You Really Think You Should Hire Your Sales Manager From Within?

In a cost-cutting effort the boss cut too deep, and it impacted his employees.

He thought he was being a good corporate employee/owner and ended up being a terrible sales manager.

In martial arts, horse training, and flirting you are taught that where the head goes, so goes the body.

This is true when it comes to sales management training, also, which is why there is such high turnover in sales: the leaders are not prepared to lead.

Look around at your own company or those at which you’ve worked in the past. Were the sales managers brought in from outside or promoted from within?

Most companies promote the highest performing sales person to sales manager and the only training the new sales manager receives is how to approve expense reports & vacation requests, and maybe how to create/review the CRM dashboards and create pivot tables in Excel. (I wish I was exaggerating. Then again, I’d be out of a job if people knew how to do this stuff.)

There’s a lot more to being an effective sales manager than staring at Excel files. (The #1 most important thing a sales manager must do is covered in the No More Sales Duds program here.)

Here are a few key reasons to provide regular sales management training:

1. Employee Retention. Top performing sales people quit because they don’t like their sales manager. Sure, they probably found a higher-paying job, but great sales people will always be in demand and are always being tempted to leave you. However, they don’t leave just for more money. So if your sales managers are competing with your sales people, if they are antagonistic, if they are impatient and challenging your sales people and telling them how great they were when they were “carrying a bag” then get prepared for lower morale, lower sales and higher turnover.

2. Employee Attraction. When your sales managers are solid people and solid leaders word will get out and top performing sales people will want to come work for him or her because birds of a feather really do fly north and south together.

3. More Money. You will sell more and work less when you have an excellent (or even an average) sales management training path or program. Your sales people that have ambition and want to grow will step up and ask to be considered to be included in the program and your top performing sales managers that want to remain at the top will raise their hands as well.

Just promoting from within because you have a top-producing sales person is not always the best way grow your business. The skills required to be a great sales manager do not spontaneously appear in people.

With the right sales management training program

• you will see esprit de corps improve within weeks if not days;

• you’ll see an uptick in sales within 90 days if not the first month;

• and you can be a new company with an increase of 30 to 100% in sales in 12 months.

There’s no problem a 50% increase in sales can’t handle.

If you need more help growing your sales, consider the following resources:

• Sell More This Month

• Find Your Best CRM

• Fix Your Follow Up Failure

• HubSpot vs Infusionsoft

• Ontraport vs Infusionsoft

Or just contact me and we’ll set a time to speak.

Good Selling,