What are the keys to developing a great sales team?

I've managed Sales teams twice and here's what I learned:

1) Motivation: You can't teach someone to "want" to be successful and in my opinion a Sales Managers job is not to 'motivate' people to want to be successful, but to 'facilitate" those who do.

2) Performance/Behavior criteria: Most sales people are very Darwinian and will eat a weak boss. That may be true in most operational areas of the company, but especially in my experience in Sales. That doesn't mean in any way shape or form that you have to be Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glenn Ross, you don't in fact have to be aggressive, loud or forceful in any way. It does however require that you are unflinchingly consistent in your application of policy, behavior, conformance and performance criteria. Many first time Sales Managers want to be "liked" by their sales teams, it's more important to be respected, it doesn't mean that you can't have both, but if you have to choose one, choose the latter. You need to decide early what behavior you want from your sales people, and weed out quickly anyone who does not conform. You need to set the standard of behavior and performance criteria early and then be quiet, calm and merciless in re-enforcing it. (Think of it as your Sales team culture, you need to figure out what kind of Sales culture you want to develop and then weed out anyone who doesn’t fit)

3) Personal Relationships: You want to develop personal relationships with each of your reps, so that they feel they know you individually and you know them individually. There is a great book out called "First break all the rules" (http://www.themanager.org/HR/Book_Rules.htm) that says the best managers communicate to their employees on a "one on one" basis and understand their employees on a one on one basis. Many first time Sales Managers try and manage the "group", because it's easier to manage from a distance, but everyone is different and requires different things from their manager in order to be successful, so managing the group is a far inferior way of helping individual people succeed than developing meaningful one on one relationships.

You still need group or team behavior and performance criteria, but the relationships that will help you do your job best are at the individual level.

4) Repetition: Not everyone learns at the same speed you do, don't teach at the speed you learn, teach and test until they've proven they've mastered the content or skills. This typically means repeating the same training, 4-5 times or more over the course of a few months. Don't be afraid to go back and re-test even after they've learned it and never stop monitoring to make sure they keep applying it. (You wouldn't expect someone to be able to go out and play tennis after one training session, why do we expect Sales people to be effective after one training session).

5) Hiring mistakes: If you inherit or hire an under- performing reps, by all means try and fix that, but set specific time frames for improvement and give it your best shot once. If you don’t see improvement then don’t be afraid to move on. Too many new Sales Managers hold onto underperforming reps thinking they can fix them, most times you can’t. People who want to improve find ways to do so. So by all means try and help the underperforming rep to try and figure out what’s wrong and how to fix it, but then it’s up to them to fix it.

Hope that helps.

Regards, Jim Barnet