Be authentic, motivate and inspire your team.
Set clear goals
Hold your team members accountable.
Measure, observe and coach. Give (and receive) feedback. Teach, praise and correct.
Develop a positive environment and winning culture of achievement.
1. Be authentic, motivate and inspire your team.
Authentic means being yourself, being open and honest and having no hidden agendas – read more.
Being authentic is one thing, motivating and inspiring your team is clearly another. In high performing sales team the role of the Sales Manager as motivator and inspirer is key. Yes, salespeople should be able to motivate themselves, but the influence of the Sales Manager is often the icing on the cake, and the difference between a high performing team and a disparate group of individuals.
2. Set clear goals
If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you arrive? Sales targets are a barometer with which to measure your team. Whilst we do believe that sales activity is more important than results, we also believe that it is important to set goals as it gives you an indication of how the team is performing, gives the Sales Manager an opportunity to measure best practice, benchmark and give salespeople a clear focus.
It's important that Sales Managers don’t use goals / targets as a stick with which to beat the team with, but as an aid to improve and develop them as salespeople.
3. Hold your team members accountable.
We often see this as an issue that Sales Managers struggle with. How do we hold our people accountable? How do we motivate poor performers without being over critical?
Many Sales Managers prefer the ‘soft approach’ which could mean giving their team untold latitude to do as they please. Others prefer to use the stick as a means to beat them with.
We’d say the best approach is…neither of these! Sales Managers shouldn’t be soft touches, but there’s no need for them to be bastards either.
Close collaboration and mutual agreement is the key here, with the salesperson developing their own sales activity plan and the Sales Manager commenting and providing input as necessary.
Most people want responsibility in their roles, but if you don’t hold your salespeople accountable, you risk poor or non-performance.
4. Measure, observe and coach. Give (and receive) feedback. Teach, praise and correct.
Sales Managers are teachers, educators, coaches and often a shoulder for salespeople to lean on.
How much should they do this? Depends completely on the individual salesperson. Sales Managers with high levels of Emotional Intelligence can pick up small and subtle changes of mood and attitude and help their people deal with them.
The best salespeople sell to meet the real needs of their clients, developing solutions to meet these needs. The Sales Manager is a teacher and coach and should help their people achieve this. Most salespeople don’t sell properly, so it is evident that there is plenty of room for improvement in this area.
Effective Sales Managers should also be open to receiving feedback and not become defensive with negative feedback. What’s good for the goose…
5. Develop a positive environment and winning culture of achievement.
Winning isn’t the main thing – it’s the only thing.
We hear this statement quite a lot, but it’s not always possible to win is it? Whether is sport or in business sometimes the opposition is simply better than you, for whatever reason.
We prefer the following statement:
Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is.
High performing teams always want to win. As we’ve said, it’s not always possible to win, but losing hurts high performing teams and will motivate them further in the future.
Winning is contagious. Creating a winning mindset where friendly competion is the norm will inspire team member to be their best.
In summary…the role of the Sales Manager is to lead and supervise sales teams and oversee the day-to-day sales operations of a business.
But it’s much more than that isn’t it? Here’s another set of their responsibilities:
Setting clear direction and planning performance.
Measuring, observing and coaching.
Removing obstacles.
Building the team
Rewarding and Recognising.
The best Sales Managers challenge and reward, praise and teach. They fully realise that it’s all about their people and never about them. They succeed (or fail) as a team.