The sales manager manifesto: One of the most important members of a company and a sales organization is the first-line sales manager. This person leads a team of sales professionals carrying quota who only make money when they generate pipeline, bring in new customers in the door, and close business. The first-line sales manager is there to make every rep exceed their quota.
First-line sales managers are at the pulse of what’s going on in the business. They know what’s working and they know what isn’t working. Sales managers are the backbone of every sales organization. They make it happen. They are the unsung heroes of corporations wearing so many hats. I’ve written a whole book for sales managers that you can read and explore.
You can also watch my short, fun tribute video for sales managers. Watch it here.
How are we going to challenge ourselves to be the best sales managers on the planet?
How are we going to be leaders who deliver revenue while making our teams better?
How are we going to inspire our teams to exceed their goals and do great things?
I present to you The Sales Manager Manifesto:
- Leadership: We’re human managers who are empathetic and sympathetic. We’re open, fair, and transparent leaders, clearly and frequently communicating expectations and listening. We always strive to inspire greatness. We lead by example.
- Forecasting & Reporting: We find the right balance of selling time versus empowering our teams versus negatively policing activity. We encourage our teams to make the news versus telling us the news that’s already in our CRM system. We employ discipline and cadence to improve judgement and forecast accuracy.
- Onboarding & Learning: We improve the competence and confidence of our sales teams, making them better sales professionals, with personalized, data-driven, and purposeful mentorship and coaching. We make every conversation a coaching opportunity.We execute flawless onboarding and reduce time to first deal and time to ramp.
- Deal Execution: We hold our teams accountable for flawless deal execution uncovering compelling events and co-creating mutual success plans with our champions and decision makers to improve forecast accuracy. We invest time to review our team sales pitches and customer presentations, giving constructive and meaningful feedback to get deals closing faster.
- Knowledge Sharing: We exceed our quota by committing time every week for best practices and knowledge sharing. We commit to hosting a weekly team meeting. We make sure our reps know and execute what our best reps are doing. We’re always ready to share first, practices pitches, and give personal examples when leading team meetings.
- Culture: We nurture a celebratory culture of ringing the virtual bell for customer wins and prospecting successes every month. Gratitude and appreciation is a big part of winning as a team culture. We always give back to our community.
- Pipeline: We motivate teams to self-source pipeline with territory planning and prospecting innovation and incentives. We keep a 3x-5x ratio of pipeline to quota for our business.
- Deal Coaching: We turn our deal reviews from “deal roasts” into thoughtful revenue-generating conversations by building better sales Enablement strategies, uncovering blind spots, adding customer value, and closing more deals faster. We close more deals faster.
- Career Coaching: We help our sales teams think bigger about their career trajectories and help them develop career paths that exceed their life goals.
If you want to go deeper on these principles and look for best practices to action with your teams, I encourage you pick up my book “SalesHood – How Winning Sales Managers Inspire Teams To Succeed.” You can get the book here.
We also created the world’s first and only on-demand sales learning platform for sales managers to use with teams to elevate sales results fast.
