What Exactly is a Sales Manager?
A sales manager is responsible for building rapport, and trust, identifying needs, presenting persuasively, getting resales and referrals, and leading and managing a team of salespeople within an organization. While the exact definition may vary from company to company, this is generally the main responsibility of a sales manager.
Sales Managers: What Makes Them Great?
How do you become a successful Sales Manager? A great salesperson would seem to provide a solid foundation, but the management of the overall sales function, including the sales team, requires more than great selling skills. It takes the right combination of skills and dedication to turn a sales department into a high-functioning machine. Communication, motivation, problem-solving, and more are all part of being a superior Sales Manager. Let’s explore some of the key traits, skills, and capabilities it takes to become an excellent sales manager :
1. Setting Realistic Goals and Empowering People to Reach Them.
if the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.
There is a powerful formula for setting, and achieving goals that you can use as a sales manager for the rest of your career. It consists of a few simple steps. These steps can dramatically improve your productivity as a sales manager.
Step one: Decide exactly what you want. You can do this by sitting down with your boss and discussing your goals and objectives until you are crystal clear about what is expected of you and in what order of priority. This can help you to envision your goals.
Step two: Write it down. Now that you know what is expected of you, you then need to «Think on paper». When you write down the goal, you can crystallize it and give it a tangible form. As they say, unwritten goals lead to confusion, numerous mistakes, and wrong trajectory.
Step three: Setting deadlines and sub deadlines on your goals. A goal without a deadline has no urgency because it has no real beginning or end.
Step four: Make a list of everything that you think is needed in order to achieve your goals, and organize the list into a plan. A list gives you a visual picture of the larger task or objective. And by doing so you will make a track to run on. And now that you have a track to run on, you need to organize your list by priority and sequence. List all tasks in the order they need to be done, and decide what you need to do first and what you can do later. You will be amazed at how much easier it is to achieve your goal when you break it down into individual tasks. With this action, you will be far more productive and efficacious as a sales manager than just carrying goals around in your head.
Step five: Take action on your plan immediately. An average plan vigorously executed is far better than a brilliant plan on which nothing is done. For you to achieve any kind of success, execution is everything. Clear written goals have a wonderful effect on your thinking. And this can help you to motivate, empower your team and galvanize your team into action.
2. Inspire and Motivate
When every physical and mental resource is focused, one’s power to solve a problem multiplies tremendously.
As a sales manager, you should identify the key result areas, discuss them with your team and make sure that everyone agrees with them. For example, getting qualified appointments is a key result area for sales managers, and closing a sale is also a key result area. When the sale is made, it triggers the activities of your team to produce and deliver the product or service. And also as a sales manager, you must be able to instill in each team member a sense of purpose and an unabashed belief that they are solving the customer’s problem, filling a void, satisfying a need, and curing pain.
3. Leadership
Leadership is the art of getting others to want to do something you believe should be done.
As a leader, you need the discipline of clarity. Lack of clarity is the primary reason for failure in business and personal life for you to be crystal clear about your goals—in all areas of your life. It is only when you are clear about both your personal goals and your business goals that you can focus and accomplish extraordinary things in your life. Now that you are clear about your goals you should resolve to take the first step. You should make your team believe that it’s possible to achieve all goals expected of you as a team by the company.
And as a sales manager, it is vital to know that your voyage won’t always go exactly according to plan. Rather, it's in remaining humble and showing you're human too that will help you build rapport and maintain healthy relationships with your team. And also knowing how to deal with conflicts is a crucial skill as a leader.
Moreso, your job isn’t to do everything for your team but to instead build the right team that can excel when given useful tools, guidance, and incentives. That’s what leadership is.
4. Be resilient
The only skill that will be important in the twenty-first century will be the skill of learning new skills. All else will eventually become obsolete.
The proficient Sales Manager will experience setbacks right along with the team. But the resourceful Sales Manager sees these setbacks as learning opportunities, training opportunities, and opportunities to refine the sales process, realign resources, and even change course when necessary. The superior Sales Manager doesn’t panic and doesn’t dwell in despair when a big account is lost. Rather, the resilient Sales Manager acts as a role model to inspire the team to learn from the experience, apply those lessons, and “go get the next one”.
5. Solve Problems
Leadership and management and respect stem largely from the ability to solve problems. And I’m not just talking about putting out fires. Rather, I’m talking about the ability to address issues at the moment and make wide-reaching adjustments when it appears the problem is not isolated. Many believe the single most important task we can undertake as a Sales Manager is to “clear the runway for our sales team. ”
6. Communicate
Frankly, the ability to communicate is essential to success in any field of endeavor. When dealing with a team of salespeople, the Sales Manager must not only communicate in the special language of “sales speak”, but also understand each team member well enough to communicate in the ways they need, individually.
Moreover, most sales manager job postings today highlight just how much you’ll have to hop on the phone and show up for presentations. This can make you a great sales manager.
Conclusively, As you can see from this list of key capabilities, it goes beyond the scope of what makes a great salesperson. As a sales manager, you must be capable of leading, inspiring, motivating, supporting, and yes, managing.