Read this article to discover the five essential skills sales managers must master to make 2025 the best year ever.
In July 2024, a corporate client with over $75 billion in annual sales had 20 of their company’s sales managers complete my online sales management training program. Three months later, these program participants were surveyed to find out what skills had helped them the most in improving their teams’ results. Here are their top 5 answers:
1. Take control of time and priorities
The top response by far is that learning specific techniques to manage their time has helped participants become more effective and efficient. Of course, for sales managers, time management is really priority management. In my online sales management training program, I get sales managers to think about what should be a priority for them by asking:
- “What are you doing now that someone else could do?” The responses here reveal that far too often, salespeople dump their problems onto their sales managers. The trick to getting out of this reactive trap is to teach your salespeople how to do more problem-solving on their own. For example, ask salespeople what they’ve done so far about the problem. Coach them on what they should do next.
- “What are you NOT doing that ONLY you can do?” Your job as a sales manager boils down to getting the best results from your team. Your #1 priority should be developing your salespeople. That’s the job that you and only you can do.
2. Motivating the team
All it takes is one sales rep with a lousy attitude to depress the results of your entire team. Motivation problems that sales managers face come in many different types within a sales team:
- New salespeople often need help linking their personal and professional goals to their work.
- Experienced salespeople can lose interest in the job if it is perceived as not challenging.
- Successful sales reps can develop into prima donnas who think they deserve special treatment from co-workers.
- Salespeople who want to rise in the organization can become discouraged if not provided the opportunity for job growth.
No single model or approach to dealing with motivation can cover all these issues. In my online sales management training program participants learn how to identify the specific motivators for each rep. What inspires one person to excel may be meaningless for the next person.
Sales managers must also learn how to deal with salespeople who have become demotivated. These salespeople believe that they are facing organizational barriers erected by either you or your company. Sometimes, just talking about these barriers is all it takes to get the salesperson to move past the issue.
3. Coaching to increase revenue
Studies have shown that effective sales coaching is a matter of both frequency and impact.
First, that means sales managers must be proactive in hard-wiring time for coaching into their calendar (see item #1 on time management!) so they can coach more often. In my online sales management training program, I ask “look at your calendar for last week – how many appointments did you have set for the purpose of coaching?” Usually, the answer is “zero.” I then encourage sales managers to commit to coaching someone before noon every day.
Second, sales managers have to focus on coaching interventions that help salespeople learn and grow. Coaching involves actions that help a salesperson understand what they are doing well and where they have to improve. Provide your salespeople with training, coaching, and mentoring to help them make improvements.
One example is having the sales manager observe the salesperson on a ride-along (or listen-along), where the sales manager is the proverbial fly on the wall. Listen and observe; don’t jump in and take over! Then, sales managers can have a more helpful dialogue about what the salesperson did well and where they could improve.
4. Improving hiring decisions
Every experienced sales manager I know can rattle off stories of people they hired that turned out to be true duds. The best way to improve the overall performance of your sales team is to keep those duds off the team in the first place!
There’s a lot of information in my online sales management training program on how to improve hiring decisions for sales teams. The one idea I’ll pass along here is to include “coachability” in your hiring criteria. People who are coachable are interested in improving themselves. They will be open to learning; they will listen to you and implement your advice.
5. Use accountability for improvement, not punishment
Accountability is often seen as a negative by salespeople because they’ve been on the receiving end of harsh criticism framed as “holding them accountable.”
The most effective sales managers I know have learned how to use accountability as a tool for evaluation and improvement, not punishment. They start by making sure that every salesperson knows exactly what they will be held accountable for.
In my online sales management training program, I provide participants with the Success Profile tool that performs that function. It describes the expected performance goals, sales skills, and peak performance attitudes of a salesperson in a particular company. That way, both the sales manager and salesperson know exactly what factors will be evaluated in quarterly or semi-annual reviews.
Where do you stand?
Managing time, motivation, coaching, hiring, accountability. Those are the five essential skills for sales managers. How do you think you’re doing in these areas? Where do you need to focus to improve yourself now so you can help your team sell more in 2025?
Kevin F. Davis is the author of the online sales management training program, The Sales Manager’s Guide to Greatness. For more information visit www.toplineleadership.com
