Creating quota-busting teams isn’t easy endeavor, even when endowed with the right experience, financial means, and technological advancement. If it were easy, every field-sales manager would make it to the top. Sales management is without a doubt a very tough job. According to CSO Insights, the average tenure of a sales manager or VP is 19 months. 47% of companies stated that it takes 10 or more months for a new sales person to become fully productive and only 58% of the aggregate sales force make quota.

Research tells us that the number of sales managers and sales VPs that have been in the job for more than a decade, and consistently making quota (at least 85% of the time) has decreased to 39%.

Sales Management By Osmosis

A large percentage of sales managers and VPs are not achieving their quota. The question is why?

Business environment fabric is part of the issue.

  1. Sales managers internal training is often inadequate or non-existent. Sales reps once promoted to the sales manager position are expected to learn management by osmosis, picking nugget of wisdom here and there. Taking some knowledge street-style whenever possible, making it hard to understand the complexity and nuances of sales management while creating lack of uniformity among sales manager.
  2. It is a common belief that it is impractical to pull sales managers of the field for any length of time. Subjects such as product training, procedures and policy are often conducted remotely and tend to take precedence. However, training sales managers regularly go to the backburner or are entirely overlooked. Everyone understands the value and importance of training sales manager to become more efficient at passing knowledge and best practices to their sales reps. Unfortunately, revenue is king, and the sales machine cannot stop despite the opportunity cost.
  3. Many sales organization, primarily small sales organization prefer a manager-player model (quota carrying sales manager). This type of sales management model operates under the belief that the sales manager will stay informed about customers’ details, market trends and challenges that the sales reps face daily. In my opinion, this model promotes management by exception, encourages self-focus rather than team focus, and deprive the sales manager of focusing on sales reps’ development and growth through collaborative planned strategies that focus on driving topline revenue and profit.
  4. There is an issue with companies that have clear rigid policies and procedures defined by prior poor senior management ideology, supported by human resources and legal. Often, chuckles creativity and innovation and can be a significant hindrance to independent judgment and creative issue resolution. Sales leader thrive under, trusted increased responsibility and potential for upward mobility through merit. Conversely, without freedom, it’s hard to operate under sluggish, complex and predefined, air-tight rigid bureaucracy.

“We herd sheep, we drive cattle, we lead people. Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.” -George S. Patton

In most organizations, sales department lags in term of allocation of resources to enhance old technology, streamline and improve current processes and integrate disconnected platforms.

The basic principles for improving performance and achieving stretch targets require. Empowering sales manager along with their cross-functional peers, standardizing processes and tightening execution. However, the ownership of these methods and information sharing is often fragmented and viciously controlled, resulting in additional complexity that slows down collaboration and impacts negatively corporate performance.

In my experience, here is why I believe some sales managers and sales VPs fail to deliver consistent above-average performance.

Rationale Behind Sales Managers Failure

  1. They don’t reinforce sales conformity. Every sales person use different selling methods, regardless if it works or not.
  2. They hire according to their gut feeling, and they hope they will turn to champions.
  3. They hire according to urgent needs, without thorough vetting or matching the candidate to the job requirement.
  4. They depend on internal archaic training systems disconnected from the customer reality.
  5. They default to weak or no planning strategy with their sales reps.
  6. They lack or do not reinforce traditional proven sales methodology.
  7. They have no solid selling process on the place for their sales reps.
  8. They rely on an inadequate support system to help top performers.
  9. They were not trained to distinguish between managing value driven activity and non-managing valueless activities.
  10. They rarely work the trenches with their sales reps and demonstrate to the client that the company is interested in the business.
  11. They shy away from providing sales presentations to potential prospects to elevate the salesperson confidence.
  12. They don’t demonstrate how to navigate tough sales situations with large demanding customers.
  13. They neglect to review and draft joint progress report to advance significant opportunities.
  14. They discard the importance of ensuring that every salesperson, manages his six-month objectives on target accounts.
  15. They don’t transfer accounts from sales reps that neglect their accounts to eager, devoted sales reps.
  16.  They don’t push internally and externally to assist the sales rep to move account stuck in the process/funnel.

“Lean in, speak out, have a voice in your organization, and never use the word ‘sorry.'” -Trish Bertuzzi

The list goes on. The sales manager job is multifaceted, tough and critical to drive profit and validate the marketing program success. Most sales managers have been promoted to the role, without much training and are expected to learn the job complexity by osmosis. Most companies training are not related to training the sales manager.

As often the training subject is related to company procedures, production, human resources, forecasting, CRM and the like. Instrumental in the job? In the broader perspective, yes, but, they do have little impact on educating the sales manager on how to become an effective sales leader.

What’s missing in the most sales organization is a platform and a clear training concept, that educate the sales manager and the sales VP on how to manage and increase functional knowledge to create a sales force that can multiply and maximize its effort to exceed quota.

While the sales manager is responsible for hiring, training, motivating and coordinating all sales processes. Nothing is more important than creating a sales force that can persuade customers to buy. The sales manager and VPs often get terminated because they fail to have their salespeople to convince customers to buy the company products and services in quantity large enough, and with a velocity sufficient to achieve quota.

Managing salespeople activity to achieve epic performance is the essence of a job well done. Many sales managers spend a great deal of time in non-managing activities that are maybe necessary but contribute little or nothing to revenue creation. (many companies are responsible and guilty burring their sales manager and VPs in low priority task, because of inadequate internal support systems – (but, that’s another whole topic)

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of right teaching.

“You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.”– Clay P. Bedford

Educate Rather Than Terminate Your Sales Leaders

Terminating sales managers is the norm nowadays, but doing so do not solve the core problem our corporate society has self-inflicted. Sales organization should instigate and approve the following actions to elevate their sales managers capability and have sales leaders that are capable of hitting their quota at least 90% of the time.

  1. Develop and create a company-wide managing dogma and principles that require broad-based corporate cultural transformation. Managing is a distinct academic field and discipline that needs intensive continuous learning with a concentration in people, projects, communities, challenges, and business. It’s helpful to relate the company managing philosophy and purpose with its short-term and long-term objectives to serve its employees, community, market, customers, and shareholders. These managing training program must be conducted across the whole organization, and must be repeated and upgraded endlessly to ensure coalescence behind the company vision and shared an understanding of new corporate managing doctrine.
  2. Develop and implement programs that educate cross-functional managers on how to work as one unit of production. You will be surprised how little most sales managers know about other cross-functional areas such as marketing functions, customer service, advertising, sales promotion, market research, finance, operations, engineering and human resources.
  3. The sales manager may be working on a daily basis with these functional managers, yet, when asked, most don’t know these technical manager’s priorities, business models, and operating systems. These educational programs should boost cross-functional collaboration, reveal functional operating preferences, simplify the process and radically break through these internal silos.
  4.  Ensure that the sales manager work conditions allow focus on high-value priorities, and minimize non-managing activities. Billions of dollars are wasted on training and development programs every year. The application of academic program happens on the job, all level of sales managers must be involved in reinforcing daily this required behavior to promote its success.

Conclusion

The sales manager should be rightly empowered not in title only but, by the power of decisions making. Many sales organization use their sales management mainly as funnels for information going up and down. Here is an example: The head of sales must approve all pricing decisions or nominal salary increases. The sales manager have to have approval for typical things from his VP; this is sales management in title only, as it deprives the sales manager of his ability to act as a responsible, trusted decision maker as it sucks oxygen and intelligence out of his being.

This type of management scrutiny and control is wrong at its core as it deprives the sales manager of any aptitude to make decision necessary to evaluate performance. Not trusting your own sales managers is a senior management and corporate deficient thinking, and must be discontinued to create future, trusted, loyal, productive corporate business leaders. The sales manager should have profit contribution, gross profit, and marginal income goals, and should be compensated accordingly to focus on high-revenue generating opportunities rather than focus on unprofitable business that provides caloric-deficient productivity metrics.

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