The Changing & Expanding Role of Sales Management

Written by Jonathan Farrington

“There is a difference between leadership and management. Leadership is of the spirit, management is of the mind. Managers are necessary, but leaders are essential. We must find managers who are not only skilled organisers, but inspired and inspiring leaders.”

– Field Marshall Slim

For companies to remain competitive today, their sales organization must be able to respond positively to changing economic tides. As businesses strive to re-establish customer orientation, sales partnerships, and a strategic approach to selling, they are demanding more and more from their salespeople but ensuring that these new methods are widely practised and smoothly implemented falls to sales management.

Sales managers with an intimate feel for the selling process succeed because their staff regards them as part of the sales team, but coaching the team is as important as playing in it. In other words, sales managers must be prepared to provide training, feedback, and support to every individual within the team. And in 2010? That leads me into one of my predictions that I made in January.

“One of the very few things to come out the deepest recession in living memory was that sales leaders in most industries, faced with decimated training budgets, were forced to roll up their sleeves and coach their teams themselves. They no longer had the option to abdicate sales team development to external providers – and do you know what? Many of them actually enjoyed it – in fact they discovered they were pretty good at it.

As a consequence, I believe that in 2010, more and more sales leaders will develop their coaching skills, and look for external mentors themselves, because it is highly likely that sales skills training budgets will never be the same again – ever. An item that appears as a cost on the balance sheet with no tangible return is now going to be subjected to the most rigorous scrutiny – shareholders will insist on that.

And therein lays the clue – sales leaders will expand their roles…..”

The reality is that old ways of doing business no longer work: the increasingly intense competitive challenges of the world economy continue to challenge everyone, everywhere, to adapt in order to prosper under new rules. In the old economy, hierarchies pitted labour against management, with workers paid wages depending on their skills, but that is eroding as the rate of change accelerates.

Hierarchies are being replaced by networks; labour and management are uniting into teams; wages are coming in new mixtures of options, incentives and ownership; fixed jobs melt into fluid careers.

At the same time, the meltdown of old hierarchies increases the importance of traditional people skills such as building bonds, influence and collaboration. And that is as true for employers as it is for employees. The task of the leader draws on a wide range of personal skills. Research has shown that emotional competence makes the crucial difference between mediocre leaders and the best. Indeed, emotional competence makes up about two thirds of the ingredients of star performance in general, but for outstanding leaders emotional competencies – as opposed to technical or cognitive cues – make up 80 to 100% of those listed by companies as crucial for success.

Star performers show significantly greater strengths in a range of emotional competencies, such as the skills of persuasion, team leadership, political awareness, self-confidence, and achievement drive. Empathy, one of the key elements of emotional intelligence, is central to good management; it is difficult to have a positive impact on others without first sensing how they feel and understanding their position. People who are poor at reading emotional cues and inept at social interactions are very poor at influencing others in the workplace.

For sales managers, developing others’ abilities is even more important – indeed, it’s the emotional competence most frequently found among those at the top of the field. This is a person-to-person art, and the effectiveness of counselling hinges on empathy and the ability to focus on our own feelings and share them.

Research suggests the best ‘coaches’ show a genuine personal interest in those they guide, and have empathy for and an understanding of their employees. Trust is crucial – when there is little trust in the coach, advice goes unheeded. This also happens when the coach is impersonal and cold, or the relationship seems too one-sided or self-serving. Coaches who show respect, trustworthiness and empathy are the best. One way to encourage people to perform better is to let others take the lead in setting their own goals rather than dictating the terms and manner of their development. This communicates the belief that employees have the capacity to be the pilot of their own destiny.

If there is anywhere emotional intelligence needs to enter an organization, it is at this most basic level. Building collaborative and fruitful relationships begins with the couples we are a part of at work. Bringing emotional intelligence to a working relationship can pitch it towards the evolving, creative, mutually engaging end of the continuum; failing to do so heightens the risk of a downward drift towards rigidity, stalemate and failure.

But, and this is a very big but, most sales managers are going to have to experience a three hundred and sixty degree turn in their thinking about their own ongoing development – why? Because most sales managers believe that when they arrive into that lofty status, further expansion of their skills-set is unnecessary – after all, they are in charge now, and they are far too busy managing.

This then is our challenge – to influence the mind-set - and some of my colleagues and I are evangelizing hard.

Jonathan Farrington -
	Jonathan Farrington is a globally recognized business coach, mentor, author and consultant, who has guided hundreds of companies and thousands of individuals around the world towards optimum performance levels. He is Chairman of The JF Corporation, CEO of Top Sales Associates and Senior Partner at The JF Consultancy Read More >>
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Websiteblog twitter