The sales function is vitally important for any business. It is what makes a business, business. Unless you sell, there is no business.
Now sales as a job is a challenging affair. It is a high stake job because you are always running after some ambitious goals and the result is tangible every month.
At the same time, it is a high-energy and demanding job because you have to routinely endure rejections and momentary failures.
This testing nature of the trade makes the job of leading a sales team so challenging.
It is simply hard to lead a sales team. A job of a sales manager is a challenging one because, as I mentioned earlier, there are multiple imperatives that you have to get right - you have to strike a balance between finding the right people, keeping them motivated while also creating a sufficiently demanding environment that ensures ambitious results.
This is exactly why managing sales reps demands solid leadership capacity from the sales managers. You have to understand your people, create systems and structure that ensures result while also making sure that your people remain motivated.
There is empirical evidence that success of a sales team depends on the sales manager because as a sales manager you are uniquely positioned to influence, inspire and empower your sales team to achieve ambitious goals. But doing that is not easy.
Since sales is a demanding job and sales manager often get busy, distracted and short-sighted, hence fail to see the bigger picture of collective success.
Moreover, we often underestimate the importance of leadership from the sales manager to drive sales whereas without excellent leadership sales managers will never be able to propel his/her team to achieve a meaning goal.
This is where Bdjobs Training’s Sales Leadership Certificate Courses, a series of extensive leadership training courses for sales managers comes in.
The hypothesis of the courses is that it is not enough to merely manage your sales reps, you need to lead them in order to drive best possible results. The courses, from different perspectives, outline in details how to transfer yourself from a sales manager into a sales leaders using three training domains - sales management, sales leadership and data analysis.
As we discussed earlier, a great sales manager can unlock the potential of their team and bring a huge return.
As a leader of the team, if you can inspire your team, motivate them, and help them to deliver better result it can revolutionize your entire organization.
This is what makes a sales manager’s jobs so much rewarding. You have extraordinary power to make a meaningful difference.
In this guide, developed based on Bdjobs Training’s Sales Leadership Certificate Course, you will learn:
The training is divided into 10 sessions and the first session deals with topics around building a sales team and developing an understanding of sales among other important topics.
As a sales manager, the first imperative of your success depends on people in your team which makes hiring right people based on a set of repeatable evaluation criteria an important job for a sales manager.
Often companies look for people with excellent work ethic, coachability and flexible, driven, intelligent, creative and entrepreneurial for sales positions due to the challenging nature of the job.
A sales manager should develop an ability to identify right people for his/her team.
The ultimate KPI for a salesperson is revenue. However, things are not that simple. When you set that you have to earn a particular amount of revenue, it does not help in moving the ball in the right direction. Rather as a leader, you need to set KPIs that are tangible, measurable in nature and can be followed up in the process that will eventually lead to better performance from your sales rep.
You may set KPIs around prospecting and meeting and closing. You can see that these KPIs are inter-connected which means if you accomplish one it automatically improves the result of another. Helping your sales reps set effective KPIs can significantly improve your overall result.
Sales is a high energy job. It is demanding. Salespeople often endure consistent failures and rejections. This can take a toll on the performance of your sales reps.
The job of an effective sales manager is to make sure that his/her people never run out of the fire.
Coach your people. Hold pep talks. Provide inspiration materials. Hold one-to-one coaching sessions and do this on a consistent basis.
When you ensure that your people are motivated, they will take care of your sales goals.
We all know that sales is all about numbers. It is pure business. Pep talks, motivations, and psychology - these things matter. Similarly, data, customer behavior, market intelligence and ability to analyze your result, hits and misses are equally critical to your success as a sales leader.
Learn basic data analysis tools, Sales Leadership Certificate Course training, spend a significant number of training hours educating sales manager in how they can use Microsoft Excel and similar tools in their job to analyze data, make better decisions and ensure a better result.
The job a sales manager is an incredibly rewarding one because you work tangibly affect the present and the future of your company. You are the one who ensures that the bottom line of your company speaks at the end of the month.
It also offers you an extraordinary opportunity to lead a group of highly driven people who face the most daunting challenge every day, which is winning over a customer, and your actions as a manager and leader of these people make a lot of difference.
Evidence suggests that a sales manager can meaningfully change the face of a sales team by simply changing himself which sales manager often don’t do because sales is a demanding job and they get busy and distracted in meeting daily demands. However, when you invest in improving your skills and yourself, it materially affects your result and the result of your team.
Bdjobs Training offers a series of extensive certificate courses on leadership for sales managers. The courses cover topics as diverse as how to be a great salesman to a great sales manager, how to build a great sales team, develop effective KPIs for your team, achieve consistent sales result, increase sales performance, motivate your team, develop sales competencies and to using Microsoft Excel to harness the power of data to ensure a better result.
“The training uses practical examples and case studies and offer in-depth understanding of sales and sales team management and transforming you from a sales manager into a sales leader.
If you are considering to develop and improve your sales management and leadership skills, you may consider taking one of the courses on Sales Leadership at Bdjobs Training.
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Note: Read our story series with Bdjobs Training on the Future of work in Bangladesh here.
Cover photo: Photo by rawpixel.com on Unsplash
(This is an editorially independent branded content prepared by Storylab, Future Startup’s in-house branded content studio, in collaboration with Bdjobs Training.)
