New sales managers face a lot of new challenges. Needless to say, this can lead to an initial feeling of being overwhelmed.
As they seek to develop the skills to work through new challenges, there is a tendency to gravitate back to what they know how to do – in the case of new sales managers, it’s usually selling.
When this happens what are these new sales managers doing? They’re going granular! When new sales managers go granular, they spend too little mastering their new job and too much time doing their old job. While it might be a short-term high, the long-term consequences are mostly negative. For example, one of the more telling downsides is failing to focus on the priority that coaching their sales team requires.
We all want to do what we’re good at. But when salespeople are promoted and become new sales managers, they need to think about the roles and responsibilities of their new position – and how they’ll they can avoid going granular. Six questions that might provide a kick-start:
- If I attend that sales call, am I making a unique contribution?
- Have I developed a performance profile of my sales team?
- Have I figured out how to maximize the time the sales team spends selling?
- Has time been devoted time to learning how to sales coaching?
- Have I developed the knowledge required to leverage the available institutional resources to help my sales team?
- Have I started to develop the skills to help the sales team to think and act strategically?
Sales managers are the pivotal job for developing a superior sales force. So there is clear and urgent need for new sales managers to master their new job as soon as possible.
