I know. I’ve been there, and I’ve seen it happen again and again.

As a sales manager, I bet you’re getting all these “initiatives” from your boss with the canned line “relay to your sales team” every single day.

If you follow all these initiatives, you risk losing your sales reps’ trust, and eventually you risk losing them as well. Then it’s going to be all your fault for not being able to keep the team together.

It’s frustrating. But as a mediator between top brass and the sales team, you can only do so much.

That’s it, you can do so much, and by that I mean becoming the “spam filter” for your sales reps!

Being a spam filter means protecting your sales reps from corporate “spam” by throwing out the ones that barely make any sense and keeping the ones you wholeheartedly support.

What’s your goal? To train top-performing sales reps that break quota every time.

Don’t take it the wrong way. You’re still going to work on the programs that don’t contribute to your sales team’s focus on selling, but you’ll be working on them at the bare minimum. Advocate them during meetings, but try to spend as little time with them as possible while still getting the point across.

A lot of initiatives are going to get filtered out. This is okay. After all your job is to produce better sales people. The interesting part is when your sales reps discover you’ve been filtering “less useful” initiatives on their behalf—and they will find out, sooner or later—they’d feel more indebted to you in return.

Filtering junk initiatives sends a message to your sales reps that you are committed to creating a dedicated environment focused on selling. It shows that you are on their side, and that you’re immune from getting caught up in the whirlwind of sales person-unfriendly corporate agendas because of some abstract concept the department head learned at the Harvard Business School ten years ago.

The trick is to minimize focus on not-so-important programs and capitalize on the ones that improve sales performance.

My last piece of advice is to be extra careful in your selection process of which programs to promote and which ones to skip. Some initiatives might not make a lot of sense now, but they might gain importance later on. When that happens, your sales people could end up lagging behind, and your boss will call for you and ask, “What were you doing all this time?“ 

Plan carefully when acting as a spam filter for your sales team. They depend on you as their sales manager.

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Tell me what you think of this approach by leaving a comment below.