First-Line Sales Managers: A Critical Piece of the Puzzle

by Kevin Hummel

Larry and Steve are both sales managers who came up through the ranks of successful salespeople within the organization, but their approaches to the new task of managing and leading others is radically different.

Larry feels that the exact same skills and behaviors that made him successful in sales will carry over to sales management. Being interpersonally skilled and extroverted, he believes good relationships are critical and loves to teach his salespeople primarily through telling war stories from his own experience. His number one aim is generating top-line sales results, so he goes on sales calls with his reps as often as possible, and usually ends up using his considerable sales skills to close as many deals as possible. His normal approach to under-producing reps is to exhort them to work harder, or to pitch in to get progress on major sales opportunities. When “management” issues a policy he does not like, he shows his solidarity with the sales team by openly criticizing it. Of course, the downside of this behavior is that it creates an unhealthy “us versus them” atmosphere, plus the reps tend to not take policies very seriously.

Steve also feels that many of the same skills and behaviors that made him a successful sales rep will work in sales management. He agrees that relationships are very important. However, his primary focus is on meeting the needs of others while still producing a profit for the company. He takes very seriously his need to balance the needs of customers, his sales staff, and the company. He accompanies reps on calls to provide support and coaching afterward, but insists that they handle the preparation and control the call themselves. When he has under-producing reps, he tries to analyze the causes and works closely with them on a plan for improvement. He also serves as an effective link between top management and the front line by communicating and implementing their strategies and policies. The downside to Steve’s approach is hard to find. He is able to build strong relationships with, and protect the interests of, multiple constituents, while at the same time broaden the skill base (and, ultimately, the performance) of the sales force.

Although sales executives would prefer a company full of Steves, those circumstances usually don’t happen by accident. Most companies don’t take a rigorous enough approach to ensuring they have the right people in place for this all-important position. They don’t have the proper selection procedures, choosing sales managers only from the ranks of successful salespeople or using the wrong selection criteria in the first place. They also don’t train them enough, or measure the right things to drive necessary behaviors and results.

This neglect is surprising when you consider the wide range of tasks sales managers must master to succeed in their jobs and how much impact the first-line sales managers can have on sales force performance:

With such a diverse range of tasks and responsibilities, it is no wonder that the performance of first-line sales managers carries significant consequences for revenues, profitability, turnover, morale, and productivity. Average sales managers tend to surround themselves with average salespeople, while top sales managers are adept at deploying a higher quality sales force and motivating them to better performance. Poor sales managers tend to have higher turnover. Low sales staff loyalty correlates to low customer loyalty, which lowers revenues and increases selling costs, not to mention the cost of recruiting and training replacements.

For these reasons, first-line sales managers are the most critical component of sales force effectiveness and productivity. They are the backbone of any successful sales organization, and a necessary starting point for your sales effectiveness initiatives. Because sales managers will be the primary implementers of subsequent sales effectiveness initiatives, such as hiring, training, performance management and culture change, actions taken here will act as force multipliers.
With so much at stake in the issue, then, successful sales organizations take a comprehensive approach to the assessment, selection, training and performance management of their first-line sales talent.

Assessment: How effective are your current sales managers?

In order to assess how well your managers are doing, you must first define exactly what “success” looks like, in this role and in your company. You no doubt have a few stars who are a cut above the others… what makes them so special? What do they do that makes them so much more effective than other managers? By carefully identifying these characteristics and behaviors, you will be able to clearly articulate what it takes to be highly successful in your organization. Armed with this information, you will be able to more accurately assess and assist your current team.
This success blueprint then serves as the basis of your assessment tools or approaches. One of the best ways to assess the quality of your first-line sales management is to ask the people who work around them—salespeople, other sales managers, even customers. Use 360 degree feedback and salesperson opinion surveys to efficiently but comprehensively find out how things are really going. For example, if you have determined that teamwork is crucial to sales manager success, you can ask constituents about the extent to which a sales manager collaborates with and involves others.
Another invaluable way to check the pulse of the organization and to make adjustments before they become more significant problems is to use exit interviews with departing salespeople to elicit feedback on the management climate.

Selection: Do you have the right people in place?

Calculate, in your mind, the dollar impact of the difference between your superstar and others on the team. Then consider the results your organization could produce if you had a whole team of stars on the field. This is entirely possible, if you use the right approach.

The prevalent approach in sales manager selection in many firms appears to be the Peter Principle, with positions being filled only from the ranks of successful salespeople. There is actually a lot of sense to this approach. Salespeople respond well to someone who has “carried the bag” and has proven themselves in the sales arena. Successful sales experience also enables managers to model the behaviors and skills they expect. Finally, many of the same skills that make salespeople successful are also useful in management, including communication, interpersonal, and problem solving skills.

However, there are two principal differences between sales and sales management that trip up many first time sales managers. The first is that, while salespeople have to balance the needs of the company and the customer, sales managers have a more demanding balancing task. They must support the needs of the sales team, and become adept at orchestrating the efforts of many different departments to serve their customers and their sales team. Second, while most salespeople in their individualistic way are good at getting things done by themselves, sales managers must perfect the art of getting things done through others.

Therefore, a crucial step in Selection is to weave the same behavioral “success blueprint” (described earlier) into your selection process. Then make sure that the procedures you use to recruit and hire people will measure the extent to which candidates possess these important attributes. This will ensure that you put an “A team” on the field.

One final tip for sales manager selection is to look beyond your current sales force for talent, and even outside of the sales field or industry. Although sales experience is a strong plus, it is not always necessary, especially in the more service-oriented, key accounts arenas. Your primary objective is to place people who possess the core competencies and attributes discussed earlier, and you might discover that very capable people can be recruited from unsuspected places. If you hire for those core areas that are hardest to train, you can then train them on the technical aspects of the industry, your products/services, or even sales management techniques.

Training: Are you providing ongoing professional development
so that knowledge and skills are continually sharpened?

Once you put the best possible team on the field, you now have an obligation to ensure that they continue to learn, grow, and improve. This is a competitive requirement and goes for your top people as well as the rest. Even Tiger Woods spends countless hours fine-tuning his skills, and has a coach who oversees his development.

“ Training” has two components: First, make sure that your incumbent sale managers have, and take advantage of, the assistance, tools and resources to hone their own skills. You must seek ways to ensure that your B Players raise their game to A level--and you must help A Players stay sharp. In fact, if you do not provide these opportunities for your best people, there is a good chance they will leave your organization… and that is a preventable and therefore unacceptable mistake. Second your sales managers must in turn provide resources and coaching for their sales representatives and you must hold managers accountable for doing it well. One of the most important things a sales manager can do is to develop and leverage talent in the organization, an expectation that should be right there along with strong sales results… after all, the former leads to the latter.

Performance management and compensation: Are you measuring
and rewarding the important aspects of “performance”?

First-order financial results are, of course, critically important, but be careful not to define performance too narrowly. In addition to revenue targets, you should also measure managers for profitability to encourage more of a business approach to their area of responsibility. You can also drive a longer-term focus on sales quality by measuring customer retention and satisfaction. And don’t forget those behavioral dimensions discussed earlier, including progress toward developing and retaining sales talent. The point is that you should think carefully about what you are emphasizing and rewarding in your organization, because those are the things that people will “do”. Conversely, if you don’t measure and reward it, people won’t do it. You can talk all you want about how important things are, but if people aren’t held accountable for those things, then the translation is that “it must not be truly very important, so I’ll concentrate on those things that are.”

Once you have properly defined your expectations for sales management success, then you must ensure that you have an effective performance management process in place as the vehicle for institutionalizing those important expectations. Any fundamentally sound performance management process contains three basic components: (1) goal setting—identifying and agreeing on appropriate results and behavioral targets, including ways that those areas will be measured and tracked; (2) coaching—providing support along the way, including making adjustments as needed to respond to changing circumstances; and (3) evaluation—drawing conclusions about performance effectiveness, including tying pay to those outcomes. Many companies have bad experiences with performance appraisals because one of these components is either not done well or not done at all.

With a credible performance management process in place, performance reviews and compensation become far more straightforward and have greater impact. Because target expectations are clear (from effective goal setting), and because managers have had support and regular dialogue about progress throughout the performance cycle (due to effective coaching), managers know exactly where they stand and the rewards are a simple formality, not a point of contention.

© Falcon Performance Group, Inc. May be copied for internal distribution.

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