FOCUS AREAS for Sales Management
TEAMS SELF MANAGE & Work Effectively
(2 minute read:)
Breakdown: Sales leaders and organizations are pulled in so many directions it is a difficult task to stay on top of all of the requests, duties, and objectives. It’s why sales the average tenure of a VP of Sales in a role is less than 24 months. That’s a shocking statistic, and it’s a telling one.
5 Areas of Focus to keep a Sales Leader Balanced and Effective in Leadership
Too often I work with prospect or client who start a conversation with the phrase:
“I have hired a few sales leaders and they just don’t seem to work out”.
Often the next phrase is:
“They were here (6-16) months and we parted ways”
If this describes your situation, you may feel that daily chaos is unavoidable and there is a lack of good sales leaders available to help grow your business. I offer an olive branch:
-Calming the waters is achievable with some discipline and intentionality for your business in the area of sales infrastructure.-
I approach most situations in the following order to drive systematic improvements and stability in organizations.
Sales Assessment (Identify, Subordinate, Prioritize)
Sales Infrastructure (Building the How, When, What, Where for your team so we can quickly go to the market)
Sales Management (Tools, Skills, Cadence)
Recruit & Hire (Recruiting plans, interview plans, onboarding plans)
Train & Coach (Product, Skills, Behaviors, Tactics, Marketing/Sales Alignment)
This can take more that a couple of months to buildout an organization in all of the listed areas. However, by working first on identifying the broken parts of the process and then adding the missing components of the sales organization, we can quickly get to the task of selling the product and upskilling the team in the critical areas that are limiting growth.
It can be a painful initial conversation for a business owner berceuse it requires personal change of habits. Also, when a leadership knows they are missing components or leaving issues internally unresolved, there is a common understanding that the selling process in its current form is an expensive way to operate the business, and it actually limits an organization’s ability to grow. This may sound familiar and while it is common, it doesn’t have to be.
An example of why a sales process is critically important: The VP of Sales stays a very short time (less than 12 months). Sometimes the VP realizes the sales infrastructure is so broken, and there is so much resistance to change, they will not be successful, so they move on. This is extremely expensive for a business and disruptive to clients and the sales team.
This is, very-likely, one of the easiest situations to address and change rapidly, but is often met with resistance from the sales team and tenured leadership because it requires leadership to change along with the sales team. If you are not willing to change at the leadership level, you may find yourself in a perpetual loop of being frustrated with sales and the lack of traction toward growth objectives.
Short & Sweet Summary: Pay attention to the 5 big areas of your business and focus on improving each area incrementally. Your business will shift to a more profitable, better performing organization with a more engaged team and a pipeline of talent desiring to work for you instead of selling for your competitors.