3 Keys to Successful Sales Management

Managing a sales team can be a lot to take on — especially if you’re doing it for the first time. Sales training veteran Mike Brooks explains how to make sure the effort is worth your investment.

If you are a business owner or sales manager responsible for getting your team of sales reps to make their numbers or achieve sales quotas, then I feel your pain. If you’re like many of the sales managers and owners I work with, then I know you’re being pulled in many different directions. You’re busy. You have endless meetings to attend to, reporting to do, and on top of it all you have many different personalities to deal with on your team, and each of them have different skill levels, motivation levels, etc.
It can seem like an overwhelming job.
In addition, you’ve probably never had any real sales management training, and the actual sales training that you are supposed to give your team probably isn’t very highly structured or developed either. I can just see you nodding your heads and thinking, “Yeah, you got that right.  Now what?”
Well, here’s what. Sales management is actually easier than you might think and straight forward if you break it down to its three most important elements. If you concentrate on these three keys and actually make it a priority to implement them, your job will get so much easier, and, more importantly, you and your team will start closing more business and making their numbers more consistently.

3 Keys to Successful Sales Management

1) Define Your Sales Process Best Practices

Provide your team with clear, easy-to-follow best practices as far as sales techniques and skill sets go for your specific sale. Give them the specific scripts and rebuttals to follow, specific qualifying questions, proper closing techniques, and, again, make sure they are clear.
In other words, identify what actually works in your selling cycle and what the best approaches are. Then develop them into a solid selling system and make it company policy that this is the best way to handle every part of your selling process — from the first call, to qualifying, to leaving voice messages and emails, to getting back to your prospects to closing the sale and handling objections.
Once you have defined your sales process and made it crystal clear enough for everyone to navigate and follow then it’s on to step two.

2) Implement and Monitor the Use of Your Defined Sales Process

Think of a great football team. What do they do? The coaches come up with the best game plan (the system), and then they teach it to their players and practice every formation, every play, and every technique. They drill it in over and over, and they watch film of each practice and game to make sure their players are following the plan and using the best techniques.
That’s what you need to do with your sales team, as well. Once you’ve given your team the best practices, it’s up to you to train them on them and reinforce adherence to them. You do that by observing your sales reps as they are on the phone with their prospects and customers. Record their calls and review them with them. Make sure they are actually using the best practices that you know work. The result will be improvement on each call and, ultimately, more sales.

3) Discipline Your Team Members When They Aren’t Following Your Sales Best Practices

First, let me say a word about discipline. Discipline comes from the Greek word that means “to teach,” not “to scold or make others feel bad.” The proper role of a teacher, coach, or sales manager is to point out when a student or sales rep isn’t following the proven tools to succeed, and then to help them do it better. That’s where your skills as a manager (and where your time) will be most efficient.
You can do this in a number of different ways:

• in your one on one’s with a rep
• in sales meetings where you can play recordings of reps who are doing it correctly
• by feeding lines to a rep while he or she is on the phone, or by instant messaging while you’re listening in, etc.

The bottom line is that it’s your job to give your team the right tools to succeed, to train them on how best to use them, and then to monitor and teach them to adhere to them.

Getting the Most Out of Your Investment in Sales Management

If you implement all three of the above keys in your selling environment, you will see the quickest and easiest return on your time and investment. If you miss one of these keys, then you will spend much of your time wondering what’s wrong, and your frustration with the team, with your company, and with your efforts will only get worse.
Look at your current selling environment and see which one of these keys is missing. Once you find it, you’ll now know exactly what to do!
If you would like more information on developing this process, join me for a complimentary webinar called, “How to Build a Multi-Million Dollar Inside Sales Team” on Thursday, February the 13^th at 9AM Pacific/Noon Eastern.
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Image by Vancouver Film School