Key Qualities of a Successful Sales Manager
Regardless of whether companies are hiring a sales team manager externally or choosing from a list of internal candidates, they need to pay attention to a number of personal qualities and characteristics that would make a person successful in the role. Some of these qualities do not necessarily correlate with work experience. But those who lack them would unlikely be capable of helping the team to deliver outstanding results. A well-prepared interview would enable recruiters and hiring managers to evaluate these qualities at least on a high level and also understand the potential for their development. Today we will discuss these qualities as well as their impact on the results of a sales manager.
Proactivity
I strongly consider proactivity an essential quality for everyone who wants to be successful in sales — not only sales managers. Being proactive means always taking the initiative to take an extra step — in doing another call, conducting another meeting, trying a new approach, leveraging a new framework, etc. This quality is even more important to those managing sales teams because their team members look up to them. Managers who’re always taking the extra mile, who’re innovative because they were not afraid to fall 100 times and then stand up would have the respect of their employees. The line between a “regular” manager and one that demonstrates a high level of proactivity is usually very noticeable — the latter would always try something new to help the team achieve amazing results. She would be hungry for best practices, she would always be the first to find out what new has been released in a product to leverage it in sales, and she would constantly test what’s working and what’s not and scale great approaches. A proactive manager always asks, “What else can we do to do even better” — even when the current team quota attainment is already above expectations.
Creativity
While tenacity and discipline are probably the most crucial traits of an effective salesperson, creativity is also something that shouldn’t be underestimated. Coming up with not good but great value proposition, creating a compelling price offering, positioning your solution against competitors with little differentiation available — that all and many more cases require creativity. Often sales reps reach out to a sales manager for a recommendation on how to handle various complex scenarios. So being creative is an important part of being an effective sales manager. Not only do they need to be able to come up with creative solutions to emerging challenges, but they also coach their team members on the way of thinking about how to create such solutions. The good news is that today there’s a large number of books on how to develop creative thinking. So if some qualities such as proactivity above must come from within a manager, creativity can be developed and improved.
Empathy
Empathy is a critical quality for any leader. It is probably even more important for a sales manager since by design the work of a salesperson involves a lot of stress. And even the toughest reps sometimes are having a hard time and need someone to listen to them, acknowledge the challenges they’re struggling with and just provide a comforting shoulder before offering a solution. There are also some tough internal situations that require a lot of empathy. For example, due to a certain decision, there’s a business need to change the size of the book of business and redistribute certain accounts. No sales rep would be happy about the news that certain accounts he’s been working with would be taken from him. So the first step in such conversation would always be acknowledged that it would create a new challenge, listening to the rep, and working with him together to come up with the best plan moving forward.
Vision
One of the key responsibilities of a sales manager is to see the big picture and plan further steps accordingly. What strategy would make the team successful? What resources would be needed to get there? What’s the optimal size of the book of business for each rep? Which customers should be prioritized to maximize the size of the pipeline? What messaging should be used when engaging different groups of customers? Obviously, the answers to these questions need to be aligned across all teams under the sales organization. But given the fact that sales managers work closely with reps who, in due turn work closely with customers, the former has a unique opportunity to drive vision from the bottom up to the executive leadership team (and do that proactively).
Attention to detail
It is well known that the first step to improving something is to measure it. Sales managers need to have great analytical skills to perform both high-level and granular analysis. What was the historical level of pipeline that allowed successful reps to hit the target? How many opportunities did successful salespeople close per month on average? What was the proportion of inbound and outbound deals? Which prospecting channels bring the most opportunities from the perspective of time spent working with them? There are dozens of more data points sales managers need to analyze to provide valuable guidance to their reps. And obviously, such analysis requires a high level of attention to detail. It’s not only about spotting certain trends and correlations but also identifying any anomalies and taking them out of the equation (or on the contrary — building new equations around them). For example, a sales manager may spot that a certain rep has a dramatically higher number of meetings booked from prospecting over the phone. The average number of phone calls was the same as for the other reps. After some digging the manager discovered that instead of doing one 60-minute prospecting session the rep decided to break prospecting into two 30-minute sessions — one at the start of the day and another after lunch. The difference in meetings booked is almost 1:2. Should the sales manager immediately recommend all other reps to do the same? Or some additional factors should be taken into account — geo of the most effective rep markets she’s working with, etc. Based on analysis it would become clear whether this is more of an anomaly situation, or the manager has indeed discovered a golden nugget and such an approach needs to be scaled to the whole team.
Stress tolerance
It’s hard to imagine a sales leader who’s always operating in an environment where all the quotas are being hit, no changes need to be made and all the team members are so happy that they would not even consider leaving the organization. It would be nice though, right? An effective sales leader needs to be able to effectively manage stressful situations that require hard calls. Sometimes it’s about making decisions that are right for the business and will not be well met by the team members. Sometimes it’s about choosing the better of two evils in a tough case with the client. The examples are many. But what makes a sales manager effective in such situations is the ability to do what needs to be done without stressing out too much. In my experience, this is something that can be developed over the years. During the interview, I always ask candidates to describe in detail a stressful situation they had and how exactly they handled it. It allows shedding at least some light on the level of stress tolerance of a potential sales manager and understanding how they would potentially handle similar cases in the future.
As you can see, some of the qualities described above have more to do with the personality of a sales manager while others can be developed through coaching and experience. Finding a person who has a combination of strong qualities and a high potential for development and growth is a critical factor in driving the success of the sales team.
