Sales Manager Traits With Expert David Brock

Today’s episode is centered on small business owners and sales managers who lead sales organizations. We meet with David Brock, president of Partner of Excellence, a consulting company that partners with clients to help them achieve a high level of performance in their sales and marketing organizations.

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In this episode we discuss the dilemmas sales managers face and things they can do to build a top performing sales organization. How can they have great sales manager traits is the topic.

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Great Sales Manager Traits

Sales Managers are integral in creating powerful sales organizations. Two issues sales managers face:

What is their role?
What is the key to success?

No longer an individual contributor, their success is dependent on getting their sales people to become top performers. How is this done?

Great Coaching

Sales managers need to recognize their job is to work with their sales reps and help them reach their potential.

Things not to do:

Tell them what to do
Assume success is doing the job the way THEY have always done it.

Hiring

Dave recommends you have a clear model in mind when hiring. Before hiring ask yourself the following:

What does it take to be successful in THIS sales organization? Do you have a clear idea of who you want?
Who is your model sales rep? Does this person match that model, are they similar?
Did you have others in your organization meet the candidate? Don’t do this alone.
Did you check their references?

How To Set Quotas

Quota setting is a difficult task all sales managers face. We touched on some key rules of thumb to be considered when setting quotas:

Take a bottoms up and top down point of view
- Recognize every territory is unique. Not all products sell equally well in all territories. Territories have unique characteristics that may even change your sales approach
- Treat each rep as the CEO of their territory. They should be consulted since they know the territory best.
- Understand the corporate objective. In this case you need to CFO and Product Manager knowing what products, services and accompanying margins.
Be honest about objectives in context with maturity of territory and products/services
- Don’t full yourself what happened last year will happen this year. Every dog has it’s day. Your products may have peaked, or better yet, not peaked yet.

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Sales Management Advice

David believes it’s all about you people. One great sales manager trait is the ability to get each person to perform to their full potential. And if they can do that, 100% of the time they will be a hero in the organization, get promoted and be compensated as well. Do that, and success is yours.

Resources

David is well represented across the internet:

David Brock has a blog called Partners In Excellence where he discuss great sales manager traits.
This is David Brock on LinkedIn. As I mentioned he’s a prolific publisher on LinkedIn. Great stuff!
Lastly you can follow him on Twitter @davidabrock
To get David’s eBook on Coaching For Sales Managers you can email him at dabrock @ excellenc.com

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