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Sales Manager Checklist for the New Year

It’s a new year filled with hope and promise, a clean slate, and new sales goals. Hopefully you experienced a good year and got to celebrate a little bit, but it is time now to move on to attacking this year’s goals.

Here is a quick checklist for sales managers to make sure everyone is focused correctly.

All individual salespeople must know the expectations of them with regard to sales, including where the sales need to come from – new clients vs. expansion of existing clients or some combination thereof.
The compensation plan must be clearly articulated to each of the salespeople on the team […]

Sales Managers: Never, Ever, Ever Give Up

I was in a conversation with a friend and sales manager yesterday and we were discussing their fantastic year— including all the changes that have occurred and the great sales growth they have experienced. He shared with me that he felt a little guilty because he let off the gas. The team was hitting on all cylinders and they were beating sales expectations. He eased up a little. Sales faltered for a few months. He felt bad that he failed his sales team because they probably didn’t sell as much as they could have had he stayed focused.

This is a common […]

Sales Goals: Activities Don’t Necessarily Produce Results

I have written before about the need for sales managers to focus on activity goals with their salespeople as opposed to being only focused on the outcome goals (or closed business goals). There are many reasons for this:

Nobody can control whether or not the prospect or customer actually buys, so focusing exclusively on sales goals allows salespeople some room for excuse making. “The guy was never going to buy.” “He was such a jerk. It’s probably good he didn’t buy.”

If the sales manager gives direction to the salesperson to sell more, frequently the salesperson doesn’t really know how to make […]