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In my last post I talked about how changes in customer behavior have made our growth goals harder and harder.  Specifically, customers may be more open to buying a vision, but getting a deal to completion has gotten a lot more challenging, and less predictable.  And our biggest leverage point for helping navigate customer organizations to get a deal done?  Managers.

The first-line manager has arguably always been the most important (and least-defined) role in a sales organization.  But recent changes in customer behavior, coupled with the shift to solution selling, have changed what matters most for managers.  So here’s the new story of manager excellence.

As a reminder, we amassed a huge dataset from our Manager Effectiveness Survey – over 5,000 returned surveys regarding over 1,000 managers – to explain the primary drivers of manager excellence.

Our first finding is no surprise:  managers need to be good at the fundamentals.  These are things like integrity, reliability and listening, which are important to any manager, not just sales managers.   Luckily, it turns out most managers are good at these.   For the 3.5% of our sample who failed at the fundamentals—they’re probably not cut out for a job in management.

More interesting are the sales-specific activities that matter most.  These fall into three high-level categories, with the impact on performance in parentheses:

• Selling (26.6%) – being personally effective at selling, particularly the Challenger™ behaviors
• Coaching (28.0%) – helping others improve, particularly with tailoring and asserting control
• Owning the Business (45.4%) – when managers run their territory as if it were their own business

Owning the Business breaks down into two parts:     Read More »

One drawback of being a consultant is that the first response to most questions can end up being a variation of “it depends”. It’s thus a wonderful thing that the question we are asked most often here at the Council has a simple, absolute answer. The question is about the number of direct reports that a sales manager should have. And the answer is: 8.

In our 2010 study of sales leadership, we found that the median span of control for a sales manager was 8 (the average was a little higher at 9.84, basically at 1:10). In 2008, the median was again 8. In 2007, the median span of control was a little lower at 7.4.

Part of why this number has to be 8 is driven by how a sales manager spends their time.  Assuming that a sales manager spends their time in a standard fashion, they will have approximately 8 hours a week to devote to coaching. And if we assume that a meaningful coaching interaction is about spending 3-5 hours with somebody per month, then that means that your average sales manager can coach 2 people per week. Assuming 4 weeks a month, that means that your average sales manager can manage a maximum of 8 people.

If you were ambitious, then you might assume that a sales manager can spend up to 3 days in the field, which would suggest that the maximum number of direct reports a sales manager can closely manage is probably around 12 people. But the manager with that many direct reports cannot be long responsible for too many reports or too many other things; they simply don’t have the time and they will likely leave a cross-section of their direct reports to essentially fend for themselves.

But there’s something about the consistency of the number eight across firms that is fascinating, and it made me wonder if others had observed a similar thing.  Read More »

For many years, the Council has been preaching the mantra of having sales managers spend at least 3 hours a month on coaching and developing each direct report. This year’s work on sales manager effectiveness has dramatically re-confirmed that advice.

It is once again true that the average amount of time a manager spends with their direct reports is the best, single predictor of the quality of the relationship. Once somebody spends a material amount of time with their manager, it is then more of a matter of what happens in that time.

The alarming part is that 47% of reps report receiving under the magic 3 hours and 6% of reps report receiving no coaching at all. Thus, for many sales leaders the simple advice is to start by inspecting how some managers spend their time. When you don’t see an average of 3 hours occurring, then you should try and engineer an occasion where you can observe the manager and the rep work together.

Sometimes you will find that the rep has no great desire to spend time with their manager. Depending on the rep’s performance level this might be an acceptable reaction, though not one you would like to encourage. This is when you might want to consider moving reporting relationships.

A lot of the time, the issue is simple lack of staying power. The weekly pull-ups are too easy to push off since something else will always seem more urgent. This is where a simple coaching pulse survey can work wonders as it permits periodic inspection and sends a clear message that senior managers value these interactions. Read More »

You count on your star salespeople. They’ve delivered the number time and time again, so you know you can lean on them in a pinch. But how do you know when you’re leaning on a star too much?

In a prolonged pinch like the recent global recession, we ask more from our salespeople than ever. It is perhaps unsurprising then that 73% of reps believe that their sales goals are unachievable. This is a cause for concern; we all know that nothing deflates sales rep morale like an unreachable goal.

To combat this risk, conventional wisdom teaches us to watch for the tell-tale signs of employee burnout – particularly with star performers who are  exceptionally prone to overextension. 

But according to Duke University (and U.S. Olympic) Men’s Basketball coach Mike Kryryzewski, all of this pooh-poohing of star performers is nonsense. Kyryzewski (a.k.a. Coach K) has faced a media onslaught in recent months for the unusually high minutes-per-game his stars log.

The questions are not unfounded: of the Atlantic Coast Conference’s four “most-played” basketball players this year, three are at Duke. In fact, all five of the most-played athletes in ACC history have played under Coach K, leading some analysts to attribute Duke’s chronic NCAA tournament underperformance in recent years to late season fatigue.

Contrarian though it may be, Kryryzewski’s take on the issue – which he says he’s learned from years of experience – is simple:  When the going gets tough, your stars want to play. That’s a big part of why they’re stars. The best thing you can do as a leader is let them play. Read More »

2005 was the year the Council first investigated how sales managers should coach their direct reports. At this point in time, we had never heard of credit default swaps and while everybody said they were worried about inflation, unemployment numbers were low and members were relatively sanguine about the prospects for continued growth. The pressure on the sales force was really centered on trying to accelerate the sales cycle. Buyers themselves were often looking to add capacity and were generally willing to cooperate with efforts designed to speed up decision-making.

Today, things couldn’t be more different from an economic perspective and the sales force is more worried about closing the sale than trying to accelerate the sales cycle per se. And so, we have returned to the topic of sales management this year and are investigating what new requirements are being placed on sales managers.

While we are still collecting data from our sellers in terms of the behaviors they observe from their manager, we do have some early observations. First, sales reps continue to score their managers low in terms of the coaching they provide. Fully 66% of sales reps indicate that their manager does worse at coaching as opposed to the other behaviors that a sales manager will need to demonstrate, such as planning, assessing risks, championing new initiatives or even delivering bad news to senior management. Read More »