Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

It's Only Common Sense: Be a Great Sales Manager

Editor's Note: To listen to Dan's weekly column, as you've always done in the past, click here. For the written transcript, keep reading...The position of sales manager is the most important and yet most underrated position in a company. By "sales manager" I mean the top salesperson in the company--the one who's responsible for managing, measuring, and motivating the sales team; the one responsible for success. Most of all, he is the one ultimately responsible for bringing in enough of the right business for the company to run profitably.

What makes a great sales manager? Here are five things that a sales manager must do to be great:

1. She must be able to see the future; she has to create a vision for the company to follow. She must be the chief strategist for the company and convey that strategy by developing the company's story. She must then implement that strategy both inside and, most importantly, outside the company through marketing. Let's not forget the title for the position is normally sales and marketing manager although, in most cases, this manager spends most of her time on sales and very little on marketing--something that's changing drastically as we speak.
2. He must build a great team. Sure, he can find great salespeople, but the most important factor hiring will be how they fit in with the team, how they improve the team, and how they make the team successful. He must also create great salespeople because we have come to the point in our industry where, due to attrition and age, we need to bring in younger people. Unfortunately there aren't that many young people interested in PCB sales. Nobody goes to college to become a PCB salesperson. But there are plenty of young people interested in sales, there are great natural-born salespeople and those are the folks we have to find and hire. Hire for passion--you can teach technology, but you can't teach passion.
3. She must work with each of her salespeople individually--pushing the right buttons and finding ways to get them even more motivated than they are already. She must develop a compensation package that will motivate the salesperson to success while also being great for the company. Find out what a salesperson's dream is and then show him how that dream can be achieved as a tangible result of successfully bringing the right amount of business for the company. For example, if the salesperson's dream is to buy a lake house, figure out how much that will cost and explain to him how he can get that house by making his numbers for three years and thus taking full advantage of his compensation package. Think about that...it's pretty powerful stuff!
4. He must be firm but tough with salesppeople. Even good salespeople are mavericks by nature and many of them are free spirits who don't like to do the more mundane tasks like writing weekly reports and completing account plans and forecasts. The sales manager has to stand firm. He has to make sure they will do these things and get them in on time every single week. He can never bend the rules or he will lose control over his band of potential business anarchists.
5. A good sales manager has to create excitement. She has to make the entire sales effort as dramatic and exciting as a movie. She must show her salespeople that what they are doing is not only important, but also challenging, even epic. She must create an adventure in which she and her sales team are all characters all striving to get that certain thing--winning business. Competition definitely exists in sales, but, in the end, it's a zero sum game where somebody wins and somebody loses and the sales manager has to turn that around and use it for as much dramatic impetus as she can create.

And the final way to be a great sales manager (yes, there's one more), is this:

A great sales manager has to know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em when it comes to salespeople. Look, there are the out-and-out bums--those who just don't fit in, those who are so ill-fit for a job in sales that it's easy to send them packing. But then there are those who are almost good. Those who can talk a good game, but never perform. They make you think they're fixable, that if you were a better sales manager you could fix them. The "almost good" salesperson is hard to fire because a sales manager might look at this situation as their fault for not being a good enough sales manager. I say nonsense. The solution is very simple, figure out how much time you're spending on that person and you'll soon realize the truth...that spending most of your valuable time on this losing proposition is not good. Cut your losses, fire the guy, and move on. The fact that you'll feel a lot better the next day will be proof you did the right thing.

If you consistently practice these six things, and do them with vigor and passion, you'll do a great job and you'll be a great sales manager. It's only common sense.