Business Coach
By: Miller Heiman
Leading and Managing for Results
While forums can be found in any number of social media outlets, email exchanges, or impromptu chats,rarely do such conversations surpass the energy and power that is brought to the mix through a live, facilitated discussion. As Sam Reese, president and CEO of Miller Heiman, said, “It’s all about elevating the role, credibility, status, and strategic importance of the sales profession. These discussions help to figure out how we’re going to get there.”
The following summary is the result of a series of discussions during an executive roundtable session comprised of senior executives from a variety of industries. The session revolved around the foremost challenges facing sales organizations and provided the sales leaders in attendance with an opportunity to discuss solutions and best practices that address these critical issues. The companies represented in this discussion are all managing in complex business to business sales environments. This publication presents the most valuable and pertinent takeaways that came as a result of this session.
The forum focused on three chief questions in the sales arena asked by those organizations looking to attain or maintain World-Class status.
The first question was centered on the sales manager: What is the role of the front-line sales leader in executing strategy? With fewer resources available, companies are forced to constantly reassess how to bolster results. The group discussed how organizations can fully utilize the role of the front-line manager to achieve desired results.
The second question sought to understand what it really means for an organization to be focused on the customer: What does it mean to build a customer-centric organization? The group focused on identifying those qualities of organizations that successfully center operations toward customers in order to grow the top-line.
The third question focused on the type of activities that are necessary to create an organization that produces top-tier results consistently: How do you develop a high-performance sales culture? The participants explored what steps should be taken to create a culture that enables the organization to operate in the most efficient and lucrative manner possible.
These discussion points came directly from previous conversations with Miller Heiman clients, having been on the minds of many a sales leader in this economy and therefore voiced and echoed multiple times. Damon Jones, managing director of strategic accounts, brought up perhaps the hottest topic: sales management – i.e. the role, how managers are being deployed, where they’re spending their time. As Jones noted, customers have observed that they have sales managers who close up to three quarters of their deals. In the preliminary findings of the 2011 Miller Heiman Sales Best Practices Study, managers reported spending most of their time on selling activities. While attending to sales activities is a necessary responsibility, it doesn’t scale. A more fruitful area of focus needs to be ensuring that sales reps themselves are capable of closing deals, as the manager’s time is already limited and he or she cannot be expected to be involved in every deal their team is pursuing.
In support of his assertion, the 2010 Miller Heiman Sales Best Practices Study revealed that World-Class Sales Organizations, those that were more likely to report growth in key metrics such as new customer acquisition and sales quota achievement, were much more likely to report that their managers spent valuable time with the members of their sales teams.
The sales manager’s role has come under the hot spotlight recently, as the question of how to do more with less became the norm. With no room left to cut in the bottom line, growing sales with the resources at hand becomes of paramount importance – and it’s the manager’s job to facilitate the growth by cultivating the productivity of the front line. In short, a large burden falls on managers’ already weighted-down, shoulders.
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