Sales Management

What does management have to do with sales growth? Everything! It’s analogous to a head coach in football. What does the coach do?

• Determines strategy
• Drives the actions/plays
• Motivates the players
• Trains or ensures that the players are trained
• Makes personnel decisions to ensure victory

Sound familiar? As sales manager your tasks are identical. You’re the one driving the process. You’re the one calling the shots. However a football coach might have an advantage over you. You’ve seen them on the sidelines with the headsets. They are getting the information they need in real time to make the decisions that they need to make. Ownership ensures that they are given absolutely every possible advantage to win. This advantage is immediate knowledge and data. For example, if time is running out and the team is losing, do you onside kick? Well that’s going to depend on statistics. How effective is your time at recovering them? How effective is the opponent. That information is fed directly into the coach’s ear at the critical time.

Do you have something that gives you the critical data that you need in order to make the decisions to win? What data am I talking about? How about these to start:

• Number of deals in pipeline
• Number of deals ready to closing and total value
• Current incumbents that we are up against
• Proactive differentiators (wedges) and their effectiveness
• Producer goals and scoreboard

If you have that data at your fingertips, I assert that it will have you make decisions based much more on real situations and real probability rather than on gut feel. I know that this makes a huge difference in management effectiveness from my decades of consulting. That’s why it’s in iWin