How Sales Managers Drive Rep Success

New research published in Harvard Business Review adds further significance to the role managers play in the success of your sales reps and your overall sales organization.

Steve W. Martin surveyed nearly 800 salespeople and sales leaders and found that 69% of high-performing salespeople rated their sales manager as excellent or above-average compared to just 49% of underperformers. His research indicates that the effectiveness of your front-line sales manager is related to the success of your individual reps.

The top attributes high performers want in their sales manager are:

• Leadership and management skills
• Practical experience and sales intuition
• Communication and coaching skills

Do your front-line managers have a cadence that helps them coach reps to success?

Ensure consistency and improve efficiency by giving them tools that make their jobs easier. One of the most valuable things you can do as a sales leader is to enable your front-line managers to develop their team members.

Managers often find themselves in the sales organization tug-of-war. They’re charged with motivating, coaching and inspecting their own teams, but they’re also dealing with constant pressure from top leadership. 

Enable your front-line managers to build a team of high-performers. Provide them with a repeatable rhythm that supports consistency throughout your sales organization, specifically around:

• Territory Reviews
• Account Reviews
• Opportunity Reviews
• Forecast Reviews

The key to success is to provide your team with standardization without sacrificing sales consumability. Process should never trump common sense. It’s not about creating a new set of forms and fields for your sales managers to fill out in your CRM, it’s about instilling a management discipline that process and tools can help execute. We call this discipline a Management Operating Rhythm®. Here are five things that a successful MOR does for your sales managers and your organization:

1. Defines the critical few management activities that the leadership team wants to take priority for the first-line sales managers 
2. Provides the tools that assist managers in successfully completing these activities
3. Simplifies the sales planning process by making it “sales consumable” and streamlining administrative burdens
4. Sets clear expectations of managerial job responsibilities with senior leadership
5. Provides clear line-of-sight into sales team performance, based on what drives success in the sales role

When all your salespeople are using the same processes and tools, everyone knows the benchmarks to create success. As a result, your front-line managers are less burdened and there’s consistency throughout the sales organization. They’re able to effectively manage because they’re not wasting time with meticulous forms and inconsistent processes.

It doesn’t matter how many reviews you do with someone, if there’s no focus on executable action, there is no value within the sales team. An operating rhythm helps you as a sales leader drive that action. When everyone is using the same processes and tools, they’re all speaking the same language and they are all on the same page. As a result, your sales managers then have the opportunity to become sales leaders because everything they do has value attached to it.