 1:1 coaching sessions with each rep should occur at least 2x a month. Ideally, this cadence is weekly, scheduled with an agenda. The rep should have action items to complete and report back from each session.
Effective sales managers ask questions; a lot of questions to gain an understanding of what the rep believes and what they understand. The rep needs to feel empowered that they “figured it out” rather than just given an answer. Here are some great coaching questions:
- Have you ever encountered this issue before?
- Is this similar or the same?
- What did you do that time?
- Did that work? Why or why not?
- What do you think might work this time?
The salesperson should start to connect the dots due to the coaching of the sales manager. Good coaching
Accountability is a necessary competency of a sales manager. They must set clear expectations, gain agreement as to why this is beneficial to all parties, and hold people to the standards.
Accountability attributes of an effective sales manager are:
- Manages behavior of the reps.
- WIll not accept mediocrity.
- Takes responsibility
- No need for approval from reps
- Their beliefs support accountability
- Asks enough questions
- Manages the sales pipeline
Give your sales manager permission to NOT accept mediocrity. They must accept a lot from the team. With high standards, they will seldom get more than they asked for. The manager must demand more and this requires some kind of consequence that crescendos up for continued poor performance. The sales manager cannot accept excuses. This will drive performance. Mediocrity on a sales team will kill morale and performance.
Give the team the tools they need to be successful, and hold them accountable.
This blog post from September 2022 talks about the responsibility of the business owner. You build the arsenal. The sales leader organizes the resources for effective alignment of your sales strategy. The sales manager manages the engagement using the weapons from the arsenal. The salespeople hit the targets.
Sales managers are the weakest link in your strategy. I know because I was one years ago.
I want to thank you for subscribing and reading the blog. The entire team at Helix Sales Development is working hard to deliver value to as many entrepreneurs as we can. We do not and cannot work with everyone who reaches out, but we are building offerings to give you access to great tools.
Which reminds me. If you want to address mistake #5, here is access to some data and a monthly subscription to the tool we use to predict sales success. Go poke around. Hiring better salespeople and discerning who should be on your team has never been more important, and we have multiple programs to help.
