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The front line sales manager is one of the most important yet undeveloped positions in a company.\u00a0 Many of these individuals are promoted out of a sales role where they excelled.\u00a0The belief is that since they were successful sales professionals they can turn others into successful sales professionals.\u00a0Sadly, that rarely happens.<\/p>\n
The first issue starts with the \u201cwhy\u201d of the manager\u2019s success in sales.\u00a0I find this falls into a few categories, including two large ones.\u00a0First, as a sales professional the manager had a process without realizing it.\u00a0In other words that process was intuitive and not explicit to the person executing on it.\u00a0That sales professional intuitively knew to call on the right sized account\u2014that was probably driven by a desire to earn a certain income and knowledge that selling a lot of low-end equipment wasn\u2019t going to get him or her there.\u00a0They might have understood that they needed to call at the correct level in the account\u2014the level with the budget and business knowledge.\u00a0Once they had their first placement in the account they intuitively knew it was easier to sell to somebody that already bought from you so they worked on gaining share of wallet in the account.\u00a0You get the point.<\/p>\n
The second category is the sales professional that \u201clucked\u201d into a cherry territory.\u00a0Without statistical territory analysis\u2014the value of the company\u2019s placements in the territory\u2014it\u2019s possible that a sales professional lands in a territory where they can exceed their quota simply by upgrading the base of devices.\u00a0When we conduct this statistical analysis for clients we always<\/em>\u2014100 percent of the time\u2014find this situation.\u00a0This sales professional never had to do a lot of business development, as upgrading base is a totally different sale then developing new business, so they don\u2019t have the skills to transfer.\u00a0There are other categories, but these two should capture 85 percent of the sales professionals.<\/p>\n Now, we throw that person into a management position.\u00a0I could have said promote, but we usually \u201cthrow\u201d them into the job.\u00a0After a few months of struggling the manager usually concludes that they have the wrong people on their team so they hire new sales professionals to replace those that they fired.\u00a0But they\u2019re inexperienced, probably had no interview training, and work off of \u201cgut feel,\u201d many times making the tragic mistake of hiring another copier company\u2019s rejects because they think it will decrease their time to success.\u00a0Those hires are almost never successful so it only increases the time to success.<\/p>\n Companies make this same mistake in hiring a manager, picking up somebody else\u2019s failure.\u00a0 If your manager has worked for three different companies in the last five years odds are he won\u2019t be your manager in a year. There\u2019s always a \u201creason\u201d for the change with both sales professionals and managers, but you have to be objective and logical.\u00a0I had a bad stint, spending a year at a dealership where the owner was certifiable.\u00a0He offered me a crazy high salary, a fancy title, and a Mercedes SL as a company car when I was 24 years old.\u00a0Are you kidding me\u2014sign me up and drop the convertible.<\/p>\n By my second day I knew I had made a mistake, but I hung on for a year as I\u00a0 didn\u2019t want it to\u00a0look bad on my r\u00e9sum\u00e9.\u00a0I insulated my team from his capricious acts (He would literally call out a name in a sales meeting and start to pluck the guy\u2019s name off the \u201cboard,\u201d that had month and YTD sales on it, and say, \u201cyour services are no longer needed\u201d in front of the entire sales team) and was recognized as the top manager in the company, but I couldn\u2019t wait to leave. Here\u2019s the point: I never made that mistake again and if I did you should question my intelligence.\u00a0So if you have a manager that continues to put himself in a bad situation it is OK to question his intelligence and pass on him.<\/p>\n Now that the manager replaced the team with \u201chis hires\u201d he desperately tries to make them successful.\u00a0 The usual approach is \u201crun faster.\u201d\u00a0They start monitoring phone calls, even scheduling \u201cphone blocks,\u201d cold calls, appointments, and other almost meaningless information.\u00a0I say almost meaningless because it is like trying to lead the horse from the tail.\u00a0It is possible that a sales professional needs help in organizing their day\/week to ensure they are allocating business development time, but I certainly shouldn\u2019t have to tell anybody every week that they need to develop business, right?<\/p>\n Revenue = prospects X close ratio X average transaction size.\u00a0That\u2019s my revenue formula.\u00a0If you agree then the next step is to look at the three variables and decide which one you can affect the most.\u00a0I\u2019d argue for prospects; I can grow my prospects by 100 percent over a year and there is no way to increase your close ratio 100 percent and it would be a miracle to increase your average transaction size, even with service like MNS by 100 percent.\u00a0 But average transaction size is definitely second as we do have those other products and services to offer to our prospects and customers.\u00a0Adding prospects is key to driving revenue.<\/p>\n There are many companies out there in any geography and those companies span the range from one-man shops to Fortune 500 companies.\u00a0If I call on one-man shops I might sell some $600 MFPs but they\u2019ll have them for a dozen years, so I better find a lot of them each and every month.\u00a0That\u2019s a plan for failure.\u00a0If I call on Fortune 500 companies, unless I work for a national company, that\u2019s going to have a really low close ratio, like close to if not zero.\u00a0But there\u2019s some subset of that range I want to focus on.<\/p>\n Then I want to call on the right person in that account.\u00a0If the company is between $15M-$40M that\u2019s the owner or CFO.\u00a0If they are between $40M-$80M it\u2019s the CFO or CIO.\u00a0This information shouldn\u2019t be too hard to figure out.\u00a0Then I need a business case and it can\u2019t be saving money or better service, but rather a real business case.<\/p>\n The key to management is being able to put in place a sales process that ensures success and that can be followed and supported by the manager.\u00a0We teach this in our Strategic Sales Management Class.<\/p>\n