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I’ve been away for a week working with a great sales management team. We were doing a deep dive into the issues they faced in maximizing the performance of the organization. An issue came up that I see with virtually every sales manager: “The workloads in managing the volume of activity with our people is overwhelming us, how can we possibly survive with the ever increasing workload.”
Too often, as sales managers, we get caught up in managing deals and transactions–it’s natural, after all we’ve been sales people, the excitement of “the deal” consumes us, plus we want to “add our value” to the deal strategy.
As enticing as that is, that’s not our job—plus, run the numbers, no one has enough time to keep deeply involved in the deal strategies for every deal their people are involved in. Let’s look at some numbers: The average sales manager has at least 10 sales people reporting to them. Let’s assume each sales person has 10 critical deals we want to review on a weekly basis. That’s 100 deals a week that we are going to do a deep dive into—if we even spend 15 minutes on each deal–hardly enough for a deep dive, that occupies 25 hours a week. Substitute your own numbers, if you are like most sales managers I know, you just don’t have the time to manage and review each transaction, there is no way to survive doing this.
Time, aside, is managing transactions the best way to manage performance and grow our people? Absolutely not! Managing at the transaction or deal level is just micro management.
Sales managers must focus on managing the process! Are the sales people executing the sales process and is the process in control? The sheer volume of activities that sales people are involved in will overwhelm any sales manager, if we try to manage those activities. Our job is to inspect the process and make sure the process is in control. If, by inspecting a few things, for example, several critical deals, we see sales people executing their process well, then we can expect they are doing the same in every other deal.
Inspecting the process and coaching people on sharp execution of the process provides both short and long term leverage for the sales manager. If we focus on the deal and “telling” the sales people the “right strategy” for winning the deal, the sales person will not learn as much as they could. If we focus, instead, on inspecting and coaching our people on how well they are executing the selling process, we will be helping them improve their ability to execute the process–improving their effectiveness not just with the deal we are reviewing, but with every other deal.
Sales management (all management) is about process! It’s about making sure we have the most effective and efficient processes in place. It’s about having metrics in place that help us identify how well the process is being executed. It’s about inspecting the process–making sure the process is in control. It’s where we have the greatest impact in developing our people, and the only way to put sanity in our lives.
