Sales Planning: Is Your Sales Team Out of Gas or Gassed Up with Nowhere to Go?
I’m working on creating a sales management leadership training course through www.myprofessionaldevelopment.com. I’m reminded that an exceptional sales manager is the ultimate sales coach, someone who squarely focuses on the individual and on day-to-day real sales gains. This is as opposed to a great leader (read one of my favorites, Marcus Buckingham in The One Thing You Need to Know….) sees those gains in aggregate and as part of a continuous push toward the strategic corporate vision and fulfillment of the sales plan.
As I mentioned before, the manager and the leader aren’t separate people, at least in the best case. In a company that’s running on all cylinders, everyone embodies the visionary leader and the practical manager. If not, there’s a tendency for one or the other to become unbalanced. Too great an emphasis on vision and you lose the individual – and that’s not only bad for morale, it’s talking the talk without giving your team the gas it needs to drive the drive. Favor management too heavily and you’re all gassed up with nowhere to go – there’s no grand sense of purpose, no answer to the question, “Are we almost there, yet?” because there’s no there there.
Clearly, businesses need to synergize near-sighted management and far-sighted vision. Vadim Kotelnikov, in his Leadership-Management Synergy, outlines five key areas where visionary sales leadership and organizational management can meet and create a whole much greater than the sum of the parts:
- Vision + resources = employee empowerment. Your people have a map and a vehicle to get where you want to go.
- Identified opportunities + reduced risks = strategic achievements. Leadership creatively brainstorms sales opportunities, which management creatively pursues in as risk-free a manner as possible. Think of this as the accelerator and brakes.
- Inspiration + coordination = teamwork. It’s hard to get anywhere when everyone is moving in contrary directions. Sales teamwork is much like the connection between the steering wheel and the tires, where the rubber meets the road.
- Improvisation + structure = innovation. Not every road is straight or free from potholes, and this synergy lets you take necessary and/or fortuitous detours and still make it to your destination, maybe even faster and in better style. In a way, it’s like a GPS which instantly reroutes you when you get off the beaten path.
- Doing the right things + doing things right = effectiveness. Pursuing a good opportunity in the wrong way can lead to a partial or total loss of that opportunity – and others, down the road. The penalty for driving toward your goals while putting yourself and others in jeopardy is a ticket. Or you might just lose your license.
Coordinating forward-thinking vision with minute-to-minute sales force management can be a challenge for even the most balanced managers, CEOs, and business owners, but the synergies gained multiply the investment of time, energy, and resources many times over.
Again, where is your strong suit? Leadership? Management?
I look forward to hearing from you!
Strategic Sales Planning: Is your sales team going nowhere fast?
As sales management leaders, we’ve heard these truisms a million times!
- Improvisation without structure is chaos.
- Doing the right things without doing them right is a waste of time.
- Pursuing opportunities blindly without recognizing and reducing risks is foolhardy.
- Vision without direction is a dead end.
Yes, these are the province of exceptional sales leadership. Structuring, doing things right, minimizing risks, and directing your team has sales force management written all over it. And to move ahead, especially when the roads are as rocky as ours currently are, you need both leadership propulsion and management steering.
Otherwise, you’re going to either stand still or drive your organization over a cliff – and very quickly.
Simple enough, right? Yet as commonsensical as is sounds, even veteran sales management leaders don’t really understand the difference between leadership and management – or the need to shift between them as conditions warrant.
What is the difference between leadership and management? Marcus Buckingham, author of The One Thing You Need to Know about Great Managing, Great Leading and Sustained Individual Effort, tells us that, in a nutshell, a manager coaches the successful salesperson in the here-and-now, while the leader visualizes and pied-pipers an entire organization toward the future (not to say your organization is filled with rats, though – that’s a subject for another discussion.)
The Sales Leadership Lesson: So, the sales leader begins in the future and works toward the now, and the manager does the same in reverse. But the secret of successful sales management, owners, and CEOs is that they’re able to be both – living simultaneously in the future and the now – all guided by the lessons of the past.
It’s a leadership paradox.
The Sales Question: So, which is your strong suite? Which is your developmental area?
I look forward to hearing from you.
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