Front line management is tough regardless of your functional area. As a manager you need to deal with scheduling, employees’ personal issues, training and emergencies you could never have anticipated. When you’re a front line sales manager you have to throw into the mix the high visibly of having to generate the revenue month in and month out.
Many consultants, trainers, and poorly developed sales leaders have contributed to making the sales manager’s job exponentially more difficult. The added difficulty has been mostly presented as trying to be helpful when in fact it takes a difficult job into the impossible to succeed zone. Some examples of sending a sales manager in the wrong direction can be found in suggestions like “always be recruiting,” a focus to irrelevant metrics, such as phone calls as the critical success factor, and the concept that the manager should “spend your time in the field.” Sadly, those three concepts are the beginning and the end of many sales managers’ repertoire of daily activities.
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I am sure I have many managers, and even vice president of sales and company owners, confused at this point so I’ll take a second to debunk these concepts. First, the only reason you’d need to be constantly recruiting is if you had tremendous turnover. If that were the case then as a manager you should be focused on what is driving that turnover and spend your time fixing that issue rather than continuing to put employees in a situation where they cannot achieve success. If you were in an industry where you were growing like wildfire, say some aspect of cloud computing, and were expanding your sales force at 50 percent to 100 percent per year then hire some staff recruiters to take on that role. Should networking with high performing sales professional be part of a manager’s role? Absolutely, but if a manager were always doing something, my hope would be that it was developing their team members.
When it comes to metrics, phone calls are basically like measuring if your sales person shows up for work. If you hired a sales person and then have to tell them that they need to prospect you made a bad hire, a really bad hire. Moreover, if I really wanted to measure activity in 2014, e-mail would be my primary metric (I am not suggesting you measure this level of activity with a sales professional except on a short-term remedial situation. If you have to go more than two weeks you’re telling them they have to work.) And “field time” is one very important aspect of the manager’s real job, developing each person on their team. But when there is a general rule that the manager should “be in the field” I’d bet the field is Starbucks or some other location with free Wi-Fi where they can meet with their team members, work with their database, and make phone calls.
How do you provide an environment where your sales manager can achieve success? First and foremost, measure the success of your manager on how many members of their team achieve success. Because the manager’s primary responsibility should be to develop their team members this has to be the primary measurement of success. If this isn’t happening in your company you probably have one or more of the following issues:
- Your compensation plan isn’t structured to attract quality sales professionals.
- The “territory” you put the sales professional in is actually a geography of businesses they are expected to crack open with little or no base of accounts.
- Your sales development efforts are based on randomly and physically cold calling businesses.
- Your sales management support is going in the field to close deals.
- Your sales manager has his or her own territory.
If you want to understand if you have a competitive pay plan go to salary.com and get a compensation report for the job description in your ZIP code—it’s free. I ran the report for account executive in my ZIP code (19010). Below is the job description and salary overview.
Account Executive: Develops and maintains favorable relationships with new and existing clients in order to increase revenue. Ensures that organizational goods or services consistently meet client needs. May be responsible for providing sales quotations as well as sustaining and renewing client contracts. May require a bachelor’s degree in area of specialty and at least 3 years of experience in the field or in a related area. Familiar with a variety of the field’s concepts, practices, and procedures. Relies on experience and judgment to plan and accomplish goals. Performs a variety of tasks. A wide degree of creativity and latitude is expected. Typically reports to a supervisor or manager.
For my ZIP code the median annual base salary for this position is $65,963. To be clear, that is the base salary at the 50 percent point. Annual base salary at the 75 percent range is $75,695. A 25-year-old friend of my daughter just left the copier industry after two years and joined a medical device company with a $75,000 base salary working in Charleston, S.C. He initially tried to get into this field after graduating college, but because his GPA didn’t meet the standard he needed experience so he used our industry for that experience. Maybe if his current salary wasn’t 50 percent of the medical salary he would have remained in our industry. The 10 percent point for base salary is $46,187, meaning that only 10 percent of people who take the job as an account executive—with three years of experience—start with a base salary at or below $46,187. Do you offer a salary above the 10 percent point? If you don’t is it fair to assume that 90 percent of the sales candidates have taken other positions.
After attracting the correct candidates and selecting those that can achieve success at your company, having a sound territory structure is the next foundation to success. Territory also drives quota. If you were selling a $200,000 ERP that customarily had an additional $300,000 in consulting fees for implementation it wouldn’t be logical to have a $500,000 quota because you’d effectively be stating that one sale a year was acceptable. If you have a sales professional with $600,000 of devices in the field (DIF) that would be refreshed this year then that same lack of logic would be in play if this sales professional carried a $600,000 quota since they could achieve that quota without any wallet share gains or net new customers. On the other hand giving a sales professional with no DIF a quota of $420,000 is basically setting them up to fail.
Telling a sales professional to “go out and find business,” without narrowing their focus to the correct types and size of account is wasting a resource. In next week’s post I will pick-up where I left off with territory structure and begin the conversation on developing your sales team so that you experience lower turnover with higher productivity.
Don’t miss our upcoming Strategic Sales Management Training on May 6th and 7th in Philadelphia! Click here for more information.
