How Your Sales Managers Are Keeping You From Having The Business You Deserve - Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, I discussed some staggering statistics about sales management. You can read the article here.  

1 out of 5 sales managers don’t meet the criteria to effectively manage a sales team

1 out of 3 sales managers are not able to be trained or coached to perform more effectively

Only 1 sales manager 15 is considered elite

4 out of 5 sales managers are ineffective at coaching

In today's economy, you must understand the impact this has on your business. 

Why Don’t Sales Managers Manage Effectively?

There are many reasons for these sales management failures, all of which can be traced back to skills, specific sales and management weaknesses, and core beliefs around selling and management.  Most sales managers got to where they are by being great salespeople with leadership traits.

Unfortunately, leadership traits are not the same as management skills and sales is quite a different job from sales management.

Why You Absolutely Must Care About This Problem

In a nutshell, you must care because you deserve better, your customers deserve better, your shareholders deserve better, and your sales team deserves better. 

You have the business you deserve. 

Caring enough to truly address these problems will make you more deserving of the business you truly want.

Here’s what’s at stake:

Revenue

When your sales managers are not effective at accountability, your future revenue is at stake.  Every time a sales manager allows a salesperson to slide, you are giving away future dollars.  Don’t you and your shareholders deserve those dollars?

New Opportunities

When your sales managers fail to understand what motivates each salesperson, they lose power to help the salespeople to do the things that they won’t do on their own to get the results you need them to get and that are in alignment with what each salesperson wants most. If a salesperson is not making enough calls what, beyond fear, will motivate them to do what’s uncomfortable? Uncover this motivator and you have the key that unlocks the door to high impact performance.

Closing New Business

When sales managers are not effective at understanding the sales process or aren’t effective at coaching the team through the steps and events and milestones, you will experience delayed closings and stalled sales. 90% of companies we evaluate don’t even have a real sales process so this is a big one to care about.  You deserve a sales process that gets you to goal. 

Forecasting New Business

When sales managers don’t follow a proven sales process, with stages and steps for each stage, then the pipeline report will be incorrect. You already know this because you discount your forecast report by a certain percentage.(You can test your sales process here.)
Your sales manager must be able to hold salespeople accountable to a process that qualifies opportunities correctly. You need to care about this the same way you care about the P&L your accountant gives you.  You’re not discounting that too, are you?

Brand Message

One of the things you lose control over with a weak or ineffective sales manager is your value proposition.  Part of the job of the sales leader is to make sure the sales team tells the brand story consistently.  You have spent time and money getting this right so make sure your sales leader doesn’t let the team get off message.  It’s much harder to win business with an ineffective message and often the business you end up getting is at a much lower price.  Don’t you deserve the right customers at the right price point?

Customer Satisfaction

Most customers don’t like to be sold but they do like to buy solutions to their business problems. When your sales managers lack coaching skills or don’t feel coaching is important, the very happiness of your customers is at stake. Salespeople need help from sales managers to learn how to have great sales conversations.  These are the kinds of conversations that differentiate you from the competition, are of value to your customers, and that keep your salespeople away from giving away the farm to get the business. Happy customers are a byproduct of an effective, customer-centric sales process managed by an effective sales leader.

What Can You Do to Create the Business You Deserve?

The easiest first step is to evaluate the sales force. It’s a good starting point because it allows you to get some important business questions answered about the performance potential of your sales force.  You already know how they are performing to goal and how they are performing to expectations. 

But your plan isn’t static.

- it calls for growth
-it calls for increased revenue
- it calls for increased profit

So the single most important question that needs to be answered is:

1) Can the sales organization you have in place right now execute that growth plan?

Beyond that, you need to know the answers to the following questions:

2) How much more revenue can you expect this group to generate?
You have both performers and non-performers on the team. 

3) Can the non-performers be saved?

4) And, if they can be saved, what specifically do you need to do with them in order to save them and get them performing like your performers?

5) And, of those who can’t be saved, what do you do with them? Replace, redeploy?

6) And, if you need to replace salespeople, is your existing selection criteria effective or do you need to change it?

7) If you need to change your selection criteria, how specifically does it need to change?

8) Can your current salesforce bring in new business?

9) Which of them can learn to differentiate by selling more consultatively?

10) Can they be better at selling value and what will that take?

11) Can you shorten your sales cycle?

12) What impact are your sales managers having on your sales force?

13) How effective are they at coaching?

14) How good are they at motivating?

15) How effective are they at holding the sales team accountable to the metrics and behaviors that matter most?

16) What’s the quality of your pipeline?

17) What would your pipeline look like if it were restaged?

18) How much more margin could you keep if you had a more effective sales process?

By evaluating the salesforce you can answer all of these questions and many more.  You can transition your sales organization away from ineffectiveness with real business intelligence.  And you can finally have the business you deserve. 

If you'd like to work with us to create a FREE Revenue Growth Roadmap for your organization, click here.

If you'd like to schedule a time to talk with me about your business, click here. Or feel free to email me at [email protected]. I welcome your thoughts and comments below.  Let's start a conversation.

Cheryl Powers is the President and CEO of Align Strategic and is a recognized salesforce development specialist, sales and marketing leader, professional coach, and author. With more than 20 years experience as a business owner, sales and marketing executive, sales trainer, speaker and professional coach, Cheryl has helped many CEOs and business leaders achieve their growth goals. By creating alignment at every level of the business, CEOs and business leaders can move performance from good to great to breakthrough levels.