Residential

Set Sales Expectations for Success

What makes a great sales manager? Depends on you, your company, and what your expectations are for your salespeople.

9 MIN READ

Love to Sell

Many company owners prefer to hire a sales manager from outside the existing salesforce. The reason: New blood brings new ideas, energy, and goals. But some of the most successful companies, such as Penguin Windows or Weather Tight, only hire managers who come through the ranks, tested every step of the way.

Both methods can be successful. But whether you hire sales managers from your existing salesforce or get them from outside the company, many owners agree that a great or even just an effective sales manager must be skilled at two things: selling in the home and managing the people who do. If he can’t do both of those ? not just one or the other but both ? he is probably not going to work out, let alone be a great, dynamic, or even effective sales manager.

Sales management, even by those managers who aren’t running leads, is still about selling. “When a salesman gets promoted to sales manager, he still has to love to sell,” McCourt says. “You have to love being in the house.”

Even if the sales manager job you offer is not a “selling sales manager” position ? i.e., a job that requires the sales manager to run leads ? he or (more rarely) she will still need to be in the house on a regular basis. Their purpose there is not so much to sell the job, but to help the salesperson sell the job and to show him or her how to do that. As Schulz points out, what you might consider key parts of the sales manager’s job ? rehashing calls, saving sales, riding with salespeople for support and, afterward, evaluating their presentation ? are actually functions that a competent salesperson could do. Many experienced salespeople, for instance, can effectively evaluate another rep’s performance, Schulz says. What makes the sales manager different, he points out, is that the sales manager “has to know what to do about that performance.”

And a sales manager must be detail-driven so as to stay tuned to everything going on. A system for staying on top of the everyday details of the job ? each lead, each call, each result ? is key to being effective. “A good manager is involved every day and knows where his salespeople are, what and where the appointments are, and what the expected outcome is,” Rea says.

He also has to know what motivates people to do their best because in each case it’s different. “Some are motivated by performance,” Cardillo says, “some by money. And then there are some who want to be No.1 regardless of the rest of the pack.”

Stands Out in the Crowd

Weather Tight, which began 2001 with $1.5 million in sales and hit $16 million last year, now fields a salesforce of between 18 to 20 reps, depending on the time of year, with three sales mangers. Schulz says that what he looked for, as he began to consider replacing himself, were “guys who stand out in the crowd, who are the natural leaders at meetings”; those who people go to when they need help and who are respected.

The three he hired to be sales managers have clocked, respectively, eight-, eight-, and five-year stints at the company ? a rarity when you consider the tendency of home improvement sales managers to shuffle in and out of jobs at a rate only slightly less than that of the reps who they manage. Schulz says that each of the three managers brings different skills and strengths to their role. One is inspirational, one is an excellent judge of field performance skills, and the third is a master of the psychology of buying, a knowledge he puts to use writing scripts and working directly with sales reps.

What these managers have in common, Schulz says, is their ability to show sales reps how to do what they do in a way that’s quickly grasped. “The leadership,” Schulz says, “comes with being able to coach and mentor an individual.” The sales manager, he says, is someone who salespeople must trust, so that the manager can be firm in the face of inadequate performance but not necessarily offer my-way-or-the-highway ultimatums. It’s the difference, Schulz says, between being aggressive and being assertive.

“The aggressive style is demanding that you hit the numbers or be fired,” Schulz points out. “Assertive is teaching the salespeople what it takes to hit their number, working with them, and developing them. It’s being able to sit down and have the salesperson establish short-term goals for enhanced performance.” And it’s long-term as well: The tools necessary to build a sales career come from the sales manager.

Micromanage the Lead

There are four key parts of the sales manager’s job:

  • 1) to train and hire salespeople;
  • 2) to save business via rehash and cancel/saves;
  • 3) to increase a salesperson’s skills and help him up his numbers; and
  • 4) to manage and monitor lead flow.

Since most home improvement companies are small ? less than $5 million in sales ? the sales manager is typically involved in all four of those tasks, and you, as the company owner, must figure out which have priority. At bigger companies, a sales manager might be more focused on training, say, or recruiting or rehash. But the sales manager, owners say, should be cross-trained and available to do any or all of these things.
Schuckman, of Renewal by Andersen of Las Vegas/Phoenix, estimates that he has hired half a dozen sales managers during the last 10 years. He says that the best manager he has had was the one who disappeared one afternoon without telling anyone and came back that night with two deals, both rehashed.

Many company owners and general managers say that what was true of sales managers two years ago, in flush economic times, is even truer today. With most companies producing fewer leads, generating smaller sales and, overall, less of them, the idea that leads are expendable is completely defunct. Every lead counts. “If a sales rep calls and says: ‘I got there but I couldn’t get them engaged.’ If you’re a sales manager, you’re immediately on the phone calling that sales rep back wanting to know: What can I do? Where did we go wrong?” The object, Schuckman says, is “to get a hold of the people and make something happen.” A good sales manager should be “a clean-up guy,” he says. Following up, for instance, on unsold leads, he points out, is a task extensive enough to take up about half the day. “He should be making 20 or 30 phone calls a day.”

But a sales manager, Cardillo adds, needs to not only be on top of the leads but be plugged into the energy of the people he is managing. “You have to understand the psyche of a sales rep,” he says. “That they have big egos, and also that their heads can be out of the game at any minute.”

?Jim Cory, editor, REPLACEMENT CONTRACTOR.

About the Author

Jim Cory

Formerly the editor of REPLACEMENT CONTRACTOR, Jim Cory is a contributing editor to REMODELING who lives in Philadelphia.

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