7 Tips To Be A BETTER Sales Manager

Being a sales manager is NOT easy…

Do it right and you’ll lead your team to sales success, but do it wrong and you’ll hold them and the company back like an anchor.

We’re on a mission to not just help salespeople be the best they can be, but to help sales leaders be the best they can be as well.

So to help, here are 5 tips to be a BETTER sales manager in 2022:

1) Hire The RIGHT People Into Your Sales Team

The best sales leaders out there FOCUS hard on recruitment. When they hire, they take it incredibly seriously. None of this “sell me this pen” nonsense, but a thorough process to find the best and right talent for their sales team.

Here are our top tips for hiring the best sales talent:

Ask your existing team and top performers for referrals, people they know who might be a good fit
Utilise platforms like RepVue to attract the best sales talent (your salespeople rate you their, and your future salespeople will check your RepVue score before they apply for your roles or interview with you)
They way they sell to you during the interview (and prep for the interview) should be to the standard you would expect them to sell to your prospects

2) Find EACH Persons Real Motivations

Not every salesperson is purely motivated by money, and even those that are may not be motivated by the money itself, but what that money might represent to them (a house, holiday, new car etc).

Sit down and have a 1-2-1 with each of your sales team and just get to know THEM. What are they working for? What does really motivate them? And then what can you do to help them achieve that. For example, if they’re saving for a house deposit, don’t just help them earn commission for it, but connect them with people/information that can help when buying a new house.

NOTE – don’t forget, motivations change. Perhaps they buy that house, what next? This is something you want to check up on monthly/quarterly.

3) Ensure They Understand YOUR Expectations

Imagine you’re going on a road trip to somewhere you’ve never been before. There are 2 options, do you map out your journey or just hit the road and hope to make your way there? Most normal people will map out their journey to create a better chance of getting to their destination in the smoothest way. Sales is the same, and as a leader it is CRUCIAL that your team know exactly what you expect from them.

This goes beyond just KPI’s, it could be down to what they need to do on the CRM, what they need to do before prospecting, pitching, closing etc. They should know EXACTLY what is expected of them (and why it’s expected obviously) to help them focus properly.

4) Find Technology Your Team Will ACTUALLY Use

So many sales teams are given tools that just aren’t easy to use or the right fit for them. We see this with CRM’s, many teams don’t use their CRM because it’s not designed well or easy to use.

This is why we recommend Pipedrive, it’s the CRM built BY salespeople FOR salespeople.

Pipedrive is a world leading CRM for user reviews, customer satisfaction and ease of use. You can check it out for yourself or for your sales team right here. (They have one of the best pipeline management setups out of all CRM’s making it so much easier to manage sales pipelines for salespeople and sales managers)

5) Make Each Person Feel VALUED

There’s a great quote “A person who feels appreciated will always do more than is expected” and it’s so true. Unfortunately, many salespeople are not shown true appreciation and do not feel valued by their company or sales manager. It’s all targets, numbers and pressure, and sometimes sprinkled with threats of losing their jobs if they don’t hit their targets.

Here are our top tips:

Praise your sales people through internal emails and communications, and externally on platforms like LinkedIn
Give them personal gifts every so often to show them you appreciate them
Go above and beyond for them
Tell them (and be genuine) that you appreciate them as part of your team

6) Lead From The FRONT LINE

If you really want to be the best sales manager that you can, you need to get out from your desk (physically or virtually) and let your sales team see you leading from the front line. That might mean making sales calls with them, crafting sales emails with them, using LinkedIn and Sales Nav with them, make sure they see YOU working hard to lead them to victory.

If your team is part or fully remote, then this becomes a little more challenging but that’s where transparency and regular updates can help. For example, you could send a daily or weekly update on the teams activities and successes, also including your efforts and activities for the week.

7) Provide The Best TRAINING Consistently

If you want your team to be the best you need to constantly support them to be the best, and this will include consistent training. There is a BIG key to doing this successfully though, your team doesn’t want to spend hours and hours in boring, not relevant training. You want the right training delivered the right way by the right people.

Talk to your team first, what do they want training on. Then look at your data, what do they NEED training on. Then look for the best people that can demonstrate success in that field and who have the right energy to deliver sessions that drive engagement from your team.

Here are a few of our personal recommendations (based on feedback from sales teams):

Prospecting Training – John Barrows, Jeb Blount (Sales Gravy)

Cold Calling Training – Benjamin Dennehey (UK’s Most Hated Sales Trainer)

LinkedIn/Social Selling/Sales Nav – Daniel Disney (King of LinkedIn & Social Selling)

Modern Selling – Dale Dupree(Sales Rebellion)

Sales Coaching – Marcus Chan

Sales Training Subscription – Sales Impact Academy

Those are our 7 tips to be a BETTER sales manager…

What would be your BIGGEST tip to be a better sales manager?

Add it in the comments!

Let’s see how many tips we can get that might just inspire some sales managers out there.

Right, we’ve talked about what it takes to be a better sales manager, and choosing a CRM that your sales team will actually enjoy using is a BIG part of that..

That’s why we are so passionate about Pipedrive, one of the world’s best CRM’s used by over 100,000+ companies in 179 countries. You can try it for free right here. The best sales managers choose Pipedrive because it is DESIGNED specially for sales teams and has been voted the easiest to use CRM.

They normally offer 14-day free trial but if you follow one of our links in this newsletter you’ll be able to get an extended 30-day free trial and as a bonus, if you choose to use Pipedrive after your trial, you’ll get 20% discount on your first year (that’s a pretty amazing offer if we’re honest!).