SALES MANAGEMENT: NOT FOR THE TIMID OR FAINT OF HEART

At the very heart of exceptional sales performance is an excellent sales leader—whether it’s a field manager, a sales executive or, in smaller organizations, it could even be a CEO.

Leadership is fundamentally all about setting an example. It is also about role modeling and personally exhibiting characteristics that salespeople need to practice in the field. Specifically, that means getting actively involved with issues such as pricing problems, delivery glitches, calling on difficult customers or prospects, working longer than the required hours, traveling to difficult-to-get-to locations, resolving conflicts between various constituencies and a whole host of other unsavory, distasteful things that fall into the lap of every sales manager.

Sales leaders must be willing and capable of handling difficult, demanding and sensitive issues, even when it’s easier to avoid potentially volatile situations. Unfortunately, many organizations fail to understand this important aspect of the sales management role and how very demanding these efforts are.

What happens when sales managers don’t lead from the front?

• Low morale

• Lack of respect for the sales manager

• A perception of hypocrisy

• An overall sense of mistrust for anyone in a management role

• Unhappy clients

• Salesperson turnover

• Poor hiring practices

• Plateaued sales

• Low closing ratios

Worse yet, in the current economic climate, we are seeing that many sales executives who became comfortable with a relatively passive role are suddenly facing layoffs as companies begin to scrutinize which players add the most value to their organizations and which they can afford to do without.

By contrast, those who have always played an active role working directly with their teams to drive sales are even more valuable now. These sales leaders are finding ways to help their teams succeed, even in challenging times.

It takes courage for a sales manager or executive to step up and face the unknown. But here lies the fundamental issue. How can you expect salespeople to face the dangers of conflict, refusal or disagreement if you won’t?

Simply put, no one will ever get any better at anything unless they are observed, coached, course-corrected and managed in the field. Without going into the selling arena, anything that a sales manager receives is pure secondhand information. It is not experiential evidence. Moreover, it is impossible to get a sense of how effective or ineffective a salesperson is without firsthand, on-the-scene, real-time observation.

And you can’t get real, valuable, first-hand knowledge from sales reports, database results, product inventory reports, call sheets or even sales results. You need to be at the point of attack to determine the effectiveness of your team’s effort.

However, it is a lot easier to stay in the office. It can also be tempting to become more focused on the other executives and power players in the organization than on your sales team—this leads to too much time in meetings and petty organizational politics—and too little time out in the field with salespeople.

It’s not as physically demanding to stay in the office either. In fact, it can become downright habit-forming. The downside of all of that is that your sales team can also develop new habits without being observed and course-corrected. Unfortunately, they are usually bad ones that become hard to change and unlearning something is a lot more difficult than learning something new.

Leading from the front requires mastering many skills:

And how about qualities like these:

• Integrity – Simply doing what is right no matter what the outcome

• Consistency – Salespeople need to know, with some degree of predictability, how their sales manager will act or react to issues or events

• Tact – Being a sales manager means confronting tough situations, but it also means being able to do this in a careful, constructive way

If all this seems overwhelming, it just goes to show that Sales Management isn’t for the timid or faint of heart. But, there are two important bright spots for sales leaders who are willing (and able) to take on this challenging role:

1. Superstar sales managers are far rarer to find than are superstar salespeople.

2. The sales leader is the one person who can influence sales and productivity more than any other person in an organization.

That means if you have what it takes and you are willing to put in the work to lead your sales team from the front, you will always be valued in your organization and sought-after in the job market. More importantly, you alone hold the power to lead your sales team—and by extension your organization—to limitless success.