A top sales manager accomplishes this job by providing particular behavioral feedback. It really is in no way a simple task. Every single sales rep possesses his or her own set of behaviors she or he brings on the job. The top sales manager should be able to analyze these kinds of behaviors based on evaluations and turn them right into feedback in a way that could promote growth as well as good change from the sales representative.

One particular way to accomplish this is to try to produce a joint perception-between the sales manager and sales representative- of the expectations and type of teaching the sales person must improve his or her game. For example, during pre-call preparation, a top sales manager can use this opportunity to take notes of important information as well as his very own findings to use as feedback in the future.

Sales management is a hard job, sure, but who ever said otherwise? If anything at all, it is among the most emotionally fulfilling jobs on the planet, knowing that you did whatever you can to support somebody get better in their own career.

When it comes to helping everyone, a top sales manager acknowledges the power behind giving positive behavioral feedback. Confident sales reps produce better results, period. Top sales managers understand this, and adjust their own methods accordingly. Underperformers could even change and even start out generating continuous sales, whereas average sales reps, under the proper motivation, might grow to become sales superstars one day!

Who knows? Anything can be done with the correct assistance of the top sales manager who knows whatever he is doing.

For even more helpful information on sales manager training, visit our website for more great sales management tips

Inside of this sales management training we are going to enumerate several basic day-to-day methods sales management specialists can readily employ even when performing mundane everyday duties which will inspire and lead their own sales teams more effectively.

1.Use humor

Instead of humiliating your salesperson the next time they make an error, use humor instead.

One of the most powerful industrialists in the 20th century, Charles Schwab operated US Steel in the early twenties. He boasted an uncanny skill for using humor in just the correct spots to encourage and lead his troops. One day, he was taking a walk through one of his company’s steel mills when he noticed a small group of his workers enjoying a cigarette break immediately opposite a “no smoking” sign. Refraining from berating these guys, he comfortably stepped up to the steel workers, distributed to each of them a stogie from his breast pocket and announced, “I’ll appreciate it boys, if you’ll smoke these outside.”

Schwab accomplished the task using a genius stroke of humbleness, kindness, in addition to humor. Wouldn’t you really want to work with a manager such as that?

2.Try to avoid criticism whenever possible.

One of the greatest methods to really encourage a salesperson is to steer clear of criticizing these people directly. Criticism doesn’t transform behavior; instead it in many cases has the opposite effect in that it can make salespeople resentful.

Whenever at all possible, bring about change using a positive approach by not calling attention to foibles specifically, instead do it circuitously so the actual sales rep is not humbled and maintains their self-esteem.

3. Refrain from issuing direct instructions

Typically, providing choices as opposed to orders is the best way to spur adjustment in behavior. In place of saying your sales force to “do this” or “do that”, consider alternatively saying “have you ever considered this?” or “Do you think this might work instead?”

If you permit your sales agents to resolve a situation for themselves and learn from their particular mistakes, this saves their ego and provides them a sensation of importance that motivates and directs simultaneously.

4. Speak to people’s interests.

The very last secret to motivating salesmen is to just get to know them. Get to know what they want, become familiar with their the entire family, get acquainted with their kids, get to know their own desires and recognize what’s most important to them. As a sales leader, unless you know your sales agents and determine what’s most essential to your salesmen, you’re never going to be able to get what you really want.

The path to effective sales management is to understand what’s most significant to every one of your sales force, then discuss the things that he or she treasures most.

To learn more about sales management training, click here to get more great information on sales management.

He was called a “leadership genius” and acclaimed as “one of the top management gurus to come along in over a century”. He earned it. Management By Walking Around (MBWA) was groundbreaking during its time.

But it wasn’t that big a deal – if you ask me.

MBWA was simply common sense. So okay. Maybe that’s why it became popular in the first place. MBWA was a simple yet effective solution to sales management. I guess that kind of stuff doesn’t come around more than once in a century.

A sales manager could be a management genius too by following what Tom Peters advocated more than thirty years ago—that is, by incorporating “roving sales leadership” into your style of management. I know, we all have our way of doing things. But MBWA is so simplistic in its approach that you might as well be doing it already without you knowing it.

Management By Walking Around talks about establishing trust with your fellow sales reps by understanding first and foremost their trials and achievements through their level of perspective.

You can’t expect to understand your sales reps—and them to understand you—if you’re giving out errands from your comfortable office chair in front of the computer. You need to get out there and know what’s really going on. Like I said in my previous posts, human contact is key to any relationship. Period.

If you’re expecting people to email you in the office any time of the day, set up an auto-responder to say that you’re unavailable from 1 PM to 4 PM on weekdays. Set your messenger status to “Busy” or “Not here right now”. Those people can wait. Your sales team, on the other hand, is only waiting for you to make a deposit in their Trust Account.

To learn more about sales management training, click here to get your choice of free sales management training courses.

Tell me what you think about establishing a personal relationship with your salespeople by posting a response to this post.

Motivating and retaining a high-performance sales force is an important undertaking. You need to start with the right people, set attainable goals, find effective ways to motivate your team and ensure that everyone – including you – completes appropriate sales training. These key steps will get you and your team moving in the right direction:

• Hire internal sales staff rather than outsourcing.

While it might be tempting consider outsourcing as a way to save money, it’s best to have a sales force that is focused exclusively on your products rather than one that is juggling multiple clients. An in-house sales team will allow you greater control over the sales function and enable you to set strategy for the entire sales organization.

• Look for certain characteristics when hiring.

The best salespeople share certain characteristics in common. To assemble a winning sales team, look for candidates with the following traits:

o   Eager to learn

o   Highly competitive

o   Great listening skills

o   Undaunted by rejection

o   Confident and optimistic

• Be clear in your expectations.

Before sending your team out into their territories, make sure that all team members are aware of their responsibilities and your expectations. Review goals and objectives with each person, and put their deliverables and compensation in writing. Clear communication helps eliminate questions or confusion.

• Use both financial and non-financial incentives to motivate your team.

While a commission-based compensation plan provides strong motivation, including base pay can help you attract and retain great people. This approach guarantees a minimum income during lean times, which helps keep morale high and minimizes the risk of losing experienced staff. A comprehensive benefits program can help you compete for the best salespeople, and public recognition is another way to encourage and reward outstanding performance.

• Obtain formal sales training for your team – and yourself.

Invest in some form of professional sales training for your entire staff, to ensure that all team members have a consistently high level of knowledge and skills. Consider online sales training that your reps can enroll in together but complete at their own pace and on their own schedule. An online certificate program offers the added benefit of official sales credentials, which can be a strong motivator. But don’t overlook your own training needs, because even the best managers have room for improvement. If you’re new to your role, look for sales management training designed to help you make the transition into a supervisory role. If you’re a veteran sales manager, seek out expert-level sales management training.

By following these steps, you can put your sales team – and your career – firmly on the path to success.

This is a guest post by the University of San Francisco who offers a sales management training master certificate program.  The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of University of San Francisco and do not necessarily reflect those of Top Sales Manager Blog.

To learn more about sales management training, click here to get your choice of free sales management training courses.

Its especially useful when you are trying to get new or struggling salespeople to do the right things, even when despite their best efforts, they continue to screw stuff up.

The corollary is: praise them even when they DON”T get it exactly right.

What the average sales manger does is if a salesperson shows progress on a task but can’t fully complete it due to lack of knowledge or skill, the average sales manager withholds praise and approval entirely. They simply wait until the salesperson gets it exactly right. And even then, when they get it done exactly the way its supposed to be done, the average sales manager probably never praises them at that point either.

The key difference is that the truly great sales manager praises every correct step along the way. Then he praises even more when it is done to exact completion!

If you truly want to get your salespeople to perform at peak levels, this is the key.

The reason is that the number one motivator of people is feedback on results – and as long as you maintain a continuous stream of feedback, whether positive or constructive directed towards your salespeople, you will be well on your way to sales management success.

To learn even more about sales manager training, get our free sales manager training.

What do you think about all this Masterful Praising stuff? Feel free to post a comment below.

There are a lot of nice things you could say…

“He’s a real nice guy”
“She’s very kind”
“He’s really funny”

The list goes on and on.

But when you speak of the people who are closest to you, maybe your best friend you’ve known for 20 years, the most important one is:

“I trust him”

What if all your company’s sales reps were asked the same question about you…and they answered the same way?

How powerful do you think that would that be?

How much more powerful leaders and motivators would you be?

Because once a sales manager establishes or re-establishes trust with their salespeople, then and only then can they start to optimally lead and motivate them…but not one second earlier.

Without that foundation of trust, the job of “sales leader” is twenty times more difficult.

At every turn, every possible moment, a sales manager needs to look for ways to strengthen their sales reps trust in them.

Far too many average sales managers try to lead first, but never bother to establish trust with their reps at any level.

Although unfortunate for their sales reps, this is very good for you and your company. Because if ALL sales managers led their troops this way, it would be far more difficult for your teams to surpass them.

To optimally lead sales reps and unleash explosive sales results, you need to be on the same page as your sales reps. They need to speak their language, and the only way they will listen is if they implicitly trust what they have to say.

What you need to do is make regular deposits in “The Trust Account”. This is our foundational concept for sales managers who read this blog, as well as for those who are members of the Sales Management Mastery Academy.

To learn even more about sales training, get our free ebook.

Post a comment and tell me how do you get your sales reps to trust you?

The best, high-performing sales managers observe their salespeople.

They notice that there are certain core talents each individual has. They make mental notes of their salespeople’s strengths as well as their weaknesses. They know that they can leverage their talents as a launching point to coax even greater performance out of their salespeople.

For example, lets compare two top performing salespeople, both having achieved the highest sales awards in their companies with great track records of success.

• “Jane” has an incredible talent for building rapport, easily weaving pleasant conversation with the true sales pitch. Jane’s manner is easygoing and laid-back, but hides a profound inner drive. She is completely in control of the situation at all times and asks many layered questions of the prospect to uncover their needs. Instead of being “all business”, she talks about jewelry, kids and other non-business activities; easily mixing in rapport building with selling through out the process. She doesn’t take herself too seriously, taking time for some self-deprecating asides, but constantly driving towards the sale. She uses no real reference pieces, instead relies on her easy, trustworthy manner to build credibility. When it comes to the end, she doesn’t really “close” per se as much as she just assumes they will be moving on to the next step.

• In contrast, “Tom” is incredibly persistent, he is a little bit awkward in his approach, but people respect him due to his aggressiveness and “never taking no” mentality. When he is in a sales call, he’s all business, no rapport building whatsoever, but asks few precisely worded questions to uncover his client’s needs. Just like his initial approach, when he hears objections, he aggressively asks the reasons behind the objections, then pulls out reference materials to overcome the objections and validate his claims. At the end of the sale, he asks “alternate close questions”, awaits responses before proceeding and aggressively pushes for the next step, and is very successful in doing so.

Would you as the sales manager for both Jane and Tom look at the above scenarios and think to yourself: “If I could just get Jane to use more reference materials and ask more hard close questions, she would really be even better!”

Or would you think: “Tom’s just too rough, I need to get him to soften up his hard edge and build more rapport. He also needs to ask more questions to uncover needs.”

In both cases, you would be falling into the most common, yet well-meaning trap that average sales managers make. You would be trying to perfect them, and I have news for you…your efforts will be futile.

The path to true sales motivation is not perfecting…rather its accepting. Accept Jane for who she is and accept Tom for who he is and dont try to change either one…rather harness and bring out more of each one and harness that talent.

In the process you’ll motivate them both…and you’ll succeed fabulously as well.

To learn more about sales management training, click here to get your choice of free sales management training courses.

Post a comment below and tell me how YOU motivate your sale reps.

And OK, if you do that, then there’s a whole lot in it for your as well….big bonus checks, top rankings, bragging rights to your peers and maybe even a shot at a promotion…

But here’s the dilemma…..there’s no way to achieve all this by just learning one or two individual things. You can learn a few tips and techniques from a bunch of different and varied sources and cobble together your own idea of how to achieve big things as a sales manager.

This is probably what you were doing before you stumbled on this blog.

This “fragmented” approach to improving your sales management effectiveness is doomed for failure because it’s so hard to form a cohesive style and approach, then try all the techniques and figure out which ones work and which ones don’t, this takes time. As you may have already guessed, if you wanted to find all the answers yourself, that taking the time to find all the answers to the sales management questions you are so interested in getting answered would take an enormous amount of time, not to mention a ton of money…

The things is that if you can’t learn all the top sales management training techniques you need to learn IN ISOLATION of each other knowing full well that it will only give you moderately successful outcome but you need each component to be organized IN RELATION TO how it fits in to an overall program.

This is the reason why after years of training individual sales managers, we decided to put together The Sales Management Mastery Academy – so that you can get all the elements of top sales management training in one singular, cohesive program – with each element INTERDEPEDENT with the other….

So now there’s one place that you can go to get exactly the kind of help you need at the click of your mouse, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week that gives you all the resources you need (as well as a lot of ones you never even thought of) to propel your team’s sales to unheard of heights. And it’s all at the Sales Management Mastery Academy.

If you want to get free taste of what the Academy’s all about, just click here to get our best selling course on “How to Motivate Your Sales Reps in 5 Days” using our proven motivational sales management training methods that only a select few sales managers have had the privilege of getting thier hands on.

You can get the entire motivational course on us for free. And if you want to test drive the Academy, you can do that for 30 days on us. Get “How to Motivate Your Sales Reps in 5 Days” and click here.

We won’t be offering the “How to Motivate” eBook for free for long, so get yours now!

To learn more about sales management training, click here to get your choice of free sales management training courses.
 

As many of you know, I have two young boys. Not unlike some of my sales reps, they are oftentimes lacking the motivation needed to do the necessary task that will help them to achieve success.

For my boys, its doing their math homework, getting excited about school, reading on their own, doing their chores, the list goes on…

If you have kids, I’m sure you have the very same issues.

So For the last three months, my wife’s been hounding me to watch a DVD she borrowed called “The Motivation Breakthrough: 6 Secrets to Turning On the Tuned-Out Child” by educator Richard Lavoie.

On the cover, Lavoie claims to have “proven and effective strategies for encouraging any child to learn and achieve success”.

Although it took me three months of do so, I finally watched it two nights ago.

Despite my extreme skepticism, I was totally shocked…it was unbelievable.

His research and ideas on motivation really hit home with me.

He claims that if a parent or teacher can identify a child’s motivational style – then gear their interactions with them based on those motivations – then the child can achieve consistent success.

Lavoie’s research proves that in order to really motivate the child, you need to first uncover their primary motivations…(if you’ve been a regular reader of this blog, does this sound a little bit familiar?)

To motivate you need to find out if the child is:

• motivated by power?
• prestige?
• praise?
• contact with other people?
• projects?
• prizes?

Lavoie explodes some common myths about motivation and demonstrates that rewards, punishment and competition are not the effective motivational tools most people tout.

Lavoie explores each motivational style in depth,  and presents proven techniques, strategies and scripts that can be used either in the classroom or at home to break through a child’s apathy and inspire him to achieve.

Although they are not children (even though they may act that way at times), motivating your sales reps is no different.

They too have their own motivations and drives that are unique to them – and in order to motivate them effectively you need to know what actually motivates them!

If you try to motivate one of your sales reps with prizes…but they’re actually motivated by prestige…you are barking up the wrong motivational tree (so to speak).

To learn more about sales management training, click here to get your choice of free sales management training courses.

What do you think? How are motivating kids and sales reps the same or different? We’d love to know! Post a comment below.

“I’m way too busy to do that”

“I’ll need to call you back, I’m way behind right now”…

Does this sound like you?

If you’re like me, there is a HUGE tendency for sales managers to get bogged down in far too many administrative duties, conference calls, time-wasting phone calls, useless meetings and mindless corporate initiatives – all repetitive activities that do nothing but waste your time – when you should be focused on more meaningful and lucrative tasks.

Worst of all (and the biggest time waster) is: YOU DOING YOUR SALESPEOPLE’S JOB FOR THEM!

Here’s the real problem: while you’re spending so much time on these useless tasks,you aren’t even coming close to spending time working on the things that will get you what your really want, namely increased sales from your salespeople!

For example, think of this common scenario: one of your sales reps calls you and asks you the same kind of question he’s been asking you for the last three months.

What do you do? You answer those questions.

So what do you think he’ll do the next time he has the same question?

That’s right – he’ll call you again, and again, and again, and so on…

Worse yet, he calls, you take the call, answer the question, and if you don’t know the exact answer or you have to talk to someone before you answer the question you say: “OK, I’ll have to get back to you on that…”

You, (trying to help of course, because you are a very attentive and caring sales manager, after all) now need to make five other calls to three other people and seven emails to five different people to get the answer to the question you were just asked!!!

Meanwhile, more emails and messages continue to pile up in your inbox and your voice mailbox that you need to answer…because those are even more questions that require even more phone calls and emails to even more people and so on and on it goes….

(I think I have to stop and take a break for a minute, because my chest is starting to tighten)….

So if you actually do the math, you are working sixteen hours a day and NOW getting paid less! Your hourly wage has technically DECREASED.

Most sales managers are under the mistaken impression you must do the work of their salespeople, work EXTREMELY hard and put in LONG hours in order to get your salespeople to both achieve their potential as well as make lots of money.

This is simply NOT TRUE.

Here’s the paradox…the best sales managers actually get more out of their salespeople if they do less for them!

Huh?

Ok, let me ask you this: if you’re working increasing hours each week and keep taking how the same pay and…who’s the insane one now?

The best sales managers eliminate themselves as “tollbooths through which all decisions must pass” by empowering their salespeople to make decisions on their own.

The completely counter-intuitive effects of this “removing the tollbooth” approach is:

1. This actually MOTIVATES your sales reps to do even more – because they’ll feel the empowerment of “doing it on their own”

2. This then leads to a reverse insanity spiral of you the sales manager doing less work….your salespeople doing more

3. You BOTH make more money

And while they’re doing all the work you used to do, you’re focusing on “the important stuff” – namely the stuff that will help both you and them to sell more effectively and make more money, while achieving the success you have both been dreaming of.

To learn more about sales management training, click here to get your choice of free sales management training courses.

What are you doing to save time and motivate your sales team? We’d love to know! Post a comment below.