Building Your Company’s Sales Management Capability

What are the key functions of a sales manager?

Key responsibilities include:

Recruiting and interviewing reps
Onboarding and ramping new reps
Creating reusable tools (playbooks)
Driving accountability through process and reporting
Coaching, mentoring, and motivating their teams

What are a sales manager’s responsibilities around recruiting and interviewing?

You can’t outsource this to recruiters – at the end of the day, you’re the sales manager and it’s your team. If you don’t put any effort into the recruiting process, you aren’t going to get the best people.

Define the competencies you need to hire for vs. what you can train for – for example, your salespeople might need discovery skills, demo skills, the ability to manage resistance, teamwork with customer success, sales development skills, etc. Of these competencies, which ones do they need to already have fully developed, and which ones are you okay with training them on once they’re on the job?

Ensure you have a structured interview process:

Plan who’s interviewing for what – specific people should be interviewing for specific things, not just “random acts of interviewing”. You can’t have entry-level people who’ve never conducted an interview before doing this step.
Have a quantitative rubric – so you can specifically rate someone on what you’re interviewing for. The rubric should also have a wildcard area that’s called an “X factor” which details how the interviewer feels about the candidate. Having a rubric will help to reduce bias.

What are a sales manager’s responsibilities around onboarding and ramping reps?

Define what “ramped” means – my general definition of a ramped salesperson is someone who has hit quota in two back-to-back quarters. This might be a little bit of an aggressive definition, but if they haven’t hit quota for back-to-back quarters, my question becomes “why?” Many times, companies are growing fast and are desperate to drive revenue, so they’re going to put people in positions to drive near-term revenue at the expense of developing some of the skills they’re going to need to drive more revenue in the long-term.

Work backward from your definition of “fully ramped” to identify the steps – it doesn’t matter what your definition of “fully ramped” is, but work backward from there and define all of the different steps along the way. For example:

Fully ramped means hitting quota at the end of the quarter
To do that, the rep needs to get to 50% of quota by mid-quarter
To do that, the rep needs to have made X sales
To do that, the rep needs to have had X conversations with prospects
Etc.

→ Orchestrate an onboarding program that helps new reps hit each of the building-block steps.

Multiple teams are involved – the efforts are typically split between the manager, sales enablement, team, HR, and other folks that might be involved. At a smaller company, the manager is going to be responsible for all of it. At a bigger company, it’s going to have to be well orchestrated, and people need to be aligned around who’s doing what and why. Because, if you start to see situations where enablement wants a longer-term program, but the manager wants the candidate to begin selling as quickly as possible, then it’s not going to work.

What are a sales manager’s responsibilities around creating and updating repeatable tools (i.e. the company’s sales playbook)?

Common Playbook “Chapters”:

Discovery questions – help your salespeople ask discovery questions about topics that are relative to the prospect persona and uncover pain in the “winning zone” (the specific area where your company wins against the competition). Document different discovery questions meant to identify pain, uncover resources, and disarm resistance.
Personas – help your salespeople get to know your buyer persona so that they can better establish rapport, become a trusted advisor, discover pain, and accelerate the sales process. Document each persona, their goals, their responsibilities, their pains, and how your company wins at solving that pain.
The Sales Process – your company probably already has a sales process, but it may not be crisply defined. Document the steps from the first conversation to renewal, key activities and exit criteria for each stage, internal resources for each stage, and pre-meeting prep and debrief for each stage.
Target Market – start by defining ideal, good, and rejected prospects based on your criteria like company size, geography, industry, event, job title, incumbent solution, language, and technology used. As you get more sophisticated, build out a lead scoring formula that identifies how well a prospect’s attributes align with your target.
Objections – in your playbook, create examples of common objections, categorize them, identify an active listening technique to apply, and a plan for what to do next (a question or statement).
Customer Stories – gain customer trust and reduce skepticism by telling stories of how you’ve worked with similar personas experiencing a similar problem. Make a plan to capture stories from the team, then index the customer stories in a way that makes them easy to find.
Competition and Battlecards – identify where your company wins and loses so that you can focus selling conversations in the advantageous areas. For each major competitor, identify your company’s “winning zone” (where your product’s features are best-in-class), “battlefield” (where you have feature parity), and “losing zone” (where pain best lends itself to your competitor’s features). Additionally, make a list of customers who’ve switched to your solution from each competitor.

Closer Content – build out additional content specifically for Account Executives, like:

Product and pricing
Demo framework
Deal-level selling scenarios (things that have happened to other sellers in the past)
Negotiation levers
Content and resources
Referrals

Sales Development Content – build out additional content for SDRs and prospecting AEs like:

Cold-calling frameworks
Email templates
Inbound lead qualification frameworks

Upsell Content – build out additional content for CSM, AMs, or AEs responsible for upsell/cross-sell, like:

Characteristics of upsell/cross-sell opportunities
Upsell email template (similar to prospecting email templates)
Account review agendas

Tips for great playbooks:

Ensure that the team has current, actionable, content – create a guide that’s broadly relevant, has actionable items, drives results, and has pertinent content. For example, if you have a cross-sell model, include that chapter. If you don’t, skip it.
Create resources that serve both rookies and veterans – the best sales playbooks are valuable to everyone from your junior sellers that just started to your senior sellers that have been there for a long time. Even the veterans are excited for updated, competitive intel, updated discovery questions around new products that have just been released, updated customer stories they may be able to leverage, and so on.
Invest in user experience – if the guide is only a PDF or PowerPoint file, it’s more likely to be a monitor stand or a waste of hard disk space than anything else.

For more detail on building a sales playbook, check out Sales Playbooks: The Builder’s Toolkit

What are a sales manager’s responsibilities around accountability?

Salespeople have two levers, quantity, and quality of activity (sales leaders need to track both).

To track quantity, understand your sales math – this is much like onboarding, where you need to work backward. For example, let’s say my quota is $200,000 a quarter and my average deal size is $20,000.

Working backward, this means I need 10 deals a quarter
50% of the proposals I send out get signed, so I need to send out 20 proposals
Half of my demos become proposals, so I need to have 40 demos
Half of my discovery calls go to demos, so I need to have 80 discovery calls a quarter

→Now as a manager you know that if a rep doesn’t have at least 80 discovery calls a quarter, they’re unlikely to hit quota. Identify and track those key leading indicators.

Inspect quality if conversion isn’t what you expect – if my conversion rates from stage to stage fail to hit normal ranges, go back to inspect lead quality to discover where you’ve gone wrong in the process.

What regular meeting should sales leaders hold?

Pipeline meetings (team meeting, weekly) – all salespeople should update the CRM before this meeting and the manager should review it before the meeting. Team meetings are good for allowing reps to learn from each other. Make sure that the team members are sharing what has worked for them vs. having the boss bark orders about what people need to do. This meeting should be focused on concise action items and next steps, not reading things that are on the screen.

Coaching meetings (1:1, weekly) – focused on applying skills (with additional intermittent coaching outside dedicated meetings). Coaching meetings should only focus on coaching one thing at a time. These meetings should help people apply the skills they need to do their job.

Training meetings (team meetings, as needed) – these involve equipping the broader team with the skills they need to do their job. They might be an intro to new topics (e.g. new product functionality), a refresher, or a level-up.

What metrics should sales leaders track?

Lagging bookings indicators – this normally includes closed deals and lost deals (and the reasons for losing deals–digging into why you’re losing deals is extremely important).

Leading bookings indicators – things like pipeline and expected value pipeline. This factors in deal volume and the probability of deals closing.

Activity reporting – track your key “sales math” activity counts. These will vary by company and by team member type. Here’s an example for SDRs.

Track the quality of data in the CRM – look for:

What percentage of deals have next steps? – do the next steps actually exist and are they things that the prospect agreed to? For example, “Call John” is not a next step. A next step is “John agreed to review the contract with me and get back to me before a specific date.”
Everything in the CRM should be in the future – nothing should be in the past; that’s good hygiene.
High-quality discovery notes – a valuable indicator of how your team is doing, and a good leading indicator of future pipeline health. Look for reps to document reason (pain), resources, and resistance.

What are a sales manager’s responsibilities around coaching, mentoring, and motivating?

Prepare for the coaching session – we use the COACH framework.

C – Challenge – identify the challenge. This is the one thing you’re coaching them on through this specific session. There are three main challenge types to identify: it’s either a mindset challenge, an activities challenge, or a skill set challenge, and you have to coach each of these challenges differently.
O – Outline the path to success – this is much like doing prep for a sales meeting. The manager goes into the conversation knowing where they’re at and knowing where they’re going to go. This should only take 5-15 minutes.
A – Action Plan – as a manager, I ask a lot of questions and get the salesperson to realize the challenge that we’re coaching to get them to come up with an action plan.
C – Consequences – these don’t have to be dire or negative, but they need to focus on “what’s the impact” if the coaching action plan doesn’t come to life.
H – Hold Accountable – what are you going to do to hold someone accountable? Are you going to send them a call snippet of a data report? Are you going to set SMART goals?

Coach on one thing at a time – it’s distracting to focus on three things at once, so then the salesperson ends up focusing on zero things at once. Instead, focus on one main item in a coaching session.

Motivate personally – it’s best if the manager knows the individual personally, what motivates them, and what their goals are. This will lead you to both understand the common goal, and you can motivate them to want to get there.

What are the signs that a team has strong or weak sales management in place?

Signs of good sales management:

Strong forecast accuracy – this is the number one sign because the team says what they’re going to do and then they do it.
People who are promoted hit their goals in the next role – this will indicate if the manager is developing people to be successful in their future roles vs. propping them up.

Signs of weak sales management:

Not hitting goals – or poor forecast accuracy.
Turnover – especially of good people.

How should sales managers provide broader mentorship and career guidance to their reps?

Give reps insight into what the “next step” means – e.g. for SDRs who want to be AEs or AEs who want to be sales managers. Many people just want to move to the next step to make more money or because they want the power. Those are fine reasons, but if you don’t truly understand what the role means, then why are you trying to become it? Explain what mistakes people make along the way, and the roadblocks they might face.

Great sales leaders teach their people to work cross-functionally – mentor your sales team on how to work with marketing, product, CS, and finance. For example, if you can’t manage a spreadsheet, the CFO is never going to take you seriously.

Make sure that future managers learn soft skills – don’t just train them on how to be “super closers” where they’re jumping in on the reps’ deals and doing their jobs for them.

What are the most important pieces to get right?

Prioritize coaching – become great at diagnosing the most limiting challenge a rep has and helping them improve. There’s no way to have a greater impact on the team.

What are the common pitfalls?

Avoid a top-down “telling” style – instead, you want to get “buy-in.” If you bark orders and instruct people what to do, then they might do it or they might not. If you’re able to get people to come up with their own ideas, they’ll have more ownership and the team is more likely to follow through.

Managers shouldn’t be “super closers”– it’s not the manager’s job to close salespeople’s deals; it’s their job to teach them how to close their own deals.