Sales manager: how do you lead a team?

Now you're at the head of a sales team that you'll have to lead and guide to success. How to manage and support your team ? What key skills should a sales manager focus on first? ? Management expert Philippe Baschoux explains the 10 best practices for leading a sales team.

1. Trust your teams

The first piece of advice for sales managers is to avoid passing on your stress or pressure to your colleagues, as this will not help them. So learn to manage your stress without letting it reflect on them. Helping them to achieve their objectives means putting on the "pressure" at certain times. On the other hand, stressing them unnecessarily won't make them more effective - quite the contrary... It's up to you to put the cursor in the right place!

Trust cannot be decreed, it has to be acquired. When you take up a sales management position, the first thing to do is to see each of your colleagues individually to take the pulse of the team. Listen to them, ask them questions. For example, "How can I help you?" or "What do you want from me?

Be careful not to fall into the trap of agreeing to do the job for them. Put them in a situation: ask them to make constructive proposals. In short, show humility, and you'll be rewarded.

You have to tame a team. Over time, they will observe your behaviour and, in particular, your ability to defend your colleagues from outside attacks. Ask your management to avoid putting pressure on a sales person who is not achieving their objectives. Deal with this situation by coaching them individually to help them get out of their comfort zone and overcome their limiting beliefs.

Creating trust also means knowing how to give people confidence. positive feedback. Feedback should not be reserved for feats, but should be given regularly. Moreover, what is easy for you may turn out to be excessively difficult for some people.

For example, you might say: "Well done, I know how hard it's been for you and how you've had to push yourself to the limit, I'm proud of you".

2. Self-management tools

Rather than spending time following each member of your staff step by step (to the detriment of the tasks assigned to you by your management), give them self-piloting tools simple, pragmatic and operational. These tools will help them find their way on the road to success.

Your employees will gain in autonomy and develop their self-confidence.

The milestone, the basic tool

Le milestone describes the 8 to 12 key stages in your sales cycle.

• The first stage is the "observed interest" phase, when the prospect or customer could potentially use the services on offer, but has not yet identified a need.
• The second stage is the needs assessment phase. A great deal of information needs to be gathered, and once this has been done, the project can be "forecast" for completion.
• Some of the other stages may involve proving that the concept works in practice, or delivering a mock-up, etc. These are costly in terms of resources and will only be undertaken if the customer is genuinely willing to sign up to the pricing conditions you want.
• Negotiation follows this stage, and in at least 70 % of cases should lead to the signing of a contract.
• Final stage: the delivery phase, i.e. the installation, delivery and monitoring phase.

In between, each stage is made up of "deliverables", i.e. information that needs to be gathered in order to move on to the next phase. These deliverables are comparable to the checklist that the pilot of an aircraft checks before taking off.

Your employees will be able to feed their own sales action plan by deciding what action to take to obtain this important information.

3. Governing with instruments versus governing "on sight

Following on from the previous point, it is important to have a factual and objective view of how the business is progressing.

The milestone is the first step in building a structured, methodical approach to sales.

A second tool can help salespeople gain peace of mind: the probability indexes or quality indices. In the same way that we measure the quality or robustness of a building, an aircraft or software, we can measure the quality of a business deal. And the higher the amounts involved, the longer the sales cycles, the more essential this tool becomes. Every important deal in terms of sales (turnover) or strategic importance must be subject, from the start of the cycle, to a measurement of its quality, which will of course evolve over time.

The objective? To identify a fifteen or so identical criteria for all cases and thus measure their probability of success.

For example: does the customer already use the products on offer? Do you have a sponsor? Each criterion, depending on the answer provided, is given a score. The sum of the scores, taken together with the maximum total score, gives a probability percentage. This score should change over time, depending on the actions taken by the sales rep and his management.

This tool for measuring the probability of a sales deal also helps your sales staff to manage themselves.

By applying it to your territory, you can get a fairly accurate idea, at any given moment, of the turnover you can generate over a given period.

4. Individualise your management

All individuals do not function in the same way and the levers of motivation are specific. Managing them as you would like to be managed will lead to frustration and generate inappropriate behaviour.

Spend time with your staff, individually and in groups, to discover these levers and use them to motivating the team. Get to know them both professionally and personally.

Gather their needs. For example: how would they like to be managed? The criteria to be taken into account are: the level of commitment, the place of each member of the team, the relationship with others, the desire for development and morale. A number of tools can be very useful, such as the Process Com®.

Managing everyone in the same way doesn't help to unite a team - quite the opposite, in fact. So individualise your management!

5. Becoming the federator rather than the expert

The legitimacy of a sales manager derives from his ability to federate It's not the ability to sell better than the salespeople that counts.

Create a team made up of individual elements, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Identify and develop individual talents so that you can build on them. It's rare for a salesperson to be "good" at every aspect of the sales cycle.

Create an "esprit de corps".

6. Encourage the team to seek out the customer's "pain" and, above all, to value it.

Losing money, market share or repeat business... When the situation experienced by the customer becomes intolerable, changes are needed. For example: a change of supplier, automation, outsourcing, use of market solutions.

Companies often wait until they are faced with a situation involving psychosocial risks before organising training to prevent them. The potential legal and financial consequences are very significant.

So encourage your sales people to look for the customer's current "pain". And above all, the consequences of this "pain" for the company. Of course, this is not as important if it is stated by a "VITO" (very important top officer) as it is by a line manager who has no decision-making power.

Contrary to popular belief, a customer's dissatisfaction with a rival supplier is not enough to make them "switch sides". What are the strategic stakes for the company? What is the cost generated by this dissatisfaction? Without these answers, it is difficult, even illusory, to make a proposal.

7. Let them go to appointments alone

Avoid going to meetings with your sales staff. If you have to accompany them, prepare the role of each person. Who will be involved? At what point? On what subject?

The sales person must not feel observed or judged. Customers should not feel that you do not trust them.

As for going to negotiate with the sales rep, this is a perilous exercise. In your presence, the sales rep will not be able to tell the customer that he must consult his superiors. There's a good chance he'll be caught out and give away more concessions than expected.

8. Less technical talk, more psychology

In today's economic climate, B-to-B sales are no longer about "shining a light" on your customers with technical and commercial demonstrations.

That's why it's unfortunate that many salespeople are, above all, very good technical experts. The temptation is great to talk with pride and enthusiasm about what they are selling. While this may arouse the envy of technical contacts, it will never win the support of economic decision-makers. As a result, sales people work on a project, spending countless hours and energy only to end up with a veto from the business decision-maker, who is very rarely the buyer.

That's why it's vital to train your sales staff to listen to and understand the psychological needs of their contacts. Encourage them to develop their general culture and their knowledge of the markets in which their customers operate.

Don't expect your sales staff to come back from their first meetings with a contract. Instead, ask them for information gathering. Compiled in this way, this information will then give rise to a proposal that generates added value for the customer.

9. Develop incentive commission plans

The commission plan is the vehicle for implementing your company's sales strategy. The various items that make it up must reflect this reality. Explore these avenues depending on your field of activity, the seasonality (or otherwise) of your sales, the average length of sales cycles, the promotion of certain newly launched products, the conquest of new territories, mutual support within your team...

It is important to avoid rent effects. These are recurring sales that increase almost mechanically with customer growth and are generated without any strong involvement on the part of the sales person.

Develop incentive commission plans that support your sales strategy.

There's another point to watch out for: make sure that sales staff don't "refrigerate", i.e. delay signing a deal when their target has already been reached, only to "roll it out" the following quarter or fiscal year.

To avoid this perverse effect and encourage your sales staff to excel, set up commissions that are not linear but exponential.

10. Become (re)known as a partner

Power has changed. In the past, it was based on the balance of power between customer and seller, or on price. Today, it resides in knowledge, information and understanding of the customer as a company: its strategy, its difficulties, the market context. And as a person: their professional development, their motivations, their psychological needs, etc.

If the main quest of sales people used to be needs, it has now become information.

This information, once held, analysed, compiled and validated, will form the basis of the value proposition you send to your customer. They will buy into it, rightly convinced that it serves their company's strategic direction.

Anticipating change, gain recognition as a partner worth considering stems from the lobbying. Lobbying is primarily aimed at VITOs, because they make the decisions. It is the responsibility of your company's general or commercial management.

Sales staff, on the other hand, will apply principles of influence with their operational contacts. They will be appreciated, they will look for an internal "coach" or "champion" whom they can "activate" when the time comes to obtain information that is vital for their business. Information that this coach is not supposed, or even authorised, to communicate to them.

Please note that this is not about immoral practices, but about creating a strong interpersonal relationship based on the discovery of "healthy" motivations.

There are many ways of joining 'open' networks known to all, where you can meet other VITOs in a non-professional setting, to build acquaintances and relationships where there is something in it for everyone.

Ultimately, managing a sales team requires a wide range of skills. Active listening, assertiveness, Process Com®... Most of these can be acquired through training or coaching. The first condition? Perfect self-confidence. Being a sales manager is an exciting, rewarding and demanding job. It requires total commitment on your part, a great deal of empathy and the know-how to facilitate team spirit. In the end, you'll be able to concentrate on what's most important: developing the company's operating margin and profitability.