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Sales Management Training: Best Practices?
What are your best practices in regards to training your managers? I generally like to have mine at the same training sessions as the sales team and rely on them to enforce my goals, as well as having ongoing meetings to get feedback. How do you handle your managers' training?
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4 Answers
One of the first items to think about is, "what drives performance of sales teams"? Items such as identifying and acquiring talent, planning, coaching, key performance indicator tracking, etc. are critical to performance, but very few EVP's review their sales management teams in the proper areas. Figure out where are they strong, where they need help and apply the appropriate resources.
Training should occur at least monthly. You are correct to include them in your rep meetings, but keep in mind a poor performing rep can cost a company, on average, $1M-$2M in lost revenue opportunities, but a poor performing Sales Manager can cost a company $8M-$16M.
Bill Eckstrom
EcSELL Institute
Sales managers must be present when salespeople are trained but don’t confuse that with sales management, or sales leadership training. Sales managers must become proficient at recruiting (finding, attracting, assessing, filtering, interviewing, selecting, hiring, on boarding and retaining) great salespeople, coaching and mentoring, holding salespeople accountable, motivating salespeople and growing and developing salespeople. In addition, they must be able to implement a formal, structured sales process, a visual, staged, criteria based pipeline, and the metrics required to keep the pipeline filled. CRM, compensation and incentives, as well as sales 2.0 tools must be in their bag of tricks as well. None of this can occur at or during sales training. Ideally the sales management team should be trained on these practices prior to training the sales training and it should take place over the course of 60 days.
Hi Dave,
I think you've got a solid list there. We know there are other skills required as well, such as team building, conflict resolution, strategic planning, etc., but you've captured the most important ones.
Clearly there is a comprehensive platform of Sales Management 101 skills required as the price of admission to the manager's office.
Training sales managers in advance of their people is the right approach. Hiring sales managers with many, most, or all those required capabilities (assuming they match your other criteria) may be the best approach of all. (Of course they need to possess the traits required for successful sales management as well.)
Here's the problem, though. Unfortunately, too often, the best sales person is promoted to manager, and those people don't possess the required skills. In fact, recent research says that 85% of those sales managers fail.
So I'm with you on your assessment, Dave. I'll just add that sixty days may be enough for some sales managers, but not nearly enough for others.
Hi Aaron,
I actually did a video blog post on this a few weeks ago "There are No Best Practices in High End Sales.". If you want to check it out visit: http://guruselling.com/blog/?p=904
You also might want to watch "Sales Managers - Fix Your Broken Sales Promise" - http://guruselling.com/blog/?p=929
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