This chapter will define what your job is and what it is not, show you how to balance work and home, and give you the foundation to be a successful sales manager. I give you advice on setting expectations for your team and maintaining standards for those working for you. Finally, I look at ways to earn your team’s respect.
Understanding Your Role as Sales Manager
As the sales manager for your organization, it’s your responsibility to lead and manage the sales team. If you’re like many first time sales managers, that one statement leaves you glassy-eyed with a bead of sweat forming on your forehead.
Again, relax (I say that a lot, but it’s usually the first thing you need to remember to do). That broad definition can be overwhelming and being overwhelmed kills the very traits you’ve exemplified in your career: creativity, a positive attitude, a desire for growth and leadership.
✔ Managing the sales team: This simply means that you’re responsible for your people. You are now the manager and anything (positive or negative) affecting the sales of the company begins and ends with you. You’re the face of the only department in the company contributing to revenue.
✔ Establishing goals and quotas: In a perfect world, each salesperson sets goals and quotas that allow her to stretch and reach new heights every year. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen. It’s up to you to set the goals, objectives, and quotas for individual salespeople and for the team as a whole.
✔ Training and developing sales skills: This is where your past success as a salesperson comes into play. You must help each member of the sales department improve her skills. Everyone can get better at some part of the sales process – your job is to identify weaknesses and help convert them to strengths. And contrary to what they tell you in the initial interview, they all have weaknesses.
✔ Assigning and defining geographical territories: After you’re in management and can see more of the big picture, some things jump out at you as obvious. Why are two people spending time in the same market on different days? One of the greatest wastes of time for salespeople is windshield time: those countless wasted hours between appointments where instead of seeing a prospect, you’re staring at the road. At some point in your job, you’ll need (and want) to address this and make things more efficient.
✔ Counseling and leading individual salespeople: In order to get the entire team pulling in the same direction, you must work on the individuals first. Because you’re their sales manager, your team needs you to take the lead and create an environment where they can succeed. Don’t wait for people to ask for help (some never will). Understand that you most likely manage each person differently, so in order to find out what makes each person tick you must get to know each and every member of your team.
✔ Reporting data to upper management: Good news, bad news, any news – it all comes from you. This is one particular area you should never accept the answer, “That’s the way we’ve always done it!” I hate that answer. That has killed more organizations than anything. It’s up to you to find ways to use data to drive sales and provide yourself and others in management with good, actionable information. The things you wished you’d known as a salesperson are now the things you must know as a sales manager.
✔ Creating incentive programs: Whether you’re using in-house programs or working with manufacturers and vendors, it’s important to keep your salespeople engaged; keep them interested and striving to grow. Build and maintain a special incentive calendar and make the job fun! Additionally, a good sales manager will create team or departmental based incentives to reward the achievement of overall goals. This is just another way to create an atmosphere of working together and not against each other.
✔ Establishing budgets: Working out the budget is the second worst part of the job. The skills you used to become successful probably aren’t related to sitting and going over spreadsheet after spreadsheet of numbers and projections. However, you now have the responsibility to create the budget for the sales department. It’s not necessarily fun, but it has to be done. I will go into detail on the difference between budgets, goals, and forecasting in Chapter 12.
✔ Hiring and firing salespeople: If budgets are the second worst part of the job, this is the worst (especially the firing part). But the buck stops with you. It’s your responsibility to continually upgrade the team in the field. To do so, sometimes you have to fire the bad ones and hire some more good ones.
Obviously this list is not all-inclusive and can change daily. The best managers are the ones who can handle the day-to-day issues, which inevitably come up without losing focus on long-term goals and objectives.
If there’s one thing first-time or young managers need to know it’s that you work for the rest of the salespeople, they don’t work for you. They can function without you – you can’t function without them.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with telling your salespeople as a group or individually, “My job is to work for you, not have you work for me.” Not only will they respect you for your candor, but you set the stage for how you want to run your department.
This statement and mindset is crucial to your success, so you must understand exactly what it means: You come to work each day asking how you can help your sales force, not how they can help you. It’s as simple as that. You run a bottom-up organization, not a top-down one.
Does Addie need you to help close a deal? Does Beatrice need you to place a phone call from a higher authority? Find out what each of your team needs from you. You’re there to make them successful and many times that means simply helping them overcome some obstacle in the sales process.
The easiest way to grow your sales
Without oversimplifying this, the easiest way to grow the sales of your company is to help each individual salesperson increase her sales. It’s almost impossible for one person alone to move the needle very much on an organization’s sales. However, if you can get each member on the entire team to grow her own business by just 10 percent, you can have a great impact on your company’s sales and bottom line.
By attacking your job with a “how can I help my sales force?” attitude, you will find yourself with the opportunities to make a difference for each person whether she’s a million-dollar producer or someone barely making her quota. Each person needs and deserves your leadership and management.
Begin your day, your week, and your month by asking yourself what you can do to help each of your