Your job as a Sales Manager is not to sell but to get it sold.
As smart as you are, you are severely limited in terms of what you can sell when you are doing the selling.
Your job is not to sell. Your job is to recruit, train and motivate a strong sales team to do the selling for you.
Your job is to hit or exceed target with the available resources.
So the first thing to do is to work with your team to agree your Sales Targets.
This can be a top down target made of what the company needs to achieve and a bottom up target made of what the Sales people are forecasting.
You now need to work out the Success Formula. By that I mean what needs to happen for you to hit your agreed Sales target.
These will be Key result areas. The activities required may include the following:
· Enquiries
· Appointments
· Quotations
· Demonstration
· Orders
The question now is how many off each do you need to achieve in order to hit target. You will get this figure by analysing your conversation ratios at each step. Once you have the total numbers you now divide this between the Sales people so that each one can do their part.
Remember... What gets monitored gets done, and inspect what you expect. If you don’t inspect it, they think you don’t respect it and they stop doing it. The carrot is bigger than the stick. So catch your people doing things right and praise the procedures you want repeated. Recognition is a massive motivator.
Once you have set your targets and your key result areas you need to look at the resources you have. List out everything you have as a resource and score yourself on a scale of 0-10 in terms of how well you use those resources.
List out all the core competences your sales people need in order to achieve your targets. You are not looking for weaknesses you are looking for areas of development. As the market changes the skills that your sales people need will change and it is your job to ensure that they have the new skills.
As Sales Manager will also need new skills in the areas of Leadership, Coaching, Mentoring.
You may need to develop your ability to recruit the very best people.
Here is a question for you.
Who sets your standards?
Well the answer is... YOU, YOUR Customers and YOUR Competitors.
No company’s stand still. You are either growing or dying. If you are standing still and your competitors are growing you are dying by comparison.
As Sales Manager you are in control of the powerhouse of growth and development because you are in charge of sales and without sales the company has no growth and development.
Most of all you need to be the role model.
The question is what kind of team will my team be if everyone in it is just like me?
The difference is you…
What next...
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Written by Mike Le Put – MLP Training
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