Sales Executives: Are You Leading Your Team to Defeat?
The sales force is the key driver of sales growth in organizations. The challenge is that every sales organization is dealing with unprecedented change, fiercely competitive environments, and declining sales and profits. As a result, sales executives are tasked with finding ways to maximize the productivity and performance of their sales team.
With so many new apps and technology solutions that claim to improve sales rep productivity, sales executives are hard-pressed to look at technology as the solution to performance. I am not opposed to technology solutions. I believe they can enhance performance. The problem is that until sales organizations have solid sales management teams, any sales initiative to improve sales performance is doomed to fail.
The front-line sales manager plays a key role in driving sales performance. Although millions of dollars are spent supporting sales reps with initial training programs, product training, and ongoing skill development, front-line sales managers are not getting the training and development they require to do their jobs effectively. The result is that many organizations are not getting the full potential out of their sales force, causing sales and profits to suffer.
Based on my experience as a sales management consultant and executive sales coach working with top companies, I believe that more can be done and should be done to improve the ongoing development of sales managers.
As the key driver of sales performance, we find it shocking that so many companies do nothing to support their sales managers’ development. We found that only 50% of sales organizations support ongoing training and development of core sales management skills. I dare ask, is this lack of support of the sales manager dramatically impacting sales performance in those organizations?
In our report, we offer recommendations for sales leaders on how to better support sales manager development. In our opinion, strong sales managers are the greatest source of untapped competitive advantage and positively impact all sales initiatives, sales performance, and the bottom line.
I challenge the 50% of sales leaders who are not investing in the ongoing development of their sales managers to rethink their priorities NOW before they end up missing their sales objectives.
