Secrets of a Successful Sales Manager
A team can fail the leaderships of an efficient sales manager. Irrespective of what we expect, sales managers keep the team happy all year round. You can learn about the dynamics of sales teams and what areas managers spend their time on with respect to running an effective sales team.
Anatomy of a Sales Team
In a sales team, the top 20% of the sales men are self motivated and engaged. They are not driven by incentives and targets in a bid to outperform others. As a result of their performance, they will motivate the rest of the team.
For 60% of the team, there is a variety of performance. The effectiveness of this group depends on the ability of the manager to motivate the team through sales incentives. The bottom 20% are still new to the job or are looking at leaving the job.
Cold Calling
When making cold calls, prospecting for clients, 12% of sales men quite after four rejections, 14% quite after three rejections, 2% quite after two rejections, and 44% of sales reps quit after the first rejection. From experience, it might take up to 7 attempts to contact an executive.
How to Spend Time
1. Help your team make the best of the sales tools. On the average, companies spent $43,000 on marketing, sales content, and sales tools per sales person each year. 90% of marketing deliverable’s are not used by professionals while companies waste an estimated $38,000 per sales person each year.
2. Managers should spend some time coaching their sales reps, research results suggests that managers should spend 60% of their time with sales reps. They should look for the right person, these are people who have the following traits of being modest, conscientious, achievement oriented, focused, and curious. They are not discouraged, self conscious, and gregarious.
3. Managers can organize sales incentive programs and boost performance from 10% to 55%. Research has revealed that less than 20% of managers perform ROI calculations on these incentives.
How to Run a Sales Contest
1. The first step to having a great sales content is to start it off with a strong momentum. Bring it to the notice of the team through emails, if you use salesforce, you can use chatter.
2. Make it as simple as possible. If their is to much going on, people will get confused and not know where to aim.
3. To retain the interest of your team, make it as short as possible. If possible, let it run for a single day. Although some run for a week or two. If it lasts for one month, sales reps might lose interest.
4. Do not make money the ultimate goal. There are other inexpensive ways to reward your staff. Consider having lunch with the CEO, a dinner outing, tickets to an event or outing with a team. These are events that people will always talk about and will always look forward to,
5. Ever as you reward the top performers, consider everyone’s interests and spread your reward around. Break down the awards to consolation prizes to carry everyone along.
6. Results should be shared regularly, tabulate the results and share it with the entire team often. Make sure your team knows their performance.
It is cheaper to go on non-monetary incentive programs. Survey has revealed that $9 billion is spent annually on non-monetary incentive programs while $100 billion is spent on monetary incentives.
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