The Role of the Sales Manager

The number one role of the sales manager is to generate the sales that are essential to the survival of the company. The sales manager achieves these sales results by working with and through other salespeople.
One of your most important jobs is to determine the level of sales you want to achieve daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually. Establish these goals as your targets and then work back to the present day. Decide what you will have to do to hit those targets in those time spans.

To hit your sales quotas, you will have to plan, project, and organize people, resources, budgets, and promotional materials. You must determine the plans of action that you will follow to get from where you are to where you want to go in terms of sales results. The better planner you are, the more successful you will be, irrespective of what is going on in the marketplace.

Another major responsibility you have is to communicate and motivate. You get your work done through other people. Their results are your results. You need to be able to give your people the information, resources, and incentives they need to get their jobs done.

Your next key function is to measure results. One of the most important business principles is this: “What gets measured gets done.” If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. If you don’t measure it, it’s probably not going to get done at all. That’s why you need clear objectives, standards of performance, and assigned responsibilities for every person.

Choose the Right People

Perhaps your most important job is to select, recruit, and hire good salespeople. Fully 95 percent of your success will be determined by the quality of the people you hire in the first place. We will talk about your selection of salespeople in detail in Chapter 3.

You must teach, train, develop, and build your salespeople so that, no matter how long they stay with you, when and if they leave, they will be more competent, capable, and effective human beings than they were when they arrived.
Your final major responsibility is to determine the resources necessary for you to accomplish all of the above. Your job as a sales manager makes you responsible for setting and achieving sales goals. This means that you have to determine the sales plan, the training materials, the budgets, the rewards, the incentives, and the sales campaigns. You also have to organize the work and prepare forecasts in each case.

Sometimes, some of these jobs will be done for you, and sometimes they will be your responsibility alone, but at the end of the day, results are everything. You have to determine the products you are going to focus on. You must decide which customers and markets you will pursue, how to promote your products and services to those customers, and what sales methodology you will use to give yourself a competitive advantage in today’s market.

Finally, you have to bring your whole team together, explain the entire “plan of battle” to them, and then provide them with all the resources they need to go out and win sales in tough markets.

The Factory Model

This is a concept that you can use in planning and organizing for success as a sales manager. With this method, you view your sales department or sales team as a factory. Just as a factory has raw materials that come in one end and finished products that come out the other end, your sales organization is similar. Your “sales factory” has inputs that include your trained and competent salespeople; money for advertising, promotion, and incentives; desks, chairs, and other resources to support your sales staff; and products and services to sell.
Inside the sales organization, like a factory, certain processes take place. The purpose of these processes is to produce sales results. The job of your salespeople is to use all of the resources or raw materials that you make available and translate them into sales in the current market.

Create Value

The two primary activities of a sales manager are first, to create value, and second, to generate revenues. You should spend 80 percent of your time creating value and generating revenue, all day long.
Almost everything else you do, including and especially dealing with email, social media, messages, and phone calls, are diversions or distractions taking you away from creating value and generating revenue. In the final analysis, your ability to get sales results will be the single most important determinant of your success.

ACTION EXERCISES

1. What specific results are expected of you in your position as sales manager?
2. Of all these results, what is the one result that is most important for you to accomplish, right now?