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Journal of Selling & Major Account Management
Train or Pain for the First-Line Sales Manager?
By Warren Kurzrock
Ask any first-line sales manager about his or
her job and you’ll quickly learn that it’s the
“best” or the “worst” of all positions. The
rewards are usually great because they are
based on the sales manager’s performance.
The opportunity is huge, and the sales
manager is responsible for revenue, and often
profits. The dream side of the job offers
visibility, recognition, and reasonable freedom
from headquarters intrusions.
On the down side, it’s one of the most
challenging, difficult and frustrating jobs on
the planet, certainly within the salesforce
milieu. In spite of being the most critical job
in the salesforce, the pain is exacerbated by a
variety of interacting obstacles and traps.
Unfortunately, top sales executives, who once
were the first-line managers, quickly forget
what it was like in the trenches and usually fail
to recognize that the key to sales is not a sales
team, but the manager who drives it.
Gary Hardy, Sales Executive Leader for the
DOW Chemical Company, clearly defines the
importance of the first-line sales manager:
“The key to a high performance sales force is
the first-line sales manager. It’s inevitably the
first-line sales manager who communicates
expectations, directly or indirectly provides
the knowledge and skills to succeed, actively
provides the coaching and counseling needed
to overcome obstacles and barriers, and
rewards based upon the degree to which
expectations are met. To effectively develop a
world-class sales team, you must first come to
grips with the critical and multi-faceted role
played by the sales manager. And, it should
immediately become clear that the transition
from Player to Coach is full of dangerous
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misconceptions. If you don’t address the skill
gaps that were never tested as a Player, they
will quickly swallow both the new Coach and
your sales results.”
Where Is The Pain?
In most cases, the first-line sales manager
lacks proximity to the majority of the
salespeople. Salespeople and account
managers operate as “Lone Rangers”, out of
sight 90-95% of the time. Spotty supervision
and management are performed on the run via
email, telephone, supplemented with
infrequent, task-packed visits. This is not a
very good scenario for determining who needs
help, who’s motivated, who’s struggling. With
a typical span of control ranging from 5-15
people, it’s an awesome job to drive successful
team performance.
The “devil” is in the salesperson as well. Most
salespeople are reasonably independent, risktakers, high-energy people. Consequently, the
good ones are on the move. To compound
the challenge, they are all different – diverse
personalities, varying experiences, different
motivations and personal needs. Each sales
rep operates in a territory or account segment
that is unique. Ostensibly the sales team
members perform the same job, but the above
characteristics and other factors make each
remarkably different.
Management often takes a cavalier attitude
about the job. At 40,000 feet (in the executive
tower) the waves on the beach look flat, but
on the beach, they’re often huge, breaking
over the head of the sales manager with a
resounding crash. This lack of awareness is
extreme for the newly promoted first-line
Application Article
sales manager. As a result, most sales manager
learning is done on the job, or at a 3-4 day
orientation. There are a number of reasons for
this: many successful sales organizations delay
formal training (since they often promote one
manager or a few at a time), send the manager
off to a generic management course (with
non-sales executives who have different
problems and issues), or neglect him or her
altogether.
The popular feeling is that the job is largely
intuitive and since most first-line sales
managers are promoted from the sales ranks,
they should have a good feel for the job per se
and the capability to grow into it. Nothing
could be further from the truth. The best
salespeople often shoot from the hip (albeit
accurately), are risk-takers, comfortable
managing themselves and their accounts, have
strong selling skills, weak analytical,
supervisory and administrative skills. As
indicated earlier, they are suddenly placed in a
chaotic, strange environment and challenged
to manage people, events, plans, and
problems.
While it’s imperative to grasp the big picture,
most sales managers are reactionary and busy.
They don’t have the ability to drill down to
the “subway” level and determine what’s really
causing a problem or situation. Instead, they
jump into action to rescue the failing
salesperson (often too late) before he goes
down the proverbial drainpipe. Quite often, in
the need for speed, sales managers focus on
performance symptoms (rather than the actual
causes) and identify a problem when it’s too
late to correct.
The Training Challenge
In spite of the huge challenges, there are
solutions that will provide management with
all the improved results: sales, reduced
turnover, and a deep bench of developing
future sales executives. The job of first-line
sales manager needs a mandate: “train to
relieve the pain”. While some salesforce
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positions can get by with standard or even
mediocre training, the complexity of the key
sales manager position, and challenges
described, require – demand – the ultimate in
sales manager development. The cook book
recipe is simple to comprehend, but difficult
to execute, and it’s always an ongoing
challenge and priority:
x Leading-edge content: topics, tools, skills,
processes
x Continuous learning to apply concepts,
exchange ideas
x Online or access to support to provide
cost-effective, ongoing reinforcement and
help
x Follow up to make sure that skills are
applied and improvements are being made
Doug Willner, Director of Training for
Medimmune, Inc., underlines the challenge:
“Typically managerial training seems to
be secondary to the product, or disease
training. We have prioritized a
consistent schedule and process for
continuous learning and reinforcement
for our managers to ensure that their
own skill development is maintained at
the highest level. Our managers are
trained in advance of their teams and
provided with reinforcement and
coaching tools so they are able to
effectively assess and provide critical
feedback to their teams. We are sending
a clear message that their managerial and
leadership skills are every bit as
important as the product knowledge.”
There are at least a half-dozen critical sales
manager competencies and skills (possibly as
many as 20) that interact together to provide a
solution; together, they enable the first-line
sales managers to stay in control and manage
themselves, their people, their customers, and
account problems. The key priorities follow.
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Journal of Selling & Major Account Management
Sales Coaching
Sales Coaching is the most critical skill for any
first-line manager and training-oriented
companies focus on this with passion.
Rightfully so. A major study recently
completed by the renowned Sales Executive
Council concluded: “Without on-the-job
reinforcement, reps lose 87% of training
within one month”! While many companies
recognize the importance of coaching and do
a reasonable job of training they often
overlook significant gaps:
(1) Because sales managers have been
successful salespeople, there is a very strong
tendency to avoid coaching per se when
working with salespeople; instead, they take
over the sale or rescue the salespeople to the
embarrassment and frustration of their reps.
(2) Most programs do not train managers how
to allocate their coaching time so they get the
best ROI for their time investment and as a
result, they give everyone equal time and plan
their visits like a “milk route”. According to
most experts, the salespeople who have room
to develop and are most “coachable” deserve
the maximum coaching time.
(3) Companies are slow to recognize the value
of “distance coaching” as a tool to save time
and extend the managers reach with his or her
people.
(4) Few sales organizations have requirements
for “how much” coaching time (in field) is
required, and due to the many other priorities, coaching often winds up at the
bottom of the “to do” list rather than at
the top where it belongs.
While most experts recommend that about
40% of the sales manager’s time should be
devoted to coaching, our research indicates
that 10% is common for many organizations.
But some companies do the right thing and
gain significant dividends. Deluxe Financial, as
part of their coaching training, did an
assessment before and after a sales coaching
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workshop by having their salespeople
anonymously and confidentially assess 30 sales
manager skills. While all managers showed
major improvements in most coaching skills,
the sales management team showed an overall
improvement in performance of 21%.
According to the client, during this same
period, sales gained momentum! The
synergism should be apparent.
Sales Leadership
Sales Leadership is rarely included in a training
curriculum because it’s believed that leaders
are “born” not “made”. Not so, in most cases.
Some leader training is provided under the
guise of “situational leadership”, but largely
it’s overlooked. The real leadership that a first
line sales manager should possess
encompasses trainable abilities like vision (to
unite and motivate the sales team with
futuristic goals, missions, plans),
decision-making, influence, as well as personal
characteristics and values like trust,
responsiveness, being a role model, etc. While
most of the personal characteristics
(“charisma”) attributes are inherent in the
sales manager’s personal style, vision,
decision-making, and influence can be
acquired in workshops and reinforced on the
job and in career development venues.
Managing Sales Performance
Managing Sales Performance is a competency
that’s often overlooked. The traditional
method for managing sales performance is to
review revenue numbers on a quarterly basis
and zero in on the less-than-quota-pace
performers; unfortunately, the data is limited
and 30-60 days late. Enlightened companies
and creative sales managers devise systems for
monitoring key indicators of performance like
calls made, product mix sold, frequency of
sales calls on key accounts, strategy
implementation, and yes, even selling skills—
is each salesperson improving, vegetating,
plateauing? The sophisticated companies
break down the total function into major
Application Article
performance categories or indicators, such as
the top 10-12 activities. This enables the sales
manager to focus short term, review ongoing
performance rather than trying to save “souls”
when the numbers are down at the end of the
quarter.
The rewards of a good system and a manager
who’s been trained (there we go again) means
that he or she can recognize performance
“warning signs and symptoms” before they
become big problems. In other words, they
can develop their people proactively and
identify gaps and gains in expected
performance on a weekly, monthly, quarterly
basis.
There’s a caveat, however. Most sales
organizations either provide sales data too late
to make it timely, adding to the problems, or
they only provide limited data such as sales
volume/rep. So, the sales manager, in order to
effectively monitor performance must set up a
data bank of his own. For example, she needs
to keep good coaching reports after each
coaching visit (hopefully doing coaching).
How else can selling skills be tracked? But
there are other performance indicators that
need to be tracked: new business vs. repeat
business, how sales calls are allocated among
accounts, prospecting efforts, and so on.
While this seems like a lot of monitoring, it’s
all about being organized and being trained to
perform what’s important and what’s not. The
alternative is pain! And with the pain comes
poor sales results, frustration, and inefficiency.
Counseling
Counseling is a salesforce process designed to
deal with attitude, motivation, and
work-related problems and is often omitted
when corporate sales manager training is
evaluated. No one can deny the importance of
counseling per se and there are a number of
reasons why it’s often omitted from the sales
manager’s curriculum:
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x Companies don’t differentiate between
coaching and counseling. As a result, their
sales managers frequently use “coaching”
solutions to solve motivational problems
that demand counseling.
x Others avoid including counseling in their
training because they don’t want to turn
their managers into psychologists who
have to perform “sales couching”
x They fail to recognize the importance of
motivation and counseling as key
requisites for every successful salesperson
or account manager.
Yet counseling is a great tool or process for
understanding what makes each salesperson
function at peak performance. Handled
professionally, counseling training for sales
managers should offer a simple process for
opening a dialogue on a potential or real
problem and working together to determine
causes, motivations and to develop a plan of
attack.
Interviewing and Selection
When it comes to hiring sales people, there
has been a power struggle, in recent times,
between the Human Resources Department
and sales management with the latter often
deferring to HR or even abandoning the
responsibility. While the ultimate selection is
often a “shared role”, the sales manager needs
to have the confidence and training to
significantly influence the final selection. After
all, who knows more about the needs of
customers, demands of the territory, the
characteristics needed to maintain a
relationship, fit with the rest of the sales team,
than the sales manager?
With many a salesforce facing an annual
turnover of 10-50%, a poor hiring process is a
costly problem that can be impacted by
training the sales manager to interview and
select: how to define his or her needs, ask
penetrating questions, make precise decisions,
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Journal of Selling & Major Account Management
know how to “sell” the job, compare one
candidate against another, and so on. Excess
turnover affects everything: sales, customer
loss, replacement costs, morale of the retained
sales team, etc.
Consider some of the elements that a sales
manager typically manages:
Managing Priorities and Time
x Accounts and prospects
With all that’s going on in the life of the
first-line sales manager, you’d think that most
sales organizations would elevate setting
priorities and managing time as top-level
courses in the curriculum. Based on our
experiences, very few even address this and
it’s perceived either as an instinctive process
or one that can’t be solved. The assumption is
that if you give a manager a daily planner or
Microsoft Outlook, he can figure it out for
himself. Yet, in terms of productivity and
efficiency, time management ranks high in
getting the job done, and priority setting (with
discipline to execute) should rank at the top.
While a good process is essential for both
short and long-term time use, there are 8-12
techniques/skills that effective managers can
acquire to find shortcuts and avoid time traps.
Just getting the job done is not enough, and
poor priority and time management will lead
to shortfalls in sales and goal accomplishment,
and enhance the pain in most parts of the
sales manager’s job.
Strategic Planning
It’s safe to state that strategic planning is
“missing in action” from most corporate
training agendas for first-line managers.
Consequently, top sales management is often
deprived of intelligence and strategic
recommendations that should emanate from
the trenches. Equally important, strategic
planning is a skill (tool) to capitalize on the
district or division market. It drives the sales
team and keeps everyone moving in the same
direction.
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x People
x Markets
x Competition
x Strategies and tactics
x Products and brands
The key questions that top management needs
to ask:
x Shouldn’t we be gathering ongoing intelligence from our first line managers in a
structured way and using that to develop
our corporate strategy?
x Is it important for a first-line sales
manager to have ongoing input into the
corporate plan?
x Can a formal plan be created in the district
or region, updated quarterly, improve
results?
If the answer to these three questions is “yes”,
you’ve defined the need for effective planning
so both corporate and front line plans
dovetail, communicate, and gain.
Unfortunately most sales managers do not
plan strategically on a long-term basis, so a
platform (format) is needed to identify needs
and determine: more/less salespeople,
forecasted business, tactics and strategies for
growing the business, developing the team,
launching new products. Needless to say,
training is a “must”.
Every organization has data bases to track
elements, and most require written activity
reports. Few have uniform action plans that
focus on the critical needs of the sales team
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and marketplace and offer a “fast forward to
the future”.
In Summary
The only option to relieve the pain in the
first-line sales job is to train, train, train. It can
be accomplished in many ways: in custom
designed or public workshops, through
ongoing career development, providing online
courses, or simply recognizing and focusing
on the sales manager position as the key to
profits, sales, and long-term growth. Product
knowledge, internal systems training, policies
and procedures are important, but without an
organized,
continuous
sales
manager
development plan and the tools to get it done,
the pain will increase turnover of both
salespeople and sales management. Ultimately
the lack of “world class” training for the
first-line sales manager will limit sales
potential or have a negative impact on the
sales team’s performance.
Warren Kurzrock
CEO
Porter Henry & Co., Inc.
(212) 953-5544
kurzrock@aol.com
Vol. 8, No. 3