5 Sales Management Errors That Make You Look Like An Ass

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Ralph

Sales management professionals unwittingly look like asses all the time.

I know, because I’ve done it plenty of times.

One time, I showed up for a sales meeting in front of my entire sales team with my fly wide open (I even had the t-shirt hanging out a little bit too).

Thank God for Dustin MacPherson who coughed “FLYIN LOW!!!” as I entered the room.

Dumb…horse’s ass.

Well, actually embarrassing is more like it…that could be entire series of sales management blog posts on sales management mistakes.

Looking dumb is inevitable, you just can’t avoid it – we’re all human and were going to make mistakes.

But as a sales manager, when you start making the same mistakes over and over again they make you look like an ass…and that’s when it becomes a real problem.

And when you look like an ass on a regular basis, your sales management leadership goes right down the crapper.

So in an effort to help you not to look like an ass in front of your sales team on a regular basis, in this sales management training here are five things Continue reading →

Sales Management Training | Why Sales Quotas Don’t Work

Posted on March 15, 2012 by Ralph

bad sales management Why are so many sales management organizations struggling right now?

It’s not because of the economy…

It’s not because of lazy salespeople (we’ll always have those)…

It’s not because you’re getting squeezed on price because everyone is looking for the lowest price…

It’s because most sales organizations are still using the old and tired way of measuring a salesperson’s effectiveness: sales quotas.

The Sales Management Myth of the Sales Quota

Nearly 100% of all sales management organizations assign sales quotas.

However, less than 10% of all sales organizations assign Continue reading →

The Sales Management Trick to Motivating A Players

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Ralph

a player sales management I once had a salesperson who just wanted to be left alone.

He was one of my top salespeople, an A player, and I figured he knew best.

“Leave well enough alone”, I thought. And I happily spent my time coaching my other, less effective sales reps; the ones who “needed me”.

I figured this was a pretty solid sales management strategy.

That is, until he left to go to the competition in his third year with the company. It was almost exactly a year after I had become his sales manager.

I always regretted that “leaving him alone” decision and I learned never to do it again…especially after he started eating our lunch in the territory he vacated to go to the competition.

The Sales Management Dilemma of The A Player

Your sales people probably tell you that they want to “run their territory as if it’s the business”. They think they’re in charge of their own destinies and all I have to do is just Continue reading →

7 Steps to Sales Management Coaching, Part 2

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Ralph

sales management Christmas ornament In the last sales management training post, I left you hanging like a cheap ornament on a Christmas tree (which I just took down yesterday and still have pine needles all over my living room)…

The truth is I was catching a plane back East and I just ran out of time to get all 7 steps into the first post.

Then Christmas came, then New Years….

Enough of the excuses, here are the rest of the 7 steps to sales management coaching here.

This is a great way to start off the New Year and really get some momentum going in 2012.

And it all starts with good solid sales management coaching.

As you may recall from our previous post, the first three steps to effective sales management coaching Continue reading →

Seven Steps to Effective Sales Management Coaching, Part 1

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Ralph

seven sales management coaching It’s a tragedy that sales management coaching is the most underutilized skill in the sales manager’s bag of tricks.

The even greater tragedy is that if sales managers did actually take the time to coach their salespeople, and did it right, the effectiveness of those salespeople would quickly improve.

In survey after survey done with thousands of sales managers from around the world, “lack of time” consistently comes up as the number one reason why sales managers don’t coach their salespeople.

In those same surveys, the second reason why sales managers don’t sales coach is that when they’re pushed on how to actually coach their sales teams, the majority have very little idea how to do it.

This is largely because they have never received any formalized sales management training on coaching.

The Sales Management Coaching Dilemma

So how does a sales manager make time for sales coaching and do it effectively at the same time? Continue reading →