Why is Sales Management so hard? Sales Managers bear 100% of the responsibility for the performance of their sales team yet receive little glory for their efforts.
In many cases even the best sales managers earn less than their top salespeople. Yet, the best sales managers work longer hours, endure more stress, and have greater responsibility than the salespeople they manage.
Making things worse is the fact that salespeople are harder to lead and manage than any other employee. They are emotional and often irrational people who demand attention. Because salespeople are essentially in jobs where rejection is the norm, sales managers are often called upon to be coaches, mentors, mothers, fathers, and even amateur psychologists in order to keep their troops motivated, focused, and delivering on sales goals.
If this isn’t hard enough sales managers are often put in the position of shielding their salespeople from others who have absolutely no understanding of the psychology of salespeople.
It is a wonder why any sane human being would voluntarily choose to be a sales manager. Though each year thousands of sales professionals give up their sales roles and accept the promotion. They move into their new office and proudly stare at their newly printed business cards – with little understanding of what it takes to actually lead salespeople. Not prepared to perform the job of sales manager a high percentage of these newly minted sales leaders are promptly demoted or fired. In many cases they have done so much damage to the sales team (and their own career) that it takes years to repair.
The sales profession is a graveyard littered with the corpses of failed sales managers.
Who is to blame?
Everyone! In a recent conversation with a Senior Vice President of Sales for one of the largest companies in the world he shared that his single biggest worry was for his sales managers. He said that his sales managers did not have the training to do the job. When I asked him about his training budget for sales management he told me that right now they were investing in training the salespeople. If you were to take a stroll around Corporate America you would discover similar issues in many companies. The executives know that they need to provide training for their sales managers but the salespeople always seem to get the training budget. It is a vicious, ongoing cycle that leaves most sales managers in the position of learning on the job.
Blame also falls on salespeople who delude themselves into thinking that just because they are great salespeople they will be great sales leaders. Studies, including one by the journal of managerial psychology, have concluded that the best salespeople may not be the best sales managers. The actual evidence of this exists in every company that employs sales teams.
Why do some top salespeople become top sales managers while others fail so miserably? Their company recognizes their need and acquires the best sales management course to help them succeed. I mention that to say we have an idea for you that can truly help you help your sales managers to succeed in building strong teams quickly.
I mention all that to ask you to please invest a few minutes to explore some video previews of our newly developed “Practical Sales Management Strategies for Today” internally facilitated training system featuring W. Steven Brown, Chairman of the Fortune Group International, Inc. and author of “The 13 Fatal Errors Managers Make* * And How You Can Avoid Them.”
This system is proven to help organization build a method that vastly improves sales managers skills and abilities to lead salespeople. They will become sales managers who top salespeople want to work for and garner the respect and admiration of their people, peers and company.
For a PDF overview of this course and how it can be successfully implemented into your organization just request it by clicking here. We appreciate your time and hope this has helped you understand how serious this issue is!
Sincerely,
Jim Strutton, CEO
770-205-8171
© 2011 Accountability Plus, Inc.
Note: If you are not involved in Senior Management, Sales, Training or Human Resources please forward this URL or email to the correct person in your company. Thank you!