Sales Management For Dummies. Bellah Butch

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СКАЧАТЬ grow. Build and maintain a special incentive calendar and make the job fun! Additionally, a good sales manager will create team or departmental based incentives to reward the achievement of overall goals. This is just another way to create an atmosphere of working together and not against each other.

      ✔ Establishing budgets: Working out the budget is the second worst part of the job. The skills you used to become successful probably aren’t related to sitting and going over spreadsheet after spreadsheet of numbers and projections. However, you now have the responsibility to create the budget for the sales department. It’s not necessarily fun, but it has to be done. I will go into detail on the difference between budgets, goals, and forecasting in Chapter 12.

      ✔ Hiring and firing salespeople: If budgets are the second worst part of the job, this is the worst (especially the firing part). But the buck stops with you. It’s your responsibility to continually upgrade the team in the field. To do so, sometimes you have to fire the bad ones and hire some more good ones.

      

If you ever get to a point where firing someone doesn’t affect you take some time off. No matter how long you hold this position, it never gets easier. I talk about this more in Chapter 15.

      Obviously this list is not all-inclusive and can change daily. The best managers are the ones who can handle the day-to-day issues, which inevitably come up without losing focus on long-term goals and objectives.

      

There will be situations every day which make you take your eye off your goals – just don’t let them take your mind off them!

Remembering you work for the sales team, not vice versa

      If there’s one thing first-time or young managers need to know it’s that you work for the rest of the salespeople, they don’t work for you. They can function without you – you can’t function without them.

      There is absolutely nothing wrong with telling your salespeople as a group or individually, “My job is to work for you, not have you work for me.” Not only will they respect you for your candor, but you set the stage for how you want to run your department.

      This statement and mindset is crucial to your success, so you must understand exactly what it means: You come to work each day asking how you can help your sales force, not how they can help you. It’s as simple as that. You run a bottom-up organization, not a top-down one.

      Does Addie need you to help close a deal? Does Beatrice need you to place a phone call from a higher authority? Find out what each of your team needs from you. You’re there to make them successful and many times that means simply helping them overcome some obstacle in the sales process.

      

Each day, ask yourself what you can do to make each member of your sales team stronger and better.

      The easiest way to grow your sales

      Without oversimplifying this, the easiest way to grow the sales of your company is to help each individual salesperson increase her sales. It’s almost impossible for one person alone to move the needle very much on an organization’s sales. However, if you can get each member on the entire team to grow her own business by just 10 percent, you can have a great impact on your company’s sales and bottom line.

      By attacking your job with a “how can I help my sales force?” attitude, you will find yourself with the opportunities to make a difference for each person whether she’s a million-dollar producer or someone barely making her quota. Each person needs and deserves your leadership and management.

      Begin your day, your week, and your month by asking yourself what you can do to help each of your people grow her sales. When you begin to lead in this manner, manage in this manner, and perform in this manner, you’ll be amazed at the results.

      

You cannot demand people follow you as their leader. However, you can create an atmosphere and environment where others want to follow you because of how you lead.

      Finally, you’re the head of your department, and you must make decisions as such. The mindset of working for the sales team doesn’t mean you let them run the show. You’re in control, you’re in charge – you just accomplish that by pulling rather than pushing.

      Ultimately, you are the person who will answer for the performance, or lack thereof, of the sales team. You have to set and enforce the goals, critique and improve performance and develop your salespeople.

Understanding the line between sales and management

      Are you in sales or are you in management? Well, the short answer is both. And it’s not always easy to separate the two. You should never be anything less than authentic and genuine, but there are times where you must wear one of the two hats and do so diplomatically.

      For example, the powers that be will make decisions that adversely affect your department. As a member of management, you must fully support what’s best for the company first and foremost. Although you may not agree with all the decisions, you must keep those opinions behind closed doors and never share them with your salespeople. Their attitudes and their opinions are shaped in large part by yours. How you respond and react is how they will respond and react.

      While there are things you cannot share with the sale department, understand there will be things senior management doesn’t share with you. It’s not because they don’t trust you, it’s simply not something you need to be involved in. Don’t get upset because you don’t know every single thing going on just because you’re a manager now. One of these days you’ll be glad to be left out of a few.

      

If you have to come down on one side or another in a certain situation, your first responsibility is to management. Even if you completely disagree with decisions made, when you stand in front of your sales team, you need to toe the company line. Is that easy? Absolutely not. It’s even painful at times. Internally you’ll be conflicted, but you are a member of management for a reason.

      The value of going to bat for your team

      Although agreement with management is a good call, there are also times when you must support your sales team or an individual sales person and go to bat for her. As a young salesperson, the company I worked for was acquiring another. As the lead salesperson on a project, I had made a commitment to a new customer that some members of management disagreed with, and at one point, overrode. My sales manager at the time backed me up and stood his ground basically saying, “If Butch told them we’d do it, we need to do it.” He knew my personal credibility was on the line and knew I felt betrayed by those who sought to overturn the decision.

      I could not have been more indebted to him for sticking up for me and having my back. I felt a great need to show him that his confidence in me was not misplaced and though that happened more than 20 years ago, I still remember it to this day.

      I always looked for and sought out opportunities to show my salespeople I had their back. I didn’t create situations or orchestrate drama, but if the situation presented itself, I remembered how I felt and wanted them to feel the same.

      

When conflict occurs and the line between holding the company line and supporting your salesperson becomes blurred, you have a choice: you can fan the flames or put out the fire. I’ve known and СКАЧАТЬ