Interim Sales Managers: When Can Hiring an Interim Sales Manager be the Best Option?

At first glance, an interim sales manager may seem like a strange concept. After all, “sales” is a constant, “business as usual” function within any organisation.

However, over recent years, the concept of an interim sales manager has emerged. Specifically interim sales managers are increasingly seen as a flexible and appropriate solution in the following three business situations:

1) Stop Gaps

2) Start-ups

3) Special Projects

This article looks at each of these three situations and explores how an interim sales manager can add immediate value.

Stop Gaps

Many companies can find themselves in positions where they have a short-term requirement to plug a gap in their sales function. Typical scenarios include long-term illness, maternity leave and any type of sudden unplanned crisis.

Whether it’s because the situation does not allow for a permanent resource, or that the time to recruit leaves sales exposed, an interim sales manager can bring immediate resource to bear on the problem.

Almost exclusively, temporary sales people are not catered for in the general recruitment market; this is the domain of professional interim sales managers who specialise in filling immediate interim assignments.

Start-ups

Another common situation where an interim sales manager is a good solution is with start-ups and early stage companies. Typically, these companies have limited resources and find attracting top sales talent a real problem.

Interim sales managers are usually over-qualified, experienced individuals with broad experience across different business stages. As well as bringing additional “hands on” sales resource, an interim sales manager will add value through supporting the start-up management team with strategy and market development.

Interim sales managers are also “heavy hitters” with strong networks, capable of opening doors and bringing in major deals that younger sales hires would struggle with.

Special Projects

Finally, every business has times when they need to focus resource on new areas to drive revenue. Often, these special projects emerge from board-level strategies to sustain profitable growth and retain a competitive edge.

These could include exploring new markets, evaluating current sales channels, or merging sales teams and divisions.

An interim sales manager is an excellent solution for this situation. Crucially, interim sales managers bring a fresh perspective, unencumbered by internal politics and structures.

In addition, while it could be argued that existing sales people could be utilised for these special projects, rather than bringing in an interim sales manager, this seldom works in reality.

Why? Unlike an Interim Sales Manager, existing sales people (if they are good) are best left focused on execution. Indeed, most of their remuneration will come from successfully selling established products to existing markets.

Many a new product launch has been halted by sales teams that are not interested in selling the new product; once they experience resistance, they go back to selling what they know.

In contrast, interim sales managers measure success by their last assignment. Once you have an interim sales manager focused on delivering a successful outcome they have no option but to make it work.

In summary, there are many situations where hiring an interim sales manager is the best option.

From start-ups to multi-national organisations, interim sales managers represent a flexible and results-focused solution short-term sales and business development resourcing.

Take Your Sales Team from Good to Great with Sales Management Training

I recently reread Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t and found that many of his ideas can help you improve performance of your sales team.

Collins’ book answers the question: How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? Using tough standards, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of “comparison” companies that failed to make the leap from good to great.

Over five years and 15,000 hours of research, Collins and his team deduced the key determinants of greatness – why some companies make the leap and others don’t. Here are a few of their findings and what, I think, Collins’ findings mean to you and the development of your team.

Good is the enemy of great

Some sales teams will never be great because their sales managers settle for being good. It’s easier than being great. We have also found that a lot of sales manager do not send their salespeople to any sales seminars.

First Who… then What

Collins expected to find that Good to Great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. What their research discovered, however, was that the best leaders first got the right people on the team, de-hired the wrong people, and got everyone in their optimal position… and then decided what the vision and strategy was. The saying, “People are your most important asset” is incorrect. It should be changed to, “The right people are your most important asset.” Then, put your best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems.

Application questions: Is there anybody on your team who shouldn’t be? Do you have any team members in a less-than-optimal position, a person whose skills are not being fully utilized? What, and when will you rectify these situations?

Confront the brutal facts, but never lose faith

One of the most important findings from Collins’ research is that breakthrough results come about by a series of good decisions, diligently executed and accumulated one on top of the other. You don’t need to be perfect, but to be great you do need to make many more good decisions than bad ones. And good decision-making requires accurate information, which can be difficult to obtain. Collins writes:

Indeed, for those of you with a strong, charismatic personality, it is worthwhile to consider the idea that charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. Your strength of personality can sow the seeds of problems, when people filter the brutal facts from you.

Winston Churchill understood the liabilities of his strong personality. He was concerned that he wouldn’t get accurate information from his subordinates, so, during the darkest days of World War II, he founded the “Statistical Office”, a separate department outside the command structure that fed him the most accurate, indeed brutal, facts of the war. Churchill also possessed the second requirement of greatness — an unwavering faith that Britain would survive and thrive, even when things looked so bleak.

Application questions: What’s one great dream you would dare to dream (for your team) if you knew you could not fail?

Your “Stop doing” list is more important than your “To do” list.

Many sales managers lead busy lives, accomplishing task after task after task. Interestingly, the leaders studied in “Good to Great” companies made as much use of “stop doing” lists as “to do” lists. They continually asked themselves:

What can we do better than anyone else? What type of opportunities are we passionate about? And, what segment of customers allows us to make the most profit?

Good to Great leaders instilled the culture of discipline – by teaching their team where to focus, and what to ignore.

Application questions: What opportunities, or customer segments, can your team make a compelling case of being the best choice? Which of these opportunities are most profitable, and why? Finally, what can you become passionate about?

Is your team brilliant on the basics? If not, you may be losing sales you should be winning. At TopLine Leadership, we help salespeople re-focus on the fundamentals of effective salesmanship, and sales managers to master the basics of management / leadership. We can help you and your sales team with these concepts with our sales management training seminars and coaching. 

Some Sales Managers are Idiots!

Yes, I said it, some sales managers are idiots.

I know, I work with field sales professionals all the time and deal with the problems that sales managers cause.

Look at the really smart companies whose sales managers are always successful, they do it right, IBM, P&G, Xerox. We all bought their books and training programs, but few of us actually implemented what they taught us.

I guess the companies simply expected the sales force to improve without good sales management! Sales training does not relieve a company of management responsibility.

Two things that sales management does wrong continually are no goal setting and the wrong skills training.

First, establish goals and then a reward system based on those goals. That sounds simple, but most companies don’t do it. They say “we need to increase the number of new customers this year. So go out and get more customers.” That’s it, no reward system for achievement, no consequences for failure. And, that is not really a goal!!

Remember, a goal is “a detailed objective to be achieved by a specific point in time.” More customers this year is not a goal, it is a dream, wish, hope or something, but not a goal.

Second, this one really confuses me. Companies will spend literally thousands of dollars each year or two on sales skills training, but won’t spend 0 per sales person on a Prospecting Kit. Yet prospecting is the only skill that will get a sales person into a situation where they can actually use their selling skills!!!

So that tells me and the sales team that the sales manager is not really serious about getting new customers. Also, most sales people are really customer service people, they make very few presentations, so they can save the money on that skills training.

If you want to step away from the crowd set up actual goals and a reward system for their achievement. Train your folks in the skills necessary to achieve the goals, and then sit back and watch your business grow. That’s the way the big guys do it.

Sell Well and Often,

Bill

Bill@BlitzCall.com

© Copyright 2008 WJ Truax

Survival Tips for the New Sales Manager

Survival Tips for the New Sales Manager

When I was a young, sales manager it was not really that hard to be good—even great. The recipe for “good” back then was fairly simple: work long hours, teach some type of sales strategy (by example) and occasionally have a pep talk with your team. If you wanted to be “crazy good” you held a sales meeting once a week, worked individually with reps and devised some type of incentive for getting people to do pretty much whatever you wanted. Sure there were challenges and competition and the need to get traffic through the door but somehow we overcame it all and were able to succeed and prosper with a fairly uncomplicated process. That was a long time ago.

Being great in today’s market comes with many of the same challenges as before—but they are challenges on steroids. Today’s sales manager must contend with tough competition, generational issues, a much more sophisticated buyer, a volatile economy and deal with major management and corporate office changes with regularity. Today’s sales manager must be a disciplinarian, a therapist and a recruiter–not to mention a stickler for managing by the numbers.

Can it Be Done?

So is it impossible to be a great sales manager? Absolutely not! There are definite strategies that can be employed to ease the challenges facing today’s managers. The modern-day sales managers must learn to be supreme sorters among the endless to-do lists that threaten to overwhelm them and must also learn to embrace change—to name a few. While we cannot cover ALL of strategies in the scope of this article—we can certainly hit on a few that might make an immediate difference.

Coping With Change-Whoever said “Change is Good” was on crack. (Actually I think it was President JFK –so no disrespect intended). Change is great until it happens to you. Departmental reorganizations, budget cuts, mergers, acquisitions and new bosses can rattle even the most solid among us. Even seemingly “smaller” changes like delays in a promised promotion, or a change in comp plan we have to sell to our team, or even a marketing strategy we completely disagree with, can be rattling because they have a direct effect on our jobs. It can feel like gut-punch and frankly being punched can elicit all kinds of inappropriate responses from us. So the next time you get hit by an email or piece of news you do not like do three things:

First: Do nothing. That’s right. Do nothing at all. Don’t send the email, the announcement, the letter or have that conversation. Just take it in. Do nothing. You need a day to think about this if you don’t have a day, take an hour a minute or a walk. But do nothing with your first impulse.

Second: De-personalize the situation. While this dramatically affects you; it is not necessarily about you. Chances are this change is part of a much bigger issue that you may not have the details about—and likely never will. Try and imagine what those issues might be. Your next move will be a lot smarter, more tactical and strategically beneficial to you if you can take your personal feelings out of the equation.

Third: Make a list of what you believe in. Not what you think or do—what you believe. And not just work beliefs—true, deep down, life beliefs. What do you believe about adversity? About change? About integrity? Now is your chance to live by those beliefs and make your next move.

The bottom line with change is that you need to get yourself into a state of mind where you expect it, deal with it and even welcome it. To accomplish this you must have a strategy for coping–otherwise the stress will kill you or will certainly impair your ability to succeed.

Combating the Overwhelm-If you have been staring through your computer or wandering around aimlessly lately you might be in a state of overwhelm. Check your Thesaurus for other words to describe the feeling and you will find: confounded, dismayed, dumbfounded, shocked, and thunderstruck among them. Anyone who as ever been overwhelmed knows that overwhelm leads to paralysis and paralysis in sales equals failure. Try these 3 steps:

1. One of the best strategies for dealing with overwhelm is to start by making the longest to-do list known to man. When I am overwhelmed I write down literally any item floating in my mind. If I am particularly breathless with To-dos I will take out several note pads (or Word documents) and categorize them by month or department or client or whatever. Just get it down on paper.

2. Next prioritize the list by writing down the top 5 things you MUST accomplish to be a success right now. The truth is that we all have way too much to do and telling ourselves that everything is of equal importance only makes things worse. Look closely at that list and ferret out the items that will directly affect sales, client or employee retention, morale, reporting and profitability. Chances are, if you succeed at the critical items on your list the other things will fall into place or fall away.

3. Once you have your list it is time to ORGANIZE your world. There is almost no chance that you are totally overwhelmed and working at a clean desk with organized files, a tidy home and a clean car. What is more likely is that you have fallen way behind on these items and the disorganization is adding to your sense of overwhelm. Take your anger out on your office. Clean it up, organize it and rearrange it and THEN attack that to do list.

Much of what it takes to survive and thrive in today’s workforce falls under the category of perspective. You need perspective to remind yourself that not every change is about you. You need perspective to sort through the increasing number of things that are now “your job” and do what really, really matters first and you need the perspective to know that you got this job by succeeding at something and you can succeed at this too.

Hire the Right Sales Manager

Although every organization is different, hiring a sales manager is not as simple as it looks. In fact, the wrong sales manager can quickly damage morale, if not scare away the sales reps and potentially injure the firm.

A common mistake is to promote a high achieving sales rep who wants to move up in management. Unfortunately, a highly successful sales rep may be exactly the wrong candidate for sales management. Often aggressive sales reps are impatient, lack team-player characteristics, and tend to have huge egos; these can be exactly the wrong characteristics for a sales manager.

In my opinion, the following general characteristics or traits are needed for a good sales manager:

1. Teaching skills- This includes the ability and interest to help others learn.

2. Empathy- A good sales manager needs to understand how reps feel and how to react accordingly. Sales teams can be highly emotional and fragile. Insensitive sales managers fail.

3. Ego in check- A strong ego is required, but the needs of the team are greater than the manager’s.

4. Communication skills- This skill is an obvious requirement that includes the ability to lead the sales team and to work with the other departments.

5. Relationship skills- This is the ability to create long term relationships with internal and external customers. Sales managers must be likeable.

6. Analytical skills- The best sales managers must be able to decide the strategic options in complex sales situations. They have to make the tough calls.

7. Wins through the victories of the team- Gets satisfaction by helping sales reps win; this is knocks out a lot of reps who want to be managers.

8. Ability to handle pressure- On a day to day basis, the sales manager is “under the gun” more than any employee in a typical firm.

9. Continuous learner- I find that the best sales managers are always looking for new ways to get things done. They are naturally curious.

10. Sales manager experience- I always favor gray hair when it comes to hiring a sales manager. Conversely, rookies will likely make mistakes and those mistakes could be costly.

Remember to do an extensive background check on external candidates. Look for a history of strong performances with good references. Life is short, so hire winners.