From December 25th, 2013, Martin Scorsese’s movie The Wolf of Wall Street has made every sales manager on the earth go to bed chanting the already legendary line “The client either buys or f%#$ing dies!!!!”

Jordan Belfort, pictured by Leonardo DiCaprio, claims that sales manager won’t take “no” for an answer and “without you [the sales manager], these telephones are just worthless hunks of plastic”. He brings us back to the key question: What is more important, the tools a sales person is forced to use, or the techniques they have learned and practiced themselves to be more productive and successful in sales?

In the post-PC era we are entering, the question can be rephrased: Will we achieve our sales targets better by executing sales according to a prescribed process built into a specific enterprise suite, or by allowing ourselves the freedom to pick and choose our favourite mobile apps and tools, and to work the way we want?

As Harvard Business Review claims in their recent article, there is a dramatic shift ongoing in customers’ buying behaviour, which profoundly changes the role of a sales manager.

“Leaders must abandon their fixation on process compliance and embrace a flexible approach to selling driven by sales reps’ reliance on insight and judgement. “ (c) Harvard Business Review, November 2013.

Before, the sales organisations tried to trick people to believe that by complying to the processes fixed into the monster CRM system, they can achieve higher conversion rates and better sales results. The hidden agenda was to make sales managers identify themselves with the monster of a CRM they were using deeply enough to make it very difficult to switch companies and learn another monster CRM.

When a sales manager asks herself the perennial question, “what makes me successful?”, she will never attribute the core of the success to the enterprise suite the corporate sales organisation provides her. These suites fail already in the very basic test of who owns and controls the contacts. Every sales manager wants to own and control their contacts, their most valuable asset. The sharing of business contacts to the company should be based on voluntary choice, based on mutual benefit. This “Bring your own Device, App & Data” -approach will finally enable true consumerization of the enterprise. There are multiple major cost & time benefits from this new approach, including minimal time to get a new sales person up to speed.

Following an old approach, Inc Magazine claims that “The technical competence is key.

“A manager doesn’t need to write code, but they do need to have enough technical aptitude to be dangerous. A manager may not have the skill set to do behind-the-scenes work on a CRM system, but they should at least understand how these systems function and understand the data available.” (c) Inc.com, November 2013.

We at Linko disagree with this statement. Imagine a sales manager who goes to work and trains herself in coding or reading books on how to fill forms on Salesforce. Instead of productive meetings with clients, this sales person spends time on internal barriers, trainings, reporting and tweaking CRM tools. All this while the client is talking to a competitor.

The most important measures of a great sales manager are how they face and listen the customers, how much trust they are able to build, and subsequently what results they achieve; not how many hours of coding lessons they took. The goal should be to free a sales manager from sales bureaucracy and from any other roadblock that forces the sales team to spend time on internal communication and reporting instead of external communication and closing deals.

Treat the sales people as innovators. Let them work in their own way, and let the best practices emerge. Share these best practices for faster learning. Do not enforce rigid rules or systems that may cause friction and waste time. Remember that “In a day when we track every single thing in sales — from calls, to meetings, to lead scores — metrics and operations are everything.” (c) Inc.com, November 2013

To win the customers over, your sales system should make you more agile, help you learn from the best, provide real time view to the business operations, and should include a completely automated and invisible way to gather the critical data for your metrics.

Want to discuss this topic with us? Join our facebook page