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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 »
I recently read an article by James Ledbetter of Slate Magazine entitled, Death of a Salesman. Of Lots of Them, Actually: The troubling disappearance of salesmen and how it helps explain America’s economic woes.
