Sales Management Insights

Here’s the whole idea in a sentence: Sales Management is a Leadership job, not a Sales job.

The reality is this – when the top performing sales professional is promoted to a Sales Manager the conversation goes like this: “Hi John, congratulations you are now a Sales Manager. You are great at sales and the thing you love the most is being face to face and toe to toe with customers. This we are taking away (or making it a dotted line responsibility at most). The thing you hate the most – the admin and business reporting, we are going to give you more of. Oh, and here have some sales people to manage, but don’t worry you are great with people so that should be easy enough for you.”

Although in jest, this is not really far from the truth, even if not expressed exactly in these words. The unfortunate next chapter for the newly promoted Sales Manager is as traumatic as more and more impossible demands are made for his time. Leadership training or some...

Here’s the whole idea in a paragraph: The world of buying has changed. Forever. And it’s long overdue that the Sales profession catches up. Gone are the days where training sales skills or behaviours actually works. Actually nothing really works unless you see sales as an eco-system.

An interconnected system, just like the 1980’s toy called the “Rubik’s Cube”. And just like sales, you can’t unscramble the cube by concentrating on getting one side fixed at a time. Implementing a CRM doesn’t fix sales results. Sending sales people on yet another round of sales training seldom brings better numbers. A better sales process. A different methodology. A new compensation plan. And the list goes on. Nothing seems to work, and when it occasionally appears to work it’s often only for a short initial period and then just as fast the results flatten again.

But, in my experience when you understand sales to be an eco-system of interconnected...

Here’s the whole idea in a paragraph: Sales Managers used to coach. Often, and consistently. Mostly in the field. But then came along a piece of technology called CRM, a mystical set of computer code magically designed to take us all to sales utopia. Or so many thought. And in the process the art of sales coaching died, or at the very least went onto indefinite life support.

Pre-CRM meant a sales manager needed to go in-field with his or her sales people to understand clients, understand accounts or understand certain key deals. Spending time with sales people in one-on-one situations meant an abundance of coaching opportunities. Post-CRM in many cases now means a sales manager has more data, more reports, more excel pivot tables, and more time behind a screen crunching numbers. And less time coaching. Much less time coaching.

And perhaps as alarming is what the CRM revolution intended to fix: client relationships, has suffered. Not because sales people forgot how to build and...