Archive for Sales Management
Hiring Your First Salesman
Posted by: | CommentsYou started out as a one person company. Up to this point you’ve been the CEO, sales person, even the janitor.
The company is growing. You are the CEO and the company’s best salesman, but you’re to the point where you can’t do both. You’ve decided to hire your first salesman.
The first thing to do after making that decision is to start codifying your selling environment.
- What’s your sales cycle?
- What’s the cost of your product?
- What is the typical expense to the buyer.
- Who is that buyer?
- Is your sales cycle six months or one day?
- Are you selling with about 52 different presentations or a one-call close?
- Do you need your sales guy to be a farmer or a hunter?
Next, describe these characteristics in your job posting. Scan the incoming resumes, discarding any that don’t match your selling environment. If you hire a guy who sold $1,000 products and you put him to work selling a $15,000 products he’s going to fail.
Finally, have multiple people interview each candidate.
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.
“I was the best salesman, now I am the sales manager – what should I do?” Part 4
Posted by: | CommentsYour 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.
“I was the best salesman, now I am the sales manager – what should I do?” Part 3
Posted by: | CommentsYour 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
3. Coaching
Coaching is where you’re either role playing with your salespeople, you’re going on site visits with your salespeople, or you are in some way, shape or form, observing how your salespeople actually go to market and speak to the product, engage customers, and discover whether you’re bringing them value and how we’re asking them to buy. So coaching is the whole process of guiding the salesperson after their initial training.
This is the part of your new role that you are probably the most well prepared for because you are simply leveraging what you already know.
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.
“I was the best salesman, now I am the sales manager – what should I do?” Part 2
Posted by: | CommentsYour 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.
“I was the best salesman, now I am the sales manager – what should I do?” Part 1
Posted by: | CommentsYour 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.
1. Recruiting
The first one is recruiting the right people. If you recruit the right people then you have done 90% of your work.
If you hire a stellar sales team, then they’ll do the work and you don’t have to worry about them. But generally few people get that right in their first few stabs at it. It takes some significant understanding of how to hire a salesperson and most people do it on a gut instinct and one or two criteria, but rarely get it right. So that becomes a very expensive lesson both for the hiring company and the sales manager.
So one if the things you should be doing is making a concerted effort to learn how to recruit appropriately.
(Continued)
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.
