There is a question being asked on a sales management LinkedIn group, and I am paraphrasing, “Are high quality sales professionals born that way or developed?” This question demeans the sales profession. Would anybody ever ask if a doctor was born with his or her talent or trained? An architect? An accountant? Are there individuals who truly believe that the profession of sales is an intrinsic skill, maybe part of the DNA of some people yet excluded from others?
The most important question is do you believe that it is paramount to develop your sales force? If you answered yes to that question then the next most logical question becomes, who has primary responsibility for that development? To me the answer is the person’s manager. But is that your managers’ focus?
If your management team is going to focus on developing each member of their team they need to have the correct set of metrics and a scalable and repeatable process. If “always be recruiting,” “telephone time,” and “field time” are the extent of your management process you are both missing a great opportunity to help your managers and sales professionals succeed as well as focused on activities that seem to have been introduced into this industry in another age without a lot of thought of how they affect success.
Today, the manager should be focused to helping the sales professional develop a robust and growing pipeline: Pipeline growth needs to be the most important metric you focus on if you want to grow your business. But pipeline growth doesn’t happen easily or magically and that is where the manager’s focus on and ability to develop their employees comes into play. If the sales professional is having difficulty securing appointments I’d spend time on how he makes his initial contacts, both the person he is contacting and the message. If he leaves his first meeting with a prospect and the next action item is almost always, “their lease is up in 15 months so he wants me to call him next year,” I’d focus on how well the sales professional probes for a business case.
Managers should be measured on how they develop their employees, which to me boils down to low turnover, under 20%, a high proportion of sales professionals achieving quota—see Gary Schwartz’s article titled “Copier Sales is Like Baseball” to determine if your quotas are logical—a growing business and promoting sales professionals to bigger jobs in the company.
If this isn’t happening in your company then you should focus on getting your managers trained so that they can develop their employees.
Don’t miss the Strategic Sales Management Class in Philadelphia on May 6-7 with Tom Callinan.
