12 things every sales manager must do, from geoffrey james
TRANSCRIPT
Geoffrey James writes a widely-read, daily sales column for Inc.com. He has also written several books, such as Business to Business Selling: Power Words and Strategies from the World’s Top Sales Experts, Success Secrets from Silicon Valley, and The Tao of Programming.
We at InsightSquared are big fans of Geoffrey James and regular readers of his blog. We were inspired by a post he wrote on “How to Be an Extraordinary Sales Manager” to create this presentation of the 12 things every sales manager must do.
1. Coach
Just like a sports coach, you need to help your team members to understand their strengths and weaknesses.
2. Teach
Like a schoolteacher, you are responsible for teaching both basic skills and larger concepts.
2. Teach
Make sure your salespeople fully understand how the product works and how it fixes the business issues that your clients face.
3. Mentor
Help them anticipate problems before they occur. Also help them develop strategies for unique selling situations.
4. Marshal
For the sake of your team, you need to be a smooth politician. Navigate internal politics to get what you and your team need.
4. Marshal
This is the only way to marshal the internal resources required to move forward with your leads and reach your goals.
5. Communicate
Be consistently clear with your sales team and with other departments. Make sure everyone knows what’s going on and what needs to happen.
6. Prioritize
It’s up to you to set your team’s priorities. They will not be able to read your mind and guess what you want them to do first.
6. Prioritize
Let them know which opportunities are most important so that you can use your resources most effectively.
8. Trim
In addition to adding new high-achievers to your team, you need to cut out the underachievers. Like a surgeon, be delicate so you don’t upset the others.
8. Trim
If you keep low-performers on your team, they will waste your resources and drag the rest of the team down with them.
9. Predict
To guide your team, you must be able to predict the future to some degree. But you don’t need magic to make an accurate prediction.
9. Predict
Use a combination of analytics (based on historical data), observation, and intuition to get an idea of what to expect.
10. Coordinate
Like a conductor, you need to make sure that your team works harmoniously with the rest of your company.
10. Coordinate
Work especially hard on coordinating the sales and marketing messages so that interactions with customers are consistent.
11. Debrief
Make sure that they learn from both – understanding what went well and what went poorly, so that they know which behaviors to repeat and which not to.
You can visit our website at http://www.insightsquared.com/ and our blog at http://www.insightsquared.com/blog/
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