Recently, I met with a CEO prospect who needed management training for the company’s sales manager. After discovering why the sales manager needed training, I asked the CEO what the company’s sales process or methodology was that the sales manager was managing. Silence …
The company did not have a sales process to manage. The sales manager had only people to manage. Which reminds me of the Cheshire Cat’s comment to Alice, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” That begs the question, do you only inspect the final result, dollars of sales; or do you inspect the process to arrive at the sales dollars? From a control perspective, it is important to not only know how you got the sale, as it is to achieving the sale.
Early in my sales career, I was graded on dollars of sales under contract and how well I wrote call reports. The process used to achieve the sales contracts was unique to each individual salesperson and my manager oversaw my expense account and call reports. Once a year I received a performance review and there were no direct rewards for dollars of sales or margin achieved. My sales manager had very little awareness of my day-to-day activities or how I achieved the sales contracts.
So, when you manage your sales team, do you manage a process; or do you inspect the final sales results and ignore the road used to achieve the sales? Do you have a process that your sales team follows? Have they been trained in that process, and then monitored in their implementation of the methodology?
What you need to ponder is what are you managing? Of course, you are managing people, but what about a process. When you are coaching your team, are you giving them a process or just giving tactical suggestions?
Dave Harman is an associate with Sandler Training. He has over 30 years’ experience in sales and sales management with Fortune 500 companies as well as small, family-owned organizations. He has held positions from sales to senior management with companies such as Conoco/Vista, Amresco and Ohio Awning, and owns his own business. He earned his MBA with a concentration in Marketing from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. You can reach him at [email protected] or (888) 448-2030.
