What is one piece of advice you would give a new sales manager?

Question posted by Jill Myrick at the Sales Playbook Group on LinkedIn

Blue Collar Sales Response:

Having been on both sides of that coin it will be difficult to pick just one piece of advice, especially since so many good points have been made.  Here goes:

Don’t ask your sales people how you can help them – you should already know.

Don’t ask them to call when they need you – you should already know.

Focus on maximizing technology (CRM, MA, etc.) to eliminate ALL manual reporting (outside the CRM) and time wasting meetings.  If sales people are filling out spreadsheets, sending word docs, written call reports, or emailing updates you are not leveraging technology, your CRM is not optimized and both you and your team are wasting valuable time.

Go fight for maximizing these tools instead of hounding your team for updates.

This week alone I heard several senior level sales leaders mention, “clean up” in the field.  Not one of them, all of them!  It was almost as if they met prior and shared notes – and they were all from different companies.  It was clear they meant administrative clean up.  It was clear that the topic was a dead horse when the comments were delivered and it was certainly clear that it was the damper on an otherwise good meeting.

If you can fight to put the systems in place and maximize their automation so that sales people can quickly update leads, accounts, and calls and you can include the fields that allow you to analyze the situation you will simplify both the salespersons life as well as your own.

Then you can focus on creating a collaborative environment where you can learn to win as a team.

You do not have to settle for doing things the way they always have been.  Fix the mechanics of the system, establish the proper analytics within those systems,  use them yourself,  and you will know when and how you can help your team.

Good Luck and Great Selling

Blue Collar Sales

Posted at Linked In: Sales Best Practices: Best method of motivating a Sales Team?

Hello All,

This is a response to the question: What is the best method to motivate sales? which was rephrased to: How to get better results from your team?

I appreciate your rephrase of the question and am surprised no one asked why you were posting the initial inquiry. It is obviously a question symptomatic to the real problem: Where are the leads, where are the opportunities?

I have noticed that when management asks, “How do I motivate?”, they really mean, “How do I get more sales revenue?’.

Having sold for many years, currently selling, and assisting several companies planning to sell, my suggestion is simple to say but difficult to do.

Invest in your infrastructure, specifically your sales and marketing infrastructure. Note I did not say your people, as everyone fears losing their investment. I said infrastructure which means selling tools, marketing tools, content creation ideas, social media tools, Sales 2.0 tools, or whatever structural tools are needed to reinvigorate your demand/lead generation process.

I rarely see a sales person demotivated when there is activity that can be developed into revenue opportunities.

Simple right? Difficult because what your asking implies that revenue, along with the economy, is slow and you will have a tough time parting with funds. I know as i just invested in a comprehensive infrastructure before having any clients!

As most of us ‘linkedin-bloggers’ know, there are a plethora of tools available to improve every aspect of sales and marketing.

You want to motivate sales? Offer them the chance to assemble and learn a state of the art (or state of the budget) sales and marketing system. Demonstrate your willingness to lead by investing in the infrastructure that, when used efficiently, will generate revenue for both the short and long term for your company and incidentally, the sales team.

Our two cents

Good Luck and Great Selling!

Blue Collar Sales