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Welcome to Friday! Great question. While there are many paths to sales success, that also means there are various styles of "sales management" that can work. The trick is putting the right ingrediants together for your organization and markets served.

Every organization's "personality" & culture will dictate a particular individual personality by its' employee's in leadership. You must understand your company's personality & culture and hire correctly to begin with. Specific to the attributes and traits of a successful sales manager, my experience points to the following concepts:

1. They are NOT your #1 hunter.

2. They need to be money driven probably, but also a team player/manager. I have never seen an organization that succeeded because they baby-sat their #1 sales guy and treated the others as second class citizens. The sales manager must set/manage this tone.

3. Thorough understanding of "a sales process" that works, and can be used as a guide for all of the sales team AND rest of organization that must execute against whatever is sold.

4. Willingness AND ability to roll-up the sleeves and get dirt under their finger nails with their team.

5. Listen to the "voice of the customer/prospects" directly and thru their sales team (but don't take sales team's "word" without personally validating insights) to make improvements/adjust to needs of sales team and markets

6. The "best of the best" sales managers don't try to make everyone "look the same" OR even worse, "look like" the sales manager! After establishing AND getting buy-in into a "sales process", you must let each sales person have some freedom to find their way to success. There is more than 1 way to sales success. If a sales manager forces only 1 path, the organization will lose good sales persons that will never get the chance to leverage their individual strengths to deliver/be successful for you.

7. MOST IMPORTANT in my opinion, must LEAD by EXAMPLE. This includes hours worked, quality of work, attention to what matters/details that are required by that organization & their customers. A sales team will constantly challenge the "backyard fence" and try to push it further out. Sales Managers must be supportive at times while dishing out some "tough love" at times too to maintain the optimum fence line.

Just my two cents.....

-Brad Lindemann

Dave Brock

President and CEO, Partners In EXCELLENCE

Posted on Dec. 15, 2010

Brad covered a lot of great issues in hiw response, I'll try to minimize repeating them.

I'm not certain it's a characteristic or a requirement of the role, but sales managers have to realize their job is to get things done through their people. Too often, people move into the sales management job, but tend to act as individual contributors on steroids---this is a sure path to failure. The manager must realize their job is to coach, develop, direct their people to achieve both their full potential and the highest levels of performance possible.

A good sales manager has to be a great business manager. They must look at the function of sales, put in place the strategies, tools, processes, methods, metrics, etc. to maximize performance. This also means looking at overall go to market strategies and how the organization functions within the overall company.

A good sales manager is not consumed with adminstration, but rolls up their sleeves working with their people. Administration is a part of any job, but great sales managers don't let it consume them.

A good manager protects his/her people from the rest of the organization and promotes them within the organization.

A good manager realizes their personal success is based on the success of their team.

A good manager sets the highest personal standard of performance and integrity, and has high expectations of all around him/her.

We address many of these issues at www.futuresellinginstitute.com