Top 5 Sales Management Best Practices

Guest post by: Dave Kurlan
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Salespeople Must Stop Snorkeling and Start Scuba Diving - By Dave Kurlan

The first problem with today's title is the "5" in "Top 5."

They are not the 5 on which most sales managers spend their time, so let's begin with the sales management practices on which most sales managers actually spend their time. By the way, that's how so many "best practices" (that aren't) actually get published. Authors ask (in this case sales managers) how they spend their time. The answers that are most often reported become best practices. So I repeat, the first list does not contain best practices, but includes those activities on which most sales managers spend their time.

The 5 practices, which aren't best practices, on which sales managers spend their time:

Selling
Putting out fires
Creating, reading and distributing reports
Closing deals for salespeople
Teaching (not coaching, but lecturing)

Let's see how those actually compare with the Top 5 Sales Management Best Practices - not the things sales managers necessarily do, but the things sales managers should do.

Coaching (should account for 50% of a sales manager's time)
Accountability (to KPI's, pipeline and sales process)
Recruiting (on-going process of upgrading the sales team)
Motivating (more and more salespeople are not money-motivated, so this is more important)
Development (grooming a replacement)

When you compare the best practices with the standard practices, you'll see that there isn't any overlap! I'm describing two completely different sets of responsibilities, even though the role - sales management - is identical.

If you are a sales manager, how difficult will it be to change what you currently do in your role to follow best practices rather than existing practices?

If sales managers report to you, how difficult will it be to get your sales managers to make that change?

The biggest challenge to adopting these best practices is that while coaching and accountability sound familiar, Objective Management Group's data shows that 86% of all sales managers aren't effective at either.

You can learn more about these 5 sales management best practices in a free Webinar, this Thursday, July 26, at 1 PM ET. Click here to learn more and register.

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Salespeople Must Stop Snorkeling and Start Scuba Diving - By Dave Kurlan

About the Author: Dave Kurlan

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Dave Kurlan is a best-selling author, top-rated speaker and thought leader on sales development. He is the founder and CEO of Objective Management Group, Inc., the industry leader in sales assessments and sales force evaluations, and the CEO of David Kurlan & Associates, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in sales force development. Dave has been a top rated speaker at Inc. Magazine's Conference on Growing the Company, the Sales & Marketing Management Conference and the Gazelles Sales & Marketing Summit. He has been featured on radio and TV, including World Business Review with General Norman Schwarzkopf, in Inc. Magazine, Selling Power Magazine, Sales & Marketing Management Magazine and Incentive Magazine. He is the author of Mindless Selling and Baseline Selling – How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know about the Game of Baseball. He created and wrote STAR, a proprietary recruiting process for hiring great salespeople, and he writes Understanding the Sales Force, a popular business Blog and is a contributing author to The Death of 20th Century Selling (Dan Seidman), Stepping Stones (Deepak Chopra and Brian Tracey) and 101 Great Ways to Improve Your Life, Volume 2 (David Riklan).
Click here to visit Dave's website.

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