“I was the best salesman, now I am the sales manager – what should I do?” Part 4
ByYour 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
Click Here to read Part 2, Training
Click Here to read Part 3, Coaching
4. Accountability
The last item on the list is accountability. Accountability is how do I motivate my sales people to engage in the right activities? How do I prod the salesperson – if necessary – to move forward? And how do to get the leading indicators to line up so that as the sales cycle comes to the end there will naturally be money in the pipeline.
Accountability required you to look at your pipeline, look at your revenue goals, and you get the salespeople to be in line with the work that they need to do.
Odds are that in your previous role as the sales guy you naturally did the work to fill up your pipeline and as aresult you were in the top 20 percent producing 80 percent of the revenue. But now as a sales manager, you are going feel some frustration because you’re probably going to find that no one has the work ethic you’ve displayed.
And your biggest source of frustration is going to be how do you coach and mentor and hold these guys accountable to get where they are not naturally inclined to be. That’s a big deal. Your biggest challenge will be building drive into your sales team and getting them motivated even when they don’t feel like it.
What if you can’t get them motivated? The old saw in sales is, “If you can’t get them fired up with enthusiasm, then fire them with enthusiasm.”
That’s the bottom line. You’ve got to have people who will do the work. There are very few people who are unsuccessful at sales because they don’t have the aptitude, but there are a ton of people who are unsuccessful because they don’t have the drive to be the number one guy on a sales team.
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.
