Manage Your Sales Team As You Would Your Best Customers

Do you treat your sales people like you do your best customers?

 If you are a sales director heading up a team of sales people, you can’t fail to have read or been trained up on the importance of building customer rapport, understanding customer needs, selling, closing and generally managing customers for long term growth. In fact, you may well have been through a number of selling structures in your career as a sales person and be pretty good at managing profitable long term customer relationships.

I started off in field sales at United Biscuits selling KP Nuts, Hula Hoops and McVities Digestives. I did well, I was promoted and relocated from my Yorkshire roots to London to manage ten reps.I was good at selling and dealing with customers, I got the management job didn’t I?

So how did I do when I had to get ten other people to sell? Well I kind of assumed they knew what they were doing, went with them to see customers every now and then, asked if the were OK, praised them if they hit target and was disappointed if they didn’t. If I look back and am honest, I’m not sure how good and rounded a job I did with that team.

We did OK and won the ‘Peanut Incentive’ to The Grand Hotel in Brighton, a memorable weekend that kept the most of the team motivated for a while, but did I really lead them to high performance, getting the most out of each individual?

OK, I was only twenty six and since then, have management multi-million pound accounts myself as well as leading teams of sales people, distributors, marketing and customer marketing managers in both the UK and Ireland. I have also been fortunate enough to have been trained, not just in selling, negotiation and so on, but in how to manage people to get the best results they can, which is what I still do now.

The two fundamental rules, I have learned about managing salespeople, and which is the foundation of Commercial Leadership are:

1. Salespeople are your customers, albeit internal.
2. Treat your salespeople ( and other staff too) as you would your top customers.

So what does that mean then?

The good news is that if you, as the leader, have been a great salesperson, which you almost certainly have , you already know how to get the best out of your team.

Just treat your sales people like you would your best customers. Easy!

In this series of three blogs we are going to look at Commercial Leadership’s Top Three Tips for Managing Sales People Like Customers, and, no surprise, they are also my top three sales skills:

 

1. High Result Questions – questions that give you lots and lots of relevant information.
2. Clean Listening – focusing on the answers rather than your own agenda.
3. Explicitness – making your points so clear that your impact always matches their intention.

So, as a sales director, what three things could you do to manage your sales people like your best customers?

Click here to see How To Get More Profitable Results Through People

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