Leading for Sales Performance: Can Your Managers Answer These 5 Critical Questions?
Michael Leimbach, Ph.D., Wilson Learning
Would you ask the best violinist in the orchestra to take over conducting without any preparation to be a conductor? Probably not. And if you did, you wouldn’t have very high expectations for the orchestra’s performance. Yet this is exactly what most organizations do. They promote high-performing salespeople into management roles without preparing them to be confident and competent in the critical areas of coaching, motivating, and developing their people. It’s not that companies don’t recognize the value of the manager’s role. When a group of sales executives was asked what was most important to improving sales performance, 88% answered, “making sales managers more effective,” a finding consistent with a Sales Executive Council survey. At the same time, over 50% indicated that their organizations were not preparing sales managers to lead effectively. Given the sales manager’s potential impact on performance, these companies are literally leaving money on the table in the form of smaller ROI for sales training, weak sales productivity, and higher turnover costs. For a relatively modest investment, sales managers can be provided with the tools and knowledge to drive sustainable high performance. To target the handful of essential skills sales managers need, prepare them to answer five simple questions.
8
What Sales Managers Need to Do—The Five Questions Despite all the differences in sales force deployment, products, industries, competitive environment, and customers, sales teams share some core needs. When those needs are fully addressed, salespeople demonstrate higher levels of motivation and commitment, and greater effectiveness in working with their customers. Ultimately, well-managed teams will deliver more sales at higher margins than those who are poorly managed or simply left to their own devices. To achieve top performance from his or her team, a manager needs the skills and tools to provide clear answers to five simple but profoundly important questions:
1. Where are we going? 2. What is expected of us? 3. How are we doing? 4. What’s in it for us? 5. Where do we go for help?
Taken together, the Five Questions offer a roadmap for effective management and a guide to the key skills needed by a high-performing sales manager. In fact, our research shows that when a company’s sales managers are able to answer these five questions, sales performance increases on average 29%.
marketingtimes
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45