The primary reasons that sales managers fail is that they don’t know how to manage their people, and they don’t manage a highly effective selling processes. Just as an engineering manager needs to be a pretty competent engineer, so does a sales manager need to be a pretty competent salesperson. However, in both cases, their primary responsibility is to manage the performance of their staff. And, both must have a good understanding of modern management principles beyond a few readings of “The One Minute Manger.”
By contrast, most engineering managers know that technology is evolving so quickly that their managerial functions prevent them from keeping up with the technology at the level of a functioning engineer. However, they know enough about the latest technology to manage it.
Conversely, most sales managers believe that very little has changed in the ways that top salespeople interact with their prospects and customers since they became a manager. Therefore, they tend to manage their people in the way they used to sell. However, the markets for every product and service have changed dramatically in the last twenty years. Top salespeople have developed new sales process to take advantage of those changes. That is what most sales managers don’t know.
1. They don’t know how to use highly effective tools to recruit, recognize and train salespeople that will perform well in their organization. Therefore, they often hire salespeople that are not compatible with their company’s culture and don’t have the appropriate sales aptitudes for their industry.
There are a few excellent service agencies that will recruit salespeople to match your requirements - at a reasonable price. Furthermore, they will benchmark you and your best salesperson to be sure that the candidates’ aptitudes are similar to your best, and that they are compatible with your management style.
2. They don’t have a uniform, highly-effective sales process for their company’s products and services. They believe that the fundamentals of selling have changed very little since they were selling. Therefore, they typically advocate obsolete sales strategies and tactics, and focus on the wrong metrics. Their efforts at determining the “best selling practices” for their company are almost always flawed.
Look for a sales process that is very different from the one that you are now using. Talk to sales training companies to determine whether they really are different, and whether they use their own proprietary sales process when dealing with you.
3. They don’t know how to train, supervise, track and coach their salespeople to optimize their sales effectiveness.
This is also a sales process problem. If you don’t have a uniform process you have not way of knowing exactly what your salespeople are doing, or whether they are actually doing what they say they are.
4. They lack skills in target marketing and prospecting. Therefore, their salespeople waste most of their time with prospects who will not buy.
One of the most important activities of top salespeople is finding and making appointments with highly qualified prospects. Even if most of the prospecting activity is done by your marketing department, or an outside vendor, the salesperson should be the one that decides if and when to visit a prospect.
5. They believe that “you can’t close if you don’t get in front of prospects.” Therefore, their salespeople go on as many appointments as possible, and they track that metric. In order to fulfill that requirement salespeople spend far more time with prospects who will not buy than with those that will.
Set demographic, situational and attitude standards for the type of prospects that are most likely to buy. Make you most important metric a function of booked business.
6. They believe that salespeople should be able to convince prospects to buy when the prospects are merely “interested.” Therefore, they have their salespeople out trying to persuade prospects to buy who are merely “interested.” It doesn’t seem to occur to them that hardly any of their salespeople can convince their sales manager to do anything he/she does not already want to do..
Sales managers need to utilize a highly effective sales process that works now. They must learn why mutual trust and respect and mutual commitments are far more effective than persuasion, convincing, closing techniques and overcoming objections.
7. They don’t know the difference between qualification and disqualification. Therefore, their salespeople create sales resistance by selling to prospects when they are not ready to buy. That lengthens the sales cycle and decreases their closing rates.
Most sales managers don’t realize that visiting with prospects before they are ready to make buying decisions will increase selling cycles and is detrimental to closing rates. What they call “sales persistence” usually loses business.
8. They don’t understand how the human mind works and how it accepts or rejects information. Therefore, their salespeople typically spew features and benefits in terms of industry jargon. However, they don’t communicate what they are selling in terms that their prospects can understand, will retain and will motivate them.
There have been many studies about how to communicate most effectively. Those studies have been done by myriad educators, communications specialists, speech writers, psychologists, broadcasters, sales consultants, etc. We used much of that research, and our own studies, to develop the High Probability Prospecting Offer Design Template. You can have a copy by sending an email request to Main@HighProbSell.com with the words “Offer Design Template” in the subject line.
9. They believe that most prospects make logical buying decisions. Therefore, their salespeople don’t satisfy prospects’ emotional motivations for selecting a vendor. However, if that were true, almost every salesperson would be highly successful by enrolling in logic courses.
Recent studies in Brain Science have revealed that most important decisions are made in the part of the brain that deals with emotions. Those emotions that deal with important buying decisions are among Maslow’s Hierarchy. Until High Probability Selling, no one figured out how to utilize that knowledge for major increases in closing rates.
10. They don’t know how to get salespeople past their fears. Therefore, most of their salespeople stay in their comfort zones and under-perform. That causes most of them to perform below their potential, or to fail. Pushing them to perform and trying to thicken their skins seldom works well. The cost of this problem is enormous.
Almost all salespeople, whether beginners or veterans, can learn how get past their fears and avoid slumps and/or burnout. It just takes a specialize set of psychological principles. Getting your sales forces to operate at optimum effectiveness is an entirely reachable goal.
