Follow up Friday: How do you Know your Sales Managers are Engaged in Activities that will Give you Growth that is Sustainable?

Reflecting on Monday’s question: How do you know your sales managers are engaged in activities that will give you growth that is sustainable?

When most sales leaders think about accountability, they think about whether or not someone hit their number.

Sounds logical – right? Accountable for results.

That’s all well and good, unless you want to have an impact on those results. You can’t manage results – you can only analyze results and do the management version of Monday Morning Quarterbacking on them.

If you want to impact results, you need to be managing the things that lead to results.
So, “How do you know your sales managers are engaged in activities that will give you growth that is sustainable?” You can’t get there by looking at the end results of their team.

If you want to know if they are doing the right things, you need to know what those right things are, agree with the managers about them, and meet and work together with management about those activities to see how they are progressing, whether they are getting done, done right, and leading to the results you would like to shoot for.

Sounds too simple to even bother writing down – right?

But be honest with yourself. Do you really manage activities? Are you really working with management at a meaningful level of granular accountability? Most of the time – when you look hard and get really honest with yourself – the answer is no.

So why is that? Most of the time it is because there is no explicit agreement about what those activities should be.

And why isn’t there this kind of explicit agreement?
Usually it is because no-one took the time to articulate what specific steps and activities need to happen to get new business.

My friend David Masover just completed a free mini training course and is hosting a webinar next week where he will address these questions – and more importantly – the specific details about how to get that level of granular, activity based, results oriented agreement embedded into your sales organization – from the reps up the org chart and into the CRM.

You can sign up for the webinar here – I hope that you find it useful.

© Copyright 2016 Sage Leadership Strategies, LLC All rights Reserved.

Magic Monday: What Should The Role of the Front Line Sales Manager Be?

Where can you find the magic at work today? I find it in collaborating with other entrepreneurs to deliver value to our clients.

A colleague of mine, David Masover, interviewed me to get my perspective on what the role of the front line sales manager should be to drive growth. He interviewed five other experts and compiled the results into the format of a panel discussion in his e-book: Your Front Line Sales Manager: Glorified Sales Rep or Driver of Growth?

I think you will find the way David put together the interview answers an interesting read that looks at the complexity of the role of the sales manager balancing selling with managing and leading while ensuring bottom line results. I don’t think sales managers ever completely get away from selling, or should they. The question is on what percentage of their time should they be engaged in selling versus managing their people to sell.

I told David, “To be a really, really good manager, you need to get charged by empowering others to be the one to close the deal, and so if you’re a fantastic salesperson who’s just been promoted, if you don’t somehow have a mindset shift or are able to shift getting excited about seeing somebody else close the deal versus you being the one to close the deal, you’re probably not going to be too happy being a manager, and you’re probably not going to be good at it, because you’re probably always going to be wanting to step in and do it for them versus letting them do it.”

You may access the full interview with David and me here.

David also offers some free training, in addition to a more comprehensive paid training program you may access through the e-book. I am most curious to learn what your point of view is on what the role of the sales manager is, or should be in your organization.

This week’s reflection questions: What percentage should your front line sales person be selling versus managing? What works in your organization? How do you know your sales managers are engaged in activities that will give you growth that is sustainable?

© Copyright 2016 Sage Leadership Strategies, LLC All rights Reserved.