“I was the best salesman, now I am the sales manager – what should I do?” Part 2

Your company has a real dilemma on its hands. Your company is depending you for revenue but they are losing this revenue now that they are moving you into management.

They are betting on you.  They are betting that you can translate some of your skills to the salespeople you now will be managing.  Often times, I’ve found that people in your position are very good at what they do but are unable to articulate how they do it.

So the first thing is really to understand what the role of a sales manager is.  And there are four major areas of responsibility for a sales manager.

Click Here to read Part 1, Recruiting

2. Training

When you transition into being a sales manager, you actually have to look at your salespeople as your customers.

In addition, your company is your customer, but your salespeople are now your customers.  And it’s an odd sort of thing, but your job is to support them doing their job.  And your sales job with them is selling themselves being able to do what it takes, or selling them on doing the activities and behaviors you need from them to get them to be successful. So your sales skills come in handy, but it’s a different job.  You’re now focused on what’s important for your salespeople and their customers base.

Training is everything your salespeople need to know before they ever hit the ground calling on customers or looking for customers.  And it’s important there to get product knowledge, it’s important there to understand the systems you’re operating under…how do I use the database, how do I use the computer, if I get an order what am I supposed to do, if the order doesn’t go smoothly within the company — how do I fix it or followup with the customers, are there advocates for the customers I have to work with, how do I get stuff done?

Those are the major pieces and that’s part of training, and product knowledge is an important part. Then there’s sales skills training and that’s an important part of the original training.  It’s a culturalization process for a salesperson to come from what was in many cases a wildly different sales environment and sales culture to start operating effectively in this one.

Michael D Goodman is the founder and CEO of Revenue Kinetics and the author of SolomonRK, a unique system for training sales professionals, business owners, and CEOs. SolomonRk is a whole company solution to revenue and teaches you how to create a revenue-producing mid-level pipeline in 90 days in any selling environment. SolomonRk is currently available as sales training in Phoenix Arizona.