Sales Management Differs from Sales

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Moving from salesperson to sales manager takes time, preparation and elevated skills. Throughout these lessons, you'll learn the key differences between a salesperson and a sales manager, which skills are applicable at both levels and how to practice being a manager in your current role. As a salesperson, you're considered an essential contributor to your organization's success. Your responsibilities are to maintain good relationships with existing clients, bring potential clients into the fold, identify new prospects, make sales presentations, set meetings, negotiate contracts, and reach your sales goals. You're accountable to perform your duties and meet your quotas on your own. Being a sales manager is different and that your responsibilities shift from achieving individual objectives to enabling a sales team to achieve theirs under your leadership. In order to be promoted, salespeople need to understand the knowledge, skills, and capabilities that are required. A sales manager is an individual responsible for guiding a team of salespeople through an organization's processes and policies. There are four main responsibilities in your role as a sales manager. Supervising, training, coaching, and leading. The first responsibility of sales management is supervising your team. In other words, your job is to provide direction for procedures and organizational boundaries, while providing guidance and expectations on how to succeed. Supervising is task-oriented and usually involves many of the required parts of a sales person's job. A supervisor ensures that goals are reached, drives growth in individual employee performance, evaluates progress, and facilitates accountability. Here's some common forms of sales supervision. Managing individual and team quotas, setting and tracking sales objectives, recruiting salespeople, resolving team conflicts, conducting performance evaluations and action plans, offering constructive feedback, and overseeing the sales pipeline. Sales managers are responsible for making sure members of their team know how to do their job properly. It's important to ensure that your employees are prepared for what their role requires by providing training and education, Training can either be formal or informal, and either on-the-job, offsite or virtual. For example, a sales manager may offer informal on-the-job training by having a salesperson shadow another employee as they work. Or they may offer formal training at a different location where they have to complete a sales class with a higher trainer. Managers can play a major role in the onboarding process for new hires. Coaching is a process that typically involves asking open-ended questions, creating collaborative action plans and implementing guidelines to meet or exceed goals. As a coach, you'll need to foster accountability with your employee by requiring them to actively engage in finding solutions and overcoming obstacles. Coaching is particularly useful in situations such as debriefing a sales call or preparing for an upcoming meeting that may be challenging. Sales managers also coach by incorporating their employees input. Getting on the same page about what works best for your employees helps create more aligned goals and objectives. Career development and progression are major benefits to collaborative coaching. With proper guidance, your employees will be empowered to propel their own progress. Finally, effective sales management has a lot to do with leadership. Leading is the ability to influence and enable your team to achieve the best results possible. Leadership involves direct communication, motivation and building relationships. It's not just what you do for your team, it's also how you set an example through your character and actions. Here's some examples of leadership. Implementing sales incentive programs, building relationships with customers yourself, providing consistent feedback and updates to your team, actively engaging in major goals and planning, being transparent and trustworthy, and creating partnerships with different departments to further support you team. The responsibilities of a sales manager can vary based on your organization, regardless your support and leadership will affect your team's performance.