Sales Managers – Get Effective or Get Out!

Your top performers are doing something different and better, mapping is how you discover what it is.

This was the clear message delivered by the CEO of a national organisation to the 23 sales managers present. They had already down-sized, right-sized, re-engineered and re-organised to squeeze all the gains they could in efficiency.

Sales managers I speak to are under increasing pressure. A common response in recent times has been to go to SFA — Sales Force Automation. This puts sales people under increased scrutiny and takes inexperienced sales managers down a well-worn track. The path to cop—not coach!

Armed with all the data and tracking information, these well meaning sales managers start to manage familiar and easily measurable criteria:

How many calls made? How many clients seen? The number of proposals made and so on.

The salesmanager’s trap

Sales people in a recent report, indicated that the sales manager is now seen more as a cop (catching them doing the wrong thing), than a coach (helping them to do the right thing).

One of my colleagues was sitting with a client conducting a needs analysis. The client produced a graph which showed a gloomy picture. Something had changed in normally stable sales and profit results. For the last quarter, number of sales increased but the average value of each sale dropped. We had seen this before. There was a simple question, “What had

happened in the management of the sales force 30-60 days before the change in results?”

The General Manager didn’t know but said he would find out.

The news was not good

He came back with the news that around thirty days before the sales went up and the revenue dropped. Yes, you guessed correctly. An activity management program was introduced! My observation is that under pressure, many

sales managers are doing the opposite of what their teams need. They chase

efficiency through activity management. Simply put, the more pressure they face, the more they use this non-useful (when used in isolation) improvement tool.

Managing efficiency only

The simple truth is, managing efficiency only could lead to your ultimate extinction! Do you know of a similar story, where the outcome was a spike in sales due to increased activity and quick hits being encouraged?

There is another outcome, reported by researchers Rackham and Ruff:

“Management pressure for increased activity doesn’t mean salespeople knock on more doors. It can also mean they knock on the same door more times, over calling on existing customers.” The goal is to prove that they are being ‘active’

SFA also creates more reporting and paperwork. Okay, as a manager, you can’t track and measure without data, but when changed from paper to electronic, the salespeople see it as the same old wolf in a new sheep’s clothing.

Am I against SFA? Not at all! I support it. It is a needed tool for managing sales. I believe the key lies in combining separate proven disciplines, to create a method that has always produced increased results. I have seen sales increase by as much as 43 to 100 percent plus using this method. This is across both individual sales-people’s performances and entire teams.

Three critical factors

1. An Impact MatrixAn Impact Matrix is all about preparing people for training before it takes place, ensuring quality when it does take place and supporting the people to use the new skills after the training.
2. Mapping the GapThe marketplace and your sales results are already telling you your top performers are doing something different — and better. Mapping is how you find out what it is.
3. Measuring EffectivenessKnowing the actual behaviours top performers use and coaching those behaviours in lower performers, you can lift the entire team’s result.

The steps are simple and have been marketplace proven.