I have reviewed many sales manager job descriptions over the years. Recently I was retained by a Fortune 500 company to examine their job description for the sales manager position. Fully 85 percent of the duties were directly linked to coaching salespeople.
After this review, I conducted face-to-face interviews with a number of the sales managers and found that less than 5 percent of their time was actually spent on sales coaching and training. Sales managers were spending 95 percent of their time focused on 15 percent of their job responsibilities. Why such waste?
One big reason was that these sales managers were spending three hours each day responding to about 150 emails–virtually none of which came from their sales team. And that’s not counting all the meetings, paperwork, and fire fighting. The list of “urgencies” for sales managers today is endless.
