A Sports Analogy
When you consider the question of what CEOs expect from sales managers, it’s hard to avoid a stereotypical sports analogy because it is so apt. Both sports coaches and sales managers are heavily evaluated on their wins. A winning record is what matters to the sports organization and fans; winning deals and achieving quotas are what matter to most CEOs.
If sports teams are winning and sales teams are meeting and exceeding targets, everything becomes easier. When sports teams stumble or when sales teams struggle to deliver results, the underlying strategy, culture, and talent issues that are hindering progress become more transparent and acute.
Are Your Sales Managers Well Prepared?
Being a star athlete or a top revenue producer does not necessarily prepare you to be an effective sales leader. In the sports world, just look at Magic Johnson, Wayne Gretzky, and Mike Singletary. All great athletes who failed as coaches.
The same can be true of high performing sales reps. While they may excel at all the top business sales training and solution selling training competencies with their clients, individual sales stars are often not successful as sales team leaders. Why?
Just as Magic Johnson, Wayne Gretzky, and Mike Singletary learned in sports, it takes a different set of skills to achieve success through others.
To succeed at leading a sales team you need to be able to lead, manage, and coach your sales team consistently and effectively. These sale leadership and coaching skills are best taught in customized sales management training for leaders and are in alignment with what matters most.
What It Takes to Succeed
Sales managers and sales leaders need to be able to:
- Lead to Create Desire
Great sales leaders ensure sales team members understand and embrace the sales strategy and are intrinsically motivated to make it happen. The best sales leaders focus on clarifying what matters most, inspiring people to perform at their peak, and putting their team and their clients first.
You will know you are being an effective sales leader when you decide to embrace your role of serving others, meet your teams greatest emotional needs, invest in helping those with a strong desire to improve, and seek consistent and honest feedback about how you can best serve your team. - Manage to Drive Productivity
Great sales managers ensure team members are accountable to the defined sales processes and critical sales productivity metrics such as revenue, gross margin, win-rate, portfolio mix, and cycle time.
You will know you are being an effective sales manager when you identify the sales success metrics that matter most, your team knows where they stand from a performance perspective at all times, they have a sales playbook as a guide, and they have confidence in the overall sales plan and their individual sales plan for success. - Coach to Build Competencies
Great sales coaches ensure team members develop to their full potential and live the desired sales culture.
You will know you are being an effective sales coach when you can consistently and effectively diagnose gaps in sales performance for each sales role, ensure alignment to an individual development plan, and implement the development plan with your team members.
The Bottom Line
Many of the attitudes and skills that correlate to individual salesperson success are inconsistent with what is required to be a high performing sales manager or sales leader. Top CEOs make sure their sales leaders and managers are prepared to lead, manage, and coach their sales team.
To learn more about how to create successful sales leaders and sales managers, download 15 Sales Warning Signs Your Sales Team is Headed in the Wrong Direction