The Failure of Frontline Sales Management

It’s with pain and a bit of frustration that I have to say this.  As an avid defender of the sales community, and a passionate participant, it doesn’t feel good to call out this elephant in the room, but it must be done.

It’s nothing knew. My observation is not revelational. Many of us are aware of the problem, we see it, we subconsciously feel it, and worse we suffer it’s consequences.  Yet, in spite of all this we do little to address the problem and even worse, leverage the benefits by fixing it.

What am I talking about?

I’m talking about the failure of frontline sales managers.

If you’re a frontline sales manager, before you get all worked up and start throwing things at the monitor and cursing my name, it’s not completely your fault and we can’t fully blame you. Leadership, enablement and the general culture in sales as failed you. We know you’re working your ass off to make the number, but we haven’t prepared you properly and that is our fault.

Here’s the deal.

As a culture and from an enablement and sales leadership perspective we have not provided, consistent, solid guidance and descriptions of what good frontline management looks like.  Too often we provide loose, disconnected and academic guidance and training, if we provide any training at all. If we do provide training, it often lacks applicability. Making matters worse, we rarely manage frontline managers to the training and unwittingly incentivize them towards competing behaviors.

Today’s Frontline Sales Managers

Today’s sales managers are often missed used and asked to do way to many things that undermine their effectiveness. Today’s sales managers:

• Are glorified sales people and too often take over the sale
• Are used as crutches for sales people and not as support
• Are micromanagers as they require their involvement in every sale
• Are used as the “closers,” not allowing salespeople to develop their own closing skills
• Lack effective coaching skills and see coaching as a secondary element of their job
• Spend way too much of their time selling and not managing
• Find organization process; CRM hygiene, sales process management, adherence to methodology to be tedious and often ignore them

Making matters worse, upper management struggles at holding frontline sales managers accountable. If I had a dime for every time I heard a prospect say, and I quote:

We can’t get our sales managers to do that.

My company wouldn’t need to offer trainings or services.  We’d be a billion dollar company.

For whatever reason, executive sales management, senior sales management and enablement have thrown their hands up when it comes to frontline sales leaders and it’s costing sales orgs dearly.

Frontline sales management are the most important and valuable players in the sales ecosystem. Yet, they are often the least trained, and most overworked.  We expect them to move mountains, yet don’t give them the proper tools. We want them to develop and grow their sales teams, yet we don’t hire the best leaders, we hire the best salespeople. We’re too often missing the mark.

Getting the frontline sales manager role correct, is by far the best human resource an sales organization can make.

Great Frontline Sales Management

Great frontline management that elevates sales teams is built different. They recognize their job is to develop, support, move, coach, and hold sales people accountable and the their job is no longer selling.

Great frontline sales managers:

• Spend 50-60%  of their time coaching
• Are experts in the elements of the sales methodology, reinforcing it and ensuring it’s leveraged across all sales opportunities
• Are excellent at deal management and conduct frequent and robust deal reviews
• Know what great looks like and reinforces the behaviors that create great salespeople
• Hold sales reps accountable for the BID (buyer input data) and how they manage opportunities
• Hold sales reps to proper CRM hygiene including:
  • proper qualification process
  • complete capture of the BID information
  • appropriate stages and close dates
  • understanding of the players involved and knowing champion for buyer
  • they buying process
  • the decision criteria
  • and more
• Find observable moments to watch and evaluate their sales people in live settings in order to assess their strengths and weaknesses.
• Leverage a repeatable coaching framework to improve and develop the team
• and more

Frontline Sales Management is the to Key Sales Success

That’s about as plain and direct as I can be.  The greatest opportunity to drive sales, accelerate growth, improve win rates, shorten sales cycles and increase average deal sizes is highly functioning frontline sales management.

Sales leadership and sales enablement, it’s time we provide the rigor, structure and support to frontline managers the way we do to the sales team. It’s time to increase the investment of time and resources into frontline management.  We need to stop hiring and promoting glorified salespeople. We need to provide them with coaching frameworks, robust methodologies, and hold them accountable. We need to stop pressuring them to drive sales at all costs, including our own profit margin and allow them to build sales teams that drive more revenue. It’s time to build frontline sales managers that are force multipliers.

We need to stop saying “Oh, we could never get our sales managers to do that.”

They’re supposed to do that.

It’s their job!