12 Best Practices That Help Sales Managers Make Their Teams Successful, from Alternatives.
Evidence repeatedly shows that turning around a sales team starts with turning around the sales manager, advises Walter Rogers in the Salesforce.com blog.
Sales managers are uniquely positioned to influence and empower sales reps to greater levels of success, but sales managers sometimes become so busy and distracted that they neglect their own professional development as they get caught up trying to survive the latest fire drill. It only takes insight into three key areas to dramatically increase the positive impact the sales manager can make on the whole sales team: Alignment, Motivation, and Performance.
As we continue to work with successful sales organizations all around the world, we have discovered that highly effective sales managers have a set of skills and characteristics in common that set them above all the rest, and which enable them to help their teams to achieve results that are also way above average. These characteristics are defined in the topics below:
1. Don’t manage, lead
Too many sales teams are over-managed and under-led, which is to say that many sales managers rely too much on metrics and deadlines to drive performance. Highly effective sales managers find numerous ways to come alongside team members to motivate and reward them in a social format that brings out the best in them in a way that inspires everyone.
