If someone asked you what you think is better: a great sales manager with a team of average sales professionals, or an average sales manager with a team of sales stars, what would you say?
When you consider the fact that most organisations fail to provide specific sales leadership training, it is clear that they think an average sales manager with a team of sales stars is the best combination. They tend to invest all or almost all of their available budget in sales professional training and simply assume that their sales leaders will work it out for themselves. But here’s the problem:
- A top sales professional will tolerate an average sales manager for a period of time as long as they are left alone, but will soon start to get frustrated by the lack of value add and they are then likely to start to look for other roles. Hence the adage “people join organisations, but leave managers”.
- An average manager will often set lower targets, expect less of their people and fail to hold them accountable. This, again, will make the sales performers a retention risk.
- Over time, the performance of the top sales people is likely to become constrained by the average sales manager and overall team performance will drop.
- Finally, an average sales manager is unlikely to have the coaching skills to help each member of the team to grow and develop and be the best they can be. Again, increasing the risk of turnover.
In contrast, a high-performing sales manager will be able to work with, coach, develop, challenge and raise the performance of a team of average sales professionals so that they each reach their potential and become a team of stars.
This then poses the challenge of how to develop high-performing sales managers and how to empower them with the skills they need to lead.
What do your leaders need?
In our experience, less than 1 in 5 sales organisations provide their managers and leaders with specific management training. Generally this scenario plays out with the promotion of a star sales professional to the sales manager role due to their success, skills and experience. Whilst they have the core sales competencies of a top sales professional, they are offered no sales management training and become one of the 50% of these promotions that fail in their first 24 months.
But why is this?
In the table below is a high-level summary of the skills and traits of a sales professional versus those of a sales manager. Is it any wonder the failure rate for this transition is so high, when organisations do not provide targeted training, coaching and development?
The skills and traits of these two roles are so fundamentally different that it is a high-risk strategy to rely on newly promoted sales managers to work it out for themselves. There must be a better way.
Prioritisation is key
To make this challenge even greater for the newly promoted sales manager, in addition to having to learn and leverage a very different skillset, they also have to determine how they should best spend their time and where they need to focus to have a significant impact on performance.
Through our work with hundreds of B2B sales managers, we have discovered a number of consistent patterns and differences between which activities a high-performing sales manager prioritises versus an average or failing sales manager.
What’s the difference?
Successful sales managers prioritise activities that ensure their team are spending more time selling to better qualified opportunities who are more likely to buy, with absolute clarity on what it takes to win at each stage of the sales process.This requires a very different skill set from the one that made them successful as a sales professional and one that is too different for many newly promoted sales managers to develop on their own.
If you want your sales teams to realise their full potential, you need to offer your sales managers specialist sales management training and coaching.
How we can help
Get in touch with us today to develop your sales leader learning pathway, designed to empower your people to lead with confidence.
