The fortunate fact is that sales managers like to coach. And salespeople like to be coached. The troubling fact is that there are other things competing for that coaching slot on the calendar – things that are urgent. Pursuing deals, fighting fires, forecasting, troubleshooting… The list could go on for pages. And in fairness, they are legitimate activities that need to get done. And so they squeeze out the coaching.

So here’s the reality that senior sales leadership has to accept: If you want your sales managers to coach their reps, then you have to make it a top priority. Perhaps THE top priority for your managers. Okay, okay… That’s easy to say, and it’ been said many times. But leadership has to mean it. And you have to give the managers the time to … Read the rest

In our foundational research in our best-selling book Cracking the Sales Management Code, we actually discovered what are the important parts of the sales manager’s role… At least as leading sales forces judge them. At its core, the research was an investigation into how companies are using metrics to manage their sales forces. And metrics are typically expensive and time consuming to collect and report. So if a company is going out of its way to measure something, it must be important to them.

What parts of sales management were these companies measuring then? What is the important stuff? It turns out that it’s simpler than you might think.

The sales forces in our research measured only five aspects of sales management:

    1) Coaching
    2) Training
    3) Equipping
    4) Assessing
    5) Forecasting

Clearly the first four areas are focused on improving the … Read the rest

However, any discussion about managing people’s activities always leads to a discussion of micromanagement. Many managers will reveal that they are uncomfortable measuring and managing their salespeople’s activities, because they don’t want to be perceived as micromanagers. They didn’t like being micromanaged when they were salespeople, and they don’t want their sellers to feel micromanaged now.

We absolutely agree that no one likes to be told what to do. It feels demeaning and it cheats sellers of the pleasure of making their own good decisions. However, we like to point out that showing interest in a salesperson’s activities does not necessarily equate to micromanagement. It’s entirely possible to have an objective and productive conversation about a sales rep’s activities that does … Read the rest

We would propose a similar insight that we have come to observe in our work: First Train All the Sales Managers. For more than a century, sales training has predominantly focused on improving the skills of front-line sellers. And this makes intuitive sense. If you want sell more stuff, then train the people who sell it. The logic is practically unassailable. Except that it is.

In our experience, we have gotten greater and more consistent sales improvement by training front-line sales managers – NOT the front-line sellers. In fact, we’ve seen win rates, margins, and revenues increase in all of our recent clients’ sales forces, though we never trained a single salesperson. All of this was accomplished … Read the rest

1) Pipeline Design – Participants felt that they left the workshop with meaningful improvements they could make in how their sales pipelines were designed. By design, they meant the number of stages in their pipelines, the types of milestones they used, the clarity of criteria for each stage in the pipeline, and the percentages that they used to forecast future revenue.

2) Pipeline Size – Participants were happy to learn a very simple way to calculate the ideal pipeline size for a given rep. Rather than rely on ‘rules of thumb’ such as 2x quota or 3x quota, they left with a basic formula for determining the appropriate size for an individual sales rep’s pipeline based on easily accessible data.

3) Pipeline Analysis – Participants felt that the frameworks discussed in the workshop provided them with … Read the rest

What we think sales managers need today is less complexity in their lives. And we at Vantage Point are committed to simplifying the lives of sales managers by providing them with the frameworks and tools to do two critical things:

1) Better prioritize their activities and the activities of their salespeople

2) Make better real-time decisions

We often ask sales managers what they would do if they had an additional 5 hours in the week. The response is always some form of, “I would do the things that I know are important but I never get around to doing.” Like coaching. Liking developing their reps. You know, all the important stuff that sales managers are hired to do.

Well, the reality is that 5 more hours are not coming. Ever. So we point out to those managers that they have a … Read the rest

It’s fair to say that demonstrating this ROI has been an ongoing challenge for training and development teams, because the Return is so difficult to measure. It’s easy to determine the ‘I’ because the Investment (or in some minds, the Expense) is a known dollar amount that is budgeted and spent. Not accounting for other soft costs like internal company time and resources, this number is easily quantified and very apparent. No problems with the ‘I’. The ‘R’ however….

Correlating specific Returns with a particular training Investment is a bit of a challenge. First, there is the fact that the ‘R’ can take a while to appear. Despite Sales’ universal desire for instant gratification, that’s not how training works. It takes time for behaviors and skills to change, and even longer for them to affect sales performance. Long sales cycles may push the incremental Returns well into the future, … Read the rest

In case you haven’t heard this term, the ‘80% Solution’ refers to the strategy of investing only enough effort to complete 80% of an objective. For instance, if a software consultant tells a VP of Sales that it will take 6 months to get a set of performance reports fully designed and implemented, the VP might decide that getting 80% of the reports in 3 months is good enough… preferred, actually. Forget the last 20%. Not worth the effort.

Or if an internal project team is working to develop new sales processes, and it will take 8 weeks to account for all of the possible contingencies. The VP might decide that it’s good enough to spend 5 weeks getting them far enough to capture 80% of the possible scenarios. It’s preferred, in fact, to … Read the rest

As I write this, I’m flying home from London where I attended one of our public sales management workshops. As with any major international hub, the variety of languages spoken in London is quite wide. Just walking down the sidewalk, I was able to identify Russian, German, French, and Spanish, in addition to my own distinct form of Southern American (that’s Virginia, not Brazil).

But when a wrong turn or the need to coordinate logistics necessitates cross-cultural communication, the lack of a common language can really get in the way. For example, take my interactions with some of my colleagues who live in London…

On the first day of the workshop, I asked a Londoner for directions to the … Read the rest

The recent economic downturn hurt more than just sales performance – it allowed destructive management practices to gain a foothold in many organizations. Hyper-vigilant forecasting, constant reporting, and increased spans of control are some of the sales management approaches borne of necessity in crisis, BUT which foster dysfunction during recovery. Join Jason Jordan, author of Cracking the Sales Management Code, as he reveals the most damaging sales management activities that are hampering your team’s performance.

by Jason Jordan… Read the rest