How to Excel in Your New Role
As a Sales Leader

Sales Manager – a title that many people feel familiar with. It’s a job that seems pretty self-explanatory, right?

But is it?

Do you know what separates most sales managers from great sales managers?

Or even just good sales manager?

According to Wendy Connick in an article for The Balance, “A sales manager is the person responsible for leading and coaching a team of salespeople,” and I don’t think you’ll find too many people that would disagree with that definition.

But what makes someone a really good sales manager?

Wendy has some insight on that too.

 

The Essential Do’s and Don’ts
of
Being a Great Sales Manager

 

Become a Master Team Builder

It is often a sales manager’s duty to recruit sales talent and grow their team. In doing so it becomes the sales manager’s responsibility to know whether a potential sales hire will be a good fit for the rigors of an open position or within the existing team culture. Good members of a sales team benefit the whole team, not just themselves.

“Sales managers who are responsible for hiring and firing members of their sales team must learn some human resources skills”, says Wendy.

A lot of people think of a job in management as a role designed to police the work of employees lower in the organizational hierarchy. While that might be the expectation at plenty of companies, a great sales manager is more concerned with building a team in which each member complements the others and doesn’t need policing.

 

Develop Next Level Communication Skills

As an experienced sales professional before becoming a manager, you probably feel pretty confident in your ability to articulate complex ideas and win buy-in among stakeholders.

Of course, as a manager and leader of a team, the stakes become a little higher. Your mis-steps are no longer measured in sales won or lost. As a manager your wins and loses follow you through the office every day. That’s because they are now measured in impact – good or bad – on the sales team as a whole, and whether that impact will continue over the short-term or indefinitely.

 

Don’t Micromanage Your Salespeople

As a sales manager you’ve become a leader within the company, and as such it’s your responsibility to develop the members of your team into the next generation of leaders.

Trying to have absolute control over every situation makes that impossible. Wendy says, “Salespeople tend to be independent and self-motivated and don’t work well in [an environment of micromanagement].”

That means, just like when trying to inspiring a prospect to buy, you’re going to have a lot more success when things are the salesperson’s own idea – or at least seem that way.

By giving your sales team autonomy in their day-to-day and allowing them to give input on the tactics and strategies that the team will be carrying out as a whole, a few interesting things happen. Not only will they learn to solve their own problems in the future, but they’ll be more invested and motivated to execute according to plan today.

 

Motivational Hack
of
The Very Best Sales Managers

Echoing Wendy Connick’s wisdom on the effects micromanagement has on your sales team’s motivation, Matéo Askaripour writes in article for Sales Hacker that, “People are naturally motivated when they feel they’re part of something larger than themselves.”

This is why the very best sales managers focus their team building efforts around creating a unified culture that values teamwork and individual’s contribution to the greater good.

It is through maintaining such a culture that your salespeople will recognize they are working for a team, and that their not on this journey alone. They’ll feel honored and will want to contribute everything  they have to see that team succeed.

What’s more, healthy competition comes out of most sales professionals when teams like this are formed. It’s this kind of internal competition – like iron sharpening iron – that will inspire and enables your sales team to reach levels of professional excellence and personal income they simply couldn’t have reached alone.

Again, the idea is that the sales professionals on your team are able to self-motivate themselves. As a sales leader however, you know that internal motivation can be enabled and manufactured. It is your responsibility to architect an environment that makes internal motivation easy for members of your sales team to find and an intentionally designed sales culture is a powerful tool for doing just that.

 

You Can’t Do Everything, So Don’t Even Try

Just like Mike Weinberg tells the Salesforce blog, “The best salespeople are productively selfish with their time,” and they have to be. There is no other way to get everything done needed to hit your sales goals unless you’re disciplined with your time and activity.

Of course, as a fairly seasoned sales professional you already know how sacred your time is and how worthy of your protection it truly is, but as a manager a higher level of time management mastery is needed.

As a sales manager this looks a bit different than it did when you were a sales rep. Instead of protecting your time for prospecting and face-time with customers, now you’ll be insulating yourself from customers to make time for your sales team and the other members of management before whom you represent your salespeople.

And still, that’s probably not going to be enough to get done all of which you’re responsible for. With time constrains as they are, a major priority that can’t go undeserved is the continued professional development of your salespeople.

To that end Asia Adam’s argues that there isn’t enough time in the day for most sales managers to consistently train and coach their salespeople at the level needed. It is for this reason that sales managers are more effective as leaders when they hire sales coaches and trainers to develop their team, than when they try to take on the full burden of training their staff themselves.

 

Crush Your First Year
As a Sales Manager

One of the most important things you need to remember as you transition from being a salesperson to being a sales manager is probably best articulated in the title of Marshall Golsmith’s book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.

No longer are you a cog in a much larger sales machine who can keep your head down, make your calls, run your meetings, and collect a commission check. You’re now in control of the levers that run that machine. You need to be a champion of world class salesmenship, not simply an example of it.

You need to be a team builder who can motivate people today with an eye on how your tactics will impact tomorrow. You need to work to build up the careers of other, not just your own. Now your career rests on the shoulders of others.

Of course, if you can remember that you’re going to crush it as a sales manager!

 

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About The Author of This Article: Ziluo Qiu is a China born student studying Journalism at Arizona State University.  She enjoys reading and traveling. Ziluo hopes to one day own and publish her very own magazine. Following graduation from ASU she hopes to to work in television, radio, or for a magazine.

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