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Overview

High-performance sales teams are essential to a company’s success. Sales managers must prioritize high-value tasks, prepare and value their team members, and work strategically to achieve goals. Sales gets a bad rap because of the stereotypes we see in popular culture: for example, Arthur Miller’s classic play Death of a Salesman portrays salesmen as being useless and unsuccessful.

It’s important to have a sales team in any company, but it is also essential that the image of a sleazy and stressed-out salesman doesn’t stick.

In this article, the author shares his insights from years of working as a sales consultant and manager. His insights show that management is more important than the salespeople themselves when it comes to creating successful sales teams.

Sales managers often focus on the wrong things. Salespeople who are pushy are just like infomercials and don’t work well. The four R’s of sales is a good way to think about success in sales, because it focuses on relationships, relevance, resonance and results.

Big Idea #1: Managers and sales teams need to avoid distractions that don’t help them achieve their goals.

To become an excellent sales manager, you must first ask yourself two questions: Which tasks do I spend the most time on? And are those tasks important to my success in managing a team of salespeople?

Managers are often overwhelmed by meetings and tasks that don’t help their team sell. They end up wasting time on tasks that don’t drive revenue, which is the most important thing for them to focus on.

The author interviewed a sales manager who once spent time helping the maintenance crew set up for an event instead of his staff.

It’s common for sales managers to be pulled away from their duties because of non-sales related tasks. If this happens it can take a lot of time away from the manager and make them less effective at their job.

Another primary distraction is a customer relationship management system, which captures and analyzes customer data. It can be helpful in maintaining customer retention by keeping the sales team connected with their customers. However, CRM software won’t fix an unproductive sales team. In fact, it can even harm performance as it diverts attention from the real job of sales to updating the system with new information.

Using CRM (Customer Relationship Management) too much and using email excessively can make it more difficult to communicate. For example, face-to-face meetings are even better than emails or texts when communicating with your team members. You should also hold regular meetings for your team members and spend time in the field with them if you want to be effective as a manager.

Big Idea #2: Managers need to stop doing things that they learned as salespeople.

Most sales managers started out as salespeople. This is a smart choice, but since the two roles require very different mindsets, problems arise.

Salespeople are taught to be selfish with their time. They should spend as little of it helping others, because that will hurt their own sales.

Managers should be accessible to their staff and spend time helping them, in addition to completing other management tasks.

Now, being a sales manager and a salesperson at the same time is not necessarily ideal. Many people have tried that approach, but it always results in them underperforming as both a manager and a salesperson.

Sometimes, a business will promote its top seller to manager and ask them to continue selling part-time. However, this can lead to problems down the road. The new manager spends 95 percent of his time on sales and neglects leadership duties.