Categories: Sales Transformation | Sales Leadership
If you're looking to increase revenue, one of the fastest ways to do it is to improve the relationship between your managers and sellers. Making that link more effective, resourceful and aligned will pay back with significant results. We work with managers extensively in our Manager Coaching deliveries and those curriculums are based on a few basic tenets that you can apply to your own organization.
1. Involve Them In Initiatives
You don't want things to happen to your managers, you want them to happen with them. It's one of the best ways you can help your front-line managers stay involved and engaged. People are effective leaders when they are emotionally connected to their initiatives. Enable them to lead their teams, by helping them to be effective change agents. Don’t force new programs on them. Instead involve them in the creation of any initiatives that are directly related to their team’s success. They’ll be more willing to drive it with their own teams if they had a say in its development.
For example, in Command of the Message, our customers often have managers trained on the curriculum before it is rolled out to reps. This ensures managers are more prepared to be better coaches when their reps are in their own training.
2. Don't Pile On
The front-line manager often has the most difficult job in the company. These roles are often managing up and dealing with constant pressure from leadership. At the same time, they're trying to motivate, coach, develop and inspect their own teams. If leadership is aligned around sales execution, the front-line manager's job becomes more focused and clear. If your leadership has knee-jerk reactions to the latest sales numbers, your managers will spend too much time running interference and shielding reps from upper management instead of operating under a rhythm aligned to company objectives. Enable your front-line managers to spend their time creating value for the company. Don’t make them run interference. Don’t pile on. Help your front-line managers become leaders and focus on the right activities and cadence. Your sales organization will increase revenue, guaranteed.
3. Coaching Tools
It’s a scary proposition for a lot of leaders – taking managers away from helping selling to coach, but it's critical. Many managers are unconsciously competent and as a result, they have a tough time communicating “the how” to others. Just telling your rep they need a champion isn’t going to help. Managers know that qualifying an opportunity is important, but many aren't good at providing the most critical component, "the how." They can say "the what" and "the when" but a lot of times they aren't articulate on "the how", and "the how" is where the skill building and the execution really happens. This lack of coaching can often show up in qualification processes. Managers don’t know how to rip deals apart, with the intent of helping and coaching the rep/account team put the deal back together. The reason this happens is because we consistently minimize the importance of teaching managers how to coach.
Your managers need to get consciously competent around "the how". Give them the tools and the training they need to give effective and actionable feedback. What's the best way to give feedback after a role play? How do you effectively do opportunity coaching? How do you equip your reps to test their champions? Your managers should be able to answer these questions, and have tools to support them.
4. A Qualification Process
It's easy to let the ball drop on qualification because it’s one of those sales fundamentals that we may lose sight of when we’re looking at a big opportunity or a large new logo, but it is almost impossible to grow or even hit your numbers repeatedly without it. And, your front-line managers are critical components to the process working effectively.
Your front-line managers need the required information to inspect a deal and then they need to be taught how to effectively coach (see tip above!). They need to be able to get the information required to understand where the strengths and weaknesses in the opportunity are. Then, they need to be able to coach to the action steps. Most importantly, the process by which you get them there must be simple. You need a framework or methodology that everyone can work within. There are a thousand different qualification methodologies out there. The 17 steps to this, the 45 ways to do that. A lot of them are overwhelming. You need a simple and tried and true methodology.
5. Management Cadence
The amount of time your front-line managers waste just trying to keep up with the forecast, the CRM and administrative burdens is valuable time not helping their team sell. Ensure consistency and improve efficiency by developing a sales operating rhythm that provides a consistent language and process around:
• Territory Reviews
• Account Reviews
• Opportunity Reviews
• Forecast Reviews
• Active Sales Call Participation and Feedback
When everyone uses the same operating cadence, they're all speaking the same language and perhaps, more importantly, everyone knows the benchmarks they need to hit to create success. When it's set up correctly, everything your managers do has value attached to it, instead of being some sort of compliance exercise.
Your front-line managers are the lynch pin to increased sales productivity. They're your boots on the ground, the group of people who ensure that the deals are closed, margins are preserved and revenue numbers are met repeatedly. Many sales organizations make the mistake of telling managers what to do, without telling them how to do it. Increase revenue by giving them "the how".
