The 5 Best Practices of Effective Sales Managers & Leaders

There are many best practices that support an effective sales manager or leader; in this article, I’m going to share what I believe are the top five. These are practical leadership skills that you can internalise through action, day after day, until they become consistent, predictable behaviours.

1). Assume accountability for managing the employee lifecycle

Employees are your greatest asset. The uncomfortable truth is that if there’s a staffing problem, that’s because you, as a company, didn’t do your job. You can make excuses to yourself about how tight the labour market is, how some salespeople underperformed or how you couldn’t have predicted someone’s departure but everyone knows those things are likely to happen. It's your job to prevent them being an issue – or happening in the first place.

Just as you want your team to always be on the lookout for new business opportunities, you want to always be on the lookout for potential hires. The best time to look for new sales talent is when you don't need it. The worst time is when you're desperate to fill a vacancy because a top sales performer left.

In the same way, just as you should have a clear prospecting process for your team to follow as part of their new business development work, you as the sales leader, need to have a clear hiring process built around effective interviewing questions designed to identify specific criteria that you've included in an ideal hire template.

2). Onboard for both culture and performance

The best sales managers design, update and implement a robust onboarding plan that gives new hires crystal-clear guidance on what benchmarks need to be hit — and when — during their critical first 90 days in a sales team.

This kind of well-structured onboarding program also provides easy access to all people, tools, and resources they will need to reach those benchmarks. HR may be able to help on the margins, but the parts that touch a salesperson — the parts that either inspire them or leave them wondering whether they made the right decision — are your responsibility.

3). Utilise one-on-one goal-setting

Determining quotas isn’t goal-setting. It’s more important to find out what the person will do if your goals (the quotas) are met. What they will do with their commissions is what motivates them in turn.

Conducting essential, respectful, private discussions about what might inspire an individual to achieve (and overachieve) financial targets is both an art and a science. It requires strong interpersonal skills, and it’s not to be confused with simply telling someone what their financial target is.

This best practice is all about initiating and supporting a conversation that sounds something like this:

"Suppose you were to hit your bonus. What would you do with the money?”

Once you get the person to open up to you about this — which may take a while — your job is to listen well until they identify a goal that lights their fire. It might be taking care of their parents. It might be going on a cruise to the Caribbean.

We won’t know what it is until we ask. And we need to ask, because people work a lot harder for their own reasons than they ever will for ours.

4). Develop the top 10 behaviours

Consider these ten behaviours and how they might be labelled in your world among your people.

Business development or lead generation considers the candidate’s prospecting: it is the number one behaviour that drives all the others.

Relationship-building is the practice of establishing a strong, open relationship based on trust.

Qualifying the opportunity is the ability to determine a prospect’s reason for doing business.

Making presentations or closing sales demonstrate a team member’s capacity to present solutions to the prospect’s problems.

Servicing customers is about delivering superior customer satisfaction.

Account management considers the ability to maximize business in each account.

Territory development includes strategy building and growth in territory.

Demonstrating a behaviour plan means the establishment of measurably productive sales activity.

Continuous education should include developing ongoing product, market, and sales knowledge.

Executing a sales methodology shows a mastery of the sales process.

These are all important, but that eighth behaviour deserves a particularly close look.

The behavioural plan, also known as a cookbook, identifies the specific daily and weekly activity metrics, unique to each salesperson, that enable them to hit their personal targets — and achieve that personal goal we helped them identify. This is a private document worked out collaboratively with the salesperson.

5). Nurture a coaching culture

Thirty-five percent of our time should be spent coaching. You may think this means we are going into “coaching mode,” but that’s not what this looks like at all.

We could sit everyone down and say to the team: “Here’s how I am going to have us solve this problem.” But guess what? That’s not coaching.

We could sit down with our team individually and say: “How’s it going? What are you working on?” Once a member begins to introduce a problem they are running into, we could tell them what we would do.

But that’s not coaching, either.

Telling isn’t coaching. Effective coaching is private and aspirational. The coaching session has a shared goal that connects to the salesperson’s life goal. We lead that session by following the 70/30 rule: We do no more than 30% of the talking. When we listen actively — and support self-discovery — that’s coaching.

Effective sales leaders must assume accountability.

These are just a few best practices that separate “sales managers” from “sales leaders.” While some may assume their job is to put out fires and cope reactively to the latest emergency, proactive sales leaders manage to prevent emergencies from arising in the first place.

Tom Mallens is training director at Birmingham-based Sandler Training, Heart of England*.

Want to discuss improving your sales team's performance?

Book an initial chat or give me a call...

Tel: +447917 005 938

tom.mallens@sandler.com

BOOK TIME WITH ME

*He's also somewhat obsessed with exercise. You can get his book 'The Lean & Mean for Life Formula' on how middle-aged men can lose 10kg and within 90 days >>> here.