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The Sales Manager
In the last article, I explained about ‘Hunters’, social animals who always come back from a conference or network event weighed down with new business cards, and ‘Farmers’, personable but commercially aware delivery people who are always on the lookout for existing customers with new problems.
Both types of people are excellent ambassadors for your company and you probably have no problem identifying these types of people in your organisation. But the hardest people to find are those who make sure the sales process is working correctly: the Sales Managers.
Early revenue is always generated hand-to-mouth; you get sales wherever you can find them and hopefully you don’t over-commit and bankrupt yourselves in the process. Managing Directors soon start having sleepless nights, worrying that sales will one day mysteriously dry up, or that they will forever be suffering from ‘feast or famine’, with a sales chart full of unpleasant peaks and troughs.
What’s clearly needed is some process; someone to do some sales management. And then what often happens is the Managing Director summons the best-performing salesperson and promotes them to Sales Manager, explaining that this is a career progression; it involves an increase in their basic salary, a better car, and a nice desk job to replace all that nasty driving around in a Ford Sierra.
This is a terrible mistake. The first problem is that there is an inevitable dip in revenue from the new Sales Manager’s former customers, usually because they don’t like the new person as much.
Then you discover that despite sending your new Sales Manager on a Leadership and Management training course, they are useless at managing people. There was an initial problem with the Sales Manager’s peers being jealous of the promotion, and this was aggravated by the Sales Manager then trying to sell for everybody, rather than giving them guidance on how to do it for themselves.
The sales forecasts are in a total mess, because these involve forms and spreadsheets which are about as popular with the average salesperson as leprosy. The result is a totally miserable and de-motivated former salesperson, actually doing very little, thinking wistfully of their happy days out on the road, when they didn’t have a care in the world.
The first lesson here is not to promote your high-performing salespeople into managers. It’s a total mistake, a bit like trying to teach fish to abseil. Leave them be, and find a career progression that doesn’t involve them managing any people or filling any forms. It’s not in their nature.
So where do you find good Sales Managers? Of course some good salespeople spend many years on the road and when they’ve had enough can make the switch to management. But they must understand that it’s a big leap from delivering success themselves to providing the leadership that can turn them into effective coaches, helping other salespeople become more effective.
They also need to develop the skills of micro-management, monitoring the sales pipeline on a deal-by-deal and a salesperson-by-salesperson basis, as much as once a week.
It’s obviously better to have a former salesperson doing this job, as they’ve ‘walked the walk’ and ‘talked the talk’ in the past, and can use their past experience to know when salespeople are lying about their level of sales activity and progress on a particular account. This is an unpleasant but sadly quite common problem.
If you have one of these experienced salespeople who can learn management skills, that’s great. If not, I suggest you give the job to someone with a background in Finance.
I can already hear readers reaching for their green pens in outrage: “How on earth can a Finance person, with no sales experience, possibly motivate hard-nosed sales force?” This may indeed be a challenge, but at least you’ll have an accurate sales forecast.
Finance people are happy with spreadsheets and processes, and if you have a simple and well understood sales pipeline methodology, then they should be able to accurately monitor progress on a weekly basis, and use this data to manage your cash flow. I’ll provide a simple, ten-step Sales Pipeline procedure in a later article.
Motivation for the sales force can be provided by the Entrepreneur, Managing Director or other charismatic individual, who are typically good in client situations (so can lend a hand where required), and also have the authority to explain diplomatically but firmly that sales people who don’t sell enough tend to get a written warning first, then their P45 later.
So there’s a role in sales for everyone: ‘Hunting’, ‘Farming’ and ‘Managing’. If people spend most of their time doing the activity that suits them best, then they’ll be motivated and effective, with everyone involved in sales.
Next week we’ll look at the sales process in more detail.
First published in The Daily Telegraph