Challenges abound for accidental sales leader

Northern Colorado and Denver are in a very tight hiring environment. With unemployment extremely low, many organizations are looking at promoting from within whenever they can. This is a very common path to sales management for many new sales leaders. They did a good job in their sales role and then took on the extra stripes for sales management.

This rapid ascension to sales management is admirable from the outside looking in. However, it is also not uncommon for organizations to put their new sales leaders into these positions with little or no sales management training. In the clear majority of cases, sales managers are not trained to the same level of proficiency demanded of most of the other leaders in the organization. This is the accidental sales manager.

The accountants, engineers and marketing people who are at high levels in an organization are likely to have advanced degrees in their field, or at the least, ongoing continuing education. It’s part of their career path — expected. Contrast that with a sales manager who often found themselves in a sales career by accident, often with no undergraduate study in their career field.

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While in a sales role, they followed a sales process. Now in their sales management role, they lack process. And, in fact, find that selling is just one facet of their role. They are now tasked with developing recruiting skills (different than hiring skills). When candidates for openings are identified, the sales manager hopefully has developed hiring skills by osmosis.

As the sales manager works to grow her team’s productivity, she realizes that she must become a strong sales trainer — not just facilitating product training, but leading sales skill training. She must develop a new-hire onboarding training program if one doesn’t exist, because her company is challenging her to speed the ramp up to productivity for new hires.

These new managers are sometimes replacing either a non-productive manager or a legacy manager. While the legacy manager may have been able to steer the ship, there is a strong chance they managed following process that was “in their head,” preventing them from passing it down to the new manager. Some of these processes the new manager will need to develop are effective systems for pre-call planning sales calls, post-call debriefing to win deals in the pipeline and methods to evaluate sales performance.

Furthermore, growth organizations know that their company has a lower valuation if they aren’t able to scale their sales growth. Most investment partners are going to want to see replicable sales department structure and systems, like a CRM and account management systems. They will want to be sure the organization and sales management has expertise in annually reviewing sales compensation structure and the goal setting and forecasting process.

As you can see, it takes time for sales leaders to not only evolve their departments but also their own skill sets as leaders. Because there can be so much client-oriented crisis for sales managers to manage, they may never get to one of the most important roles for any sales manager: coaching.

So many sales leaders manage their business by reacting to lagging indicators of performance. This is akin to driving down the road and keeping your eyes locked on your rearview mirror. All sales managers must be given training and coaching from their organizations on how to improve their own coaching skills.

An often-forgotten skill area, coaching can get pushed off and pushed off as an “important” activity that constantly gets reprioritized behind the “urgent” activities or running everyday business.

Just like sales managers should have time blocked in their weekly/monthly behavioral plan (we call this a cookbook), they should have time clocked to receive management coaching from their mentor or supervisor in the organization.

Organizations that build out process and systems and get out in front of their business by dedicating time and resources to actually develop their sales managers skills have an enormous advantage. Not only can they walk and chew gum at the same time, but easily capitalize on new opportunities as they spend less time fighting fires and just keeping their heads above water.

Bob Bolak is president of Sandler Training. Reach him at 303-928-9163 or bbolak@sandler.com.