Managers, especially sales managers, are often seen by their direct reports as people who do not make mistakes. While they are less prone to making mistakes because of their hard work and experience, the truth is, they are not immune to it. Errors often stem from the early days of being managers, when they are still transitioning from being salesmen to suddenly being responsible for several other employees.
This role is one of the toughest in sales because of the responsibilities involved. Aside from the weight of accountability, there are a lot of distractions and challenges. Identifying the areas where mistakes can happen is critical in ensuring that one becomes a manager of the highest performing sales team.
Mistakes commonly happen at this ‘transition’ stage of a manager getting his feet wet in management. Fortunately, with the help of a little foresight, they can all be prevented from ever happening. Below are five of the most common mistakes made by sales managers and how to avoid or correct them.
1. Letting go of the previous role
Being a great salesman does not automatically guarantee that the person is fit to be a manager. Salespeople who become sales managers often suffer from going back to their intuitive style while still selling. While this is effective when you are only responsible for your performance stats, it may prove less than adequate when dealing with the whole team’s stats. People who have surpassed this challenge say that as a new sales manager, one should make that choice to learn how to lead a team.
The key is to stop selling and stop yourself from acting like a salesperson when you are in the leadership role. Being too busy with your own sales can jeopardise the whole sales team as a whole. When you step into being a manager, it means the sales of those reporting directly to you become your statistics.
2. Being reactive
Another perfect example of the previous role overlapping the new one is that you immediately take over when you see a salesperson making a mistake. Doing this may be useful in the short term, but you take away learning from the person involved directly. Managers who make this mistake are on the reactive side of problems where they wait for the issues to happen instead of preventing it in the first place.
As a fixer, you will end up micro-managing everything your team members do instead of focusing on steering the entire team towards success. When you are always making yourself available to fix these problems, you essentially make your team reliant on you. This is dangerous as it can stagnate even those who would have otherwise shown potential, as well as overloading you with needless tasks.
Avoiding this involves a 360-degree move where you become proactive instead of reactive. This means that instead of intervening every time on a deal, training and passing down the knowledge to your people should be the primary focus. Although problems should always be fixed, a manager should coach his reports on how to solve them instead of stepping in themselves to do it.
3. Becoming a desk rider
Analytics are essential, and numbers even more so in sales, but when you overdo it and look at numbers all day long cooped up in your office, it is not healthy. Quantifying data is an essential aspect of managing a team, but it is not everything. As a sales manager and a coach, one should strive for a balance between the office and the field to keep yourself apprised of your team’s situation.
Keep an eye on your numbers but keep an even closer look at how your team plays individually. Doing this will always give you that overall awareness of where you are at in terms of your team goals and act accordingly.
4. Losing your presentation skills edge
Salespeople are excellent at selling either their products or themselves. Presentation is a skill that is quite valuable in sales, and it is a skill that always needs constant practice. Improving your sales presentation skills does not stop when you become a manager, but instead, it intensifies. If you fail to continuously hone your presentation skills, you could make your team’s presentation less effective, but there are far more damaging effects than just that.
Poor presentation skills can make you lose accounts and business, and that is simply unacceptable in sales. As a manager, always plan for continuous learning and retraining both for yourself and your team members. It is still advisable to reach out via regular staff meetings and use the opportunity to give out feedback. Not just that, but you can also incorporate presentation training on top of the typical things discussed in these meetings. You can also have professional training with your team that focuses explicitly on presentation.
5. Not knowing when to delegate
Making sure everything is in order by doing it themselves is a classic mistake rookie leaders or managers make. Delegation is a skill that anyone in the leadership role needs to master early on. In a team, delegating tasks is crucial because not everyone can do everything by themselves. Without distributing workload, a manager can quickly become overloaded, decreasing their effectiveness.
Delegating does more than just clearing up your schedule. It helps boost morale by making your team members feel trusted and allow them to develop other skills. It is a valuable teaching tool to make sure your subordinates are ready for different future roles. Avoid this by making sure you discard the notion that delegation is just passing on workload and embracing the idea that it is a genuine learning opportunity.
Wrap up
The list above is not exhaustive, but these are reasonably common pitfalls that need avoiding when taking up the leadership mantle. Avoiding just one or two will propel you that much closer to becoming the ideal sales manager, leading a highly productive and successful sales team.
Authored by Angeline Licerio
This article is supported by ant-digi.com