A sales manager’s number one priority is to create a sales team that is as talented as they are. Think about it. The average sales leader has a team of seven people working for them. If each of those team members has twenty selling interactions per week, that’s a total of 140 client interactions. How many can your sales manager be involved in personally? Not many. Yet, a surprising number of sales managers think that their job is closing the deal and making the number.

Train your sales managers

Industry leaders address this head on and proactively train their sales managers in the skills of managing and developing their teams. GrowthPlay’s decades of experience show that most sales managers (even those with years of experience) often need training to develop the skill and comfort needed to effectively:

  • Recruit, Interview, and Hire
  • Communicate Performance Expectations
  • Hold Others Accountable
  • Provide Feedback & Coaching
  • Diagnose Performance Issues
  • Confront Poor Performance
  • Grow & Develop Top Talent

Establish a sales talent management operating rhythm

In parallel with providing training, top companies establish a sales talent management operating rhythm. Doing so helps simplify the process of talent management and ensures that managers are executing the right things at the right time.

Identifying and communicating a sales coaching cadence is particularly important for sales executives. As you know, what gets measured, gets done. Sales leaders who don’t hold sales managers accountable for coaching end up running organizations that don’t grow and scale effectively.

Make tools easy to access

It’s also a best practice to bring all talent management processes and tools together in one place. Having a simple and consumable toolkit is essential for getting busy sales managers to spend time on talent management tasks.