The other day, I spoke to a business owner who had given his new sales rep a sales target of $1.2-million.
When I asked how his new sales rep was doing on his goal, the owner admitted the salesperson had not closed a single piece of business in his first six months on the job. In other words, the seven-figure target was a joke, and the salesperson would be lucky to hit 10 per cent of his plan by year’s end.
Most business owners make great salespeople but lousy sales managers. As the owner of your company, you’re probably your business’s best sales rep because you have miles of credibility, you know your industry and your product and you can sell based on the depth of your experience.
Almost by definition, your salespeople are going to have less industry knowledge, so they need a different set of skills and experiences to draw from. What’s more, you’re probably not going to give them the support they would get from a traditional sales manager.
A sales manager’s job is to make his or her salespeople successful. Good managers meet regularly (at least weekly, if not daily) with their reps to discuss their progress. They have their salespeople prepare a sales funnel and manage their numbers. Great sales managers think of sales as a simple game of managing their reps’ numbers.
For example, they might know that 100 leads typically yield 10 meetings, which will convert to three proposals, which will result in one sale. Instead of hounding their reps for a sale, the best sales managers focus on the status of the funnel, making sure their sales reps have the right number of leads and meetings, which they know – if they just work the system – will result in the right number of sales.
As business owners, we usually make crappy sales managers. First, we’re rarely so process-oriented to have the patience to work a system like the kind that the best sales managers follow.
Second, we’re too busy putting out fires to meet regularly with our sales reps – something else always comes up.
Third, we’re too optimistic. Our glass is always three-quarters full, which leads us to develop unrealistic budgets and set salespeople up for failure before they even start.
Given our inherent weakness for managing salespeople, what should business owners do if we can’t afford a sales manager but need someone to replace us as the company’s salesperson?
My suggestion is that you work under the assumption that your employee won’t get the traditional management and support most salespeople need, so, when hiring your first salesperson, consider only prospects who could work manager-free.
One of the things I notice when I look back on winning salespeople I have hired is that they were all self-directed. In other words, they didn’t need a lot of hand-holding from me.
When it comes to expectations of sales staff, there is a big distinction between large and small businesses. In a big business, salespeople work under many layers of sales management. Sales managers design the territories, targets, sales process, support material and offers. All salespeople really have to do is follow the system, and they will usually achieve a decent level of success. In fact, some of the best-performing salespeople in a large company are primarily just good at adhering to a system.
In a small business, none of the infrastructure exists. Budgets are largely a guess, territories are blurry and what could laughingly be described as a sales process is really just a series of habits that the business owner follows unconsciously.
