Successful Sales Management – Maintaining Authority and Fostering Growth

By: Leanne Hoagland-Smith

The purpose of management is to help others achieve shared goals (organizationally and personally). However many in sales management have difficulty securing this desired results because of these two challenges pr obstacles:

1. Maintaining Authority
2. Fostering Growth

Both of these challenges require exceptional interpersonal skills (people) or what I prefer to call self-leadership skills. However the current K-16 educational experience at least in most American schools does not provide any development for this critical business need.

For individuals to take this initiative on their own requires self-awareness supported by personal action plans. One of the first steps is the creation of a life wheel from which an action plan can be developed. From my research, the earliest life wheel I found was created by Buddha.

Another action is to identify the decision making styles externally and internally as well as the key talents of not only sales management, but the entire sales team. To realize greater success, this assessment needs to be deductive in nature instead of inductive. By securing such an instrument helps to reduce miss reads because the co-efficients of reliability and validity are higher.

The reason for such an instrument is it helps to overcome the challenges of maintaining authority and fostering growth. Imagine for a moment as a manager, you have validated knowledge of how each salesperson makes decisions along with her or his talents. Sales Training Coaching Tip: Many people invest more time on their weaknesses or non-talents than their strengths because of past conditioning.
Additionally such a tool allows you to create a far more balanced team.

Great sales managers know how to mentor those they are responsible for managing. Having knowledge about how individuals think about themselves when making internal decisions can be of invaluable help. Then specific goals can be set where those decision making styles and talents can be incorporated to ensure achievement of the desired results. With anywhere from 40%-70% of all sales targets (sales growth) not being achieved, does it not make sense to find tools or instruments to potentially reverse or reduce those dismal statistics?

Finally, for sales management to be truly successful does demand an organization where strategy, structure, processes, rewards and people are all in alignment. Even the best sales managers cannot work in a broken organization. Sales Training Coaching Tip: This is called fighting an uphill battle with C-Level individuals.

For example, if the organization is geographically spread out, then each area probably has a somewhat different demographic and psychographic. A one size fits all marketing and selling approach does not work. Maybe the processes such as marketing, customer service, accounting and production work counter productive to what is demanded from the sales team. Sales Training Coaching Tip: No one looks good in a bad system and this is why I recommend Jay Galbraith’s 5 Star Model for organizational development.

Successful sales management can happen provided there is support, alignment and documentation. Through effective self leadership skills, sales managers can increase sales, reduce staff turnover and truly enjoy their roles.

Of course, this may require the investment of the resources of time, energy, money and emotions. However, the end results justify such investments provided everyone truly desires achievement of the pre-determined result and willing to do what is necessary (proactively) to achieve those results.