Job Promotion - Sales Manager

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Are you ready to embrace your sales management role?

Adjustment is a thing that you will put in your mind first while you perform your new role, the management are looking forward to duplicate your success story to your team.

Here’s the top skills to become a successful Sales Manager

1.Numbers Numbers Numbers

You already know what I mean, when we talk about sales the first thing that ping in our mind is the numbers, your numbers is the most important tool to be become a successful sales manager.

Types of number that you need to learn.

a) Sales Target vs. Sales Achievement

This number is very important to determine your month to date (MTD) or year to date (YTD) performance. The basic formula to compute your MTD are as follows.

MTD = (Sales Achievement / Sales Target) x 100%

The same formula will also apply to your team daily sales expectations.

b) Sales Pipelines

Pipelines are classified to Hot, Medium, and Low. Hot pipelines are the list of your customer from your team to be close anytime today or few days, whilst the low pipelines are the accounts you can close in two weeks or so, and Low pipelines are accounts that can be closed within a month or needs more time.

Ideally, management usually expect a healthy pipelines from the Sales Manager, a good example of a healthy pipelines are having 300% of the total hot pipeline numbers vs monthly sales target.

c) Daily/weekly/monthly Expectations

This is very important and your daily dose, the team sales expectations, it gives you an idea of the sales closures of the day, and your average sales output of your team, you can also monitor and determined whom among your team contributes more sales order.

d) Sales Target

You must know your sales target by heart as this will give you an idea to prepare your sales plans and distribute the target among your teams.

e) Manpower count

In a large sales organizations, the number of your manpower count is essential as this will help you distribute the assigned sales target, you cannot give the same amount of sales target of the senior sales team to the new employees

2.Motivation

This is very essential skills that a Sales Manager must have, you need to learn how to motivate your team, a simple recognition for job well done or good sales results among your team members can boost the motivation to your team, if needed introduce a standard reward monthly programs, and on top of that you must be transparent to your team sales target share it to them ahead of the month so that they can also prepare their own sales plans to achieve their individual targets.

3.Sales Planning

How is your sales planning skills? Have you prepared any sales plans before? If not, then you must start learning how to prepare a sales plans. Your plan must include all the details how you can achieve the monthly sales target assigned to you. If needed, share your plan to your team too, this will help them learn and understand the directions of your team.

4.Product Knowledge

As a Sales Manager your team expect you to be a subject matter expert of all the products and services you are selling, after all you are always the first point of contact of your team if they need a product supports. If you can trained them too on the product knowledge that is a plus factor.

5. Organizational Skills

Surprisingly some Sales Manager are not organized and results are many delays, issues unresolved among others. Organizational skills is very basic and it is essential to your job, list down all your daily priorities and start from the most high important.

6.Passion

Sales must be your passion if you want to succeed on this field. If you are not comfortable to work in Sales Management role decide early before you fail.

7.Time Management

This is very critical and important skills that a Sales Manager must have, you must know how to manage your time well.

Time management was always the issue for the sales team, as most of them does not know how to manage their time specially when they are working on the field. As a Manager you should help your team how to manage their schedules, avoid point to point as this cause much of their time visiting the customers, apply 360 degrees approach in order for them to have a good and productive results.

8.Communication & Listening Skills

Your communication skills is very important, your team and management expect you to deliver a clear message, and this will also apply to your customers.

Whilst listening to your team, customer and management are also essential, this will help you to understand the current situations and formulate a sales plans to improve your sales strategies.

9.Sales Coaching

This skills will increase your team productivity, daily sales coaching is very important, support your team on the sales pitch of every products or services you are selling, and this does not focus only to your services, you can go extra mile like sharing your success stories why you achieved the Sales Manager post.

10.Presentation Skills

There are lots of sales leader who has great knowledge on product but not able to present properly, you as a sales leader must know how to effectively present the services you are selling to your customer. You must know how to catch the attention of your audience, you must know how to encourage participations of your audience and most of all you must know how to make them believe of your products, your presentations skills is your key to achieve your sales target.

11.Account Management

You need to apply profiling of your accounts and label them into different segmentations depends on your criteria, you can segregate them by revenue or industry.

12.Personality Development

Lastly you must look after yourself, life is not all about work. Your image is very important to your role, create your own style and aligned them to your current role.

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