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