A new level of sales management

Below are some questions to which we at Precedo Consulting have tried to find answers:

Do a sales team's good sales results indicate good sales management?
Can the effectiveness of sales management be measured?
How do we recognize a top-class sales manager?
What do top-class sales managers do differently than average performers?
What makes coaching success so difficult in sales organisations in particular?

The sales director as an orchestral conductor—towards becoming a top sales organisation

Our experience shows that in top sales organisations a good balance of four key factors prevails: the sales strategy, the sales process, sales skills, and sales metrics. One of sales management's most important tasks is to ensure that the above-mentioned factors have been clearly defined, they are well balanced, and they direct the sales organisation consistently in the same direction.

Does developing sales management produce results?

In recent years, sales management development has meant, in practice, that leadership and coaching courses have been arranged for sales managers within an organisation. The aim behind this has often been to develop sales managers' ability to give personal feedback to their subordinates. It has very rarely been possible to measure the effectiveness of these training programs; they are often insubstantial in sales management's experience.
Why is this?

The director for the Asian operations of one of our large clients commented:

“We have, of course, trained our sales managers in general coaching skills, but we have not gotten results from this. It seems that all that training has merely reinforced conventional coaching skills, but failed to make a connection with those matters from which successful sales work and effectiveness arise”

Our client's sales director also said:

We easily distinguish top performers thanks to better sales results, but we have not managed to fully grasp in what matters average performers should individually develop their skills. For example, we cannot, at present, measure how our sales people would perform in a needs assessment test, or what specific improvements would be needed if someone were to fail to achieve desired levels of profitability in demanding negotiating situations. Is the reason to be found in the quality of preparation, poor performance in the sales stage, or in the management of the negotiations themselves?"

An industrial group's division director said:

"Our customers' purchasing behaviour is clearly changing. In order to be able to ensure our own operation’s profitability, we should be able to serve our various customers in different ways. How can we get a profound and objective enough view of our sales people’s capabilities, so that we may place them with confidence in the positions in our organisation most appropriate to their skills, some dealing with sales consulting, others with sales transactions?"

The business-to-business sales manager in a global IT company described his challenge as follows:

“We are well able to analyze the figures for the offers and meetings in our sales pipeline, but we cannot really assess the quality of our sales operations. We are unable to measure the quality of our sales operations, although it is of quite central importance.”

Top-class sales management requires that the entire company's management team has a thorough understanding of the key factors that drive their sales organisation's efficiency, as well as tools with which the organisation can objectively analyze and measure its own operational efficiency and quality.

Indeed, a sales management development program will produce results only when it can be linked very concretely to the sales organisation's key factors - sales strategy, sales process, sales skills and sales metrics.

Coaching in a sales organisation can actually be divided into strategic development and the development of salespeople's sales skills.

In demanding sales operations, where the quality of sales work is important, both are equally significant, though very different. The quality of feedback given to salespeople is essential to the success of any coaching that aims to develop their skills.

Our experience shows that the basic conditions for an effective sales coaching culture are:

1. Salespeople and their sales managers share a common understanding of what constitutes a good sales performance.
2. Sales managers have sufficient skills to objectively assess their salespeople's sales skills.
3. 3. Sales managers are proficient in giving feedback to different salespeople in a way that they find easy to accept.

Precedo Consulting is a strategic developer of sales and service organisations. Precedo Consulting's mission is to help companies with demanding sales operations along the road to becoming world-class sales organisations, giving them concrete tools to comprehensively rebuild their sales in the areas of strategy, process, skills, metrics and management.

In recent years Precedo Consulting has helped more than 25 of its large client organisations to build exceptional results in the area of sales management. As part of these development projects, Precedo Consulting has trained over 3,000 sales managers, salespeople, and technical experts; performed in-depth interviews with over 5,000 customers globally as part of its client projects; and carried out over 500 real-life sales-case coaching sessions with customer teams.

If you want to develop your sales organisation and sales management towards excellence, open a dialogue with us. We'll happily describe in more detail what world-class sales management and coaching in a sales organisation requires, what can be achieved, and how to get there.