The Accountable Sales Manager

By Marcus Miller

In recent conversations with senior executives we posed two questions. What happens when your sales organization fails to achieve their sales objectives? And, what is the root cause for the failure? The first question generated immediate off-the-cuff responses, but the second question led to deeper thought and inconsistent solutions.

Typically the response we heard for missed sales objectives was a litany of predictable reasons. Excuses ranged from changing market conditions, aggressive pricing from competitors or a lack of talent in the sales ranks. For the second question of the root causes for missed objectives we determined it stems from unclear organizational design.

As one executive pointed out, it is important to bring accountability to all aspects of your organization, including sales management. The executive went on to explain that sales managers are key resources on the front line of an organization that perform a pivotal role between the field sales resources and the organization. Historically the role of the salesman has been well defined. It addresses prospecting new opportunities, winning and closing customers and cementing customer relationships. In theory sales managers should provide a clear and complimentary role to the field sale representatives. The sales managers' role should focus on strategizing and developing new business, coaching and directing sales activities and expectations, and motivating through recognition and rewards.

So how do sales managers become unaccountable? From our analysis we identified four issues that impact the success of the sales manager:

1) Misalignment of expectations and rewards
Many organizations do not clearly express the activities they want their sales managers to perform. Typically the incentive plan expresses the overall sales objectives but misses the key elements that distinguish the role of the sales manager: coaching and developing people for performance, achieving revenue goals through others or creating and executing plans for business development.
2) Unclear job profile for the sales manager
The behavior of sales people strongly influences the role sales managers play in the sales cycle. The interplay may even be an adversarial role where coaching gets in the way and leads to infrequent or ineffective people development. The business process needs to take the time to work out how to use the sales manager effectively in a complimentary role.
3) Lack of training for rookie managers
Top performing sales reps are frequently promoted to sales management and left without any training for the skills demanded by the position. They are just expected to intuitively know what to do. Sales managers tend to stay within their comfort zone of selling but need to grow into achieving results through others, coaching rookie performance and reinforcing behavioral changes.
4) Burden of paper work and reporting
Time is a limited and fixed commodity. If the available time is chewed up with corporate reporting, paper work and internal issues, then there is little time left over for the core issues of coaching and mentoring sales resources. Sales managers need to focus on these difficult sales tasks versus putting them off.

Enabling sales managers to achieve optimum performance begins with setting the climate of the sales organization. The organization needs to be accountable for the sales culture. Clarity of roles and expectations for each person in the sales team means that people can take initiative with little direction. Another important topic is recognition, acknowledgment and reward for performing good work. Commitment to achieving challenging goals at all levels is the glue that ties the sales organization together. With the right sales culture in place the groundwork is set to address sales performance. But first the support systems are needed to provide the levers to manage for results and to streamline the sales process.

Support systems focus ancillary tasks into the hands of specialists, which alleviates burdensome detractors from the sales manager. Support topics include recruiting, sales metrics, sales tracking, strategic account management, CRM and training.

• High calibre sales talent is an important ingredient for continued growth. Organizations need a well-developed process to identify and attract the right people on an ongoing basis.

• Selling is a business process not an art. It is the actualization of the marketing strategy. Performance management metrics provide sales management with the information to influence behaviors and to better forecast sales results. The metrics track key selling indicators and compare them to individual sales efforts and objectives

• The sales process runs on information systems. Opportunity management systems track sales activities from lead generation to closing the sales and CRM systems deliver account information on the historic customers buying process.

• The process for managing key accounts can be burdensome and could be best handled by dedicated resources. Strategic accounts may require additional corporate resources to set in place the partnership between the key account and the rest of the organization.

• Training and development enhances the skills of all incumbents through classroom or on-the-job delivery. Bringing a rookie sales person up to par quickly benefits the individual and the organization and mitigates low performance and unexpected turnover.

Accountable sales managers operate in a driven sales culture. They utilize sales performance tools and support systems that let them be most effective in their job. They are charged with achieving and growing overall sales objectives through others, they groom and develop new resources and motivate the team for high performance. This sets them apart and accountable to the organization.

Marcus Miller (Marcus.Miller@LEAPJob.com) is the President of LEAPJob (www.LEAPJob.com). LEAPJob is a recruiting and sales force consulting firm that helps companies achieve their growth targets by building top performing sales organizations. You can reach Marcus at 905.281.3090, Ext. 21.