4 Sales Management Skills You Should Focus On

A great team is often defined by the kind of leadership that they have. This is especially true in results-driven sales, where teams are in a constant race to reach quota and close those accounts.

While it can seem helpful to spend most of an organization’s time and money on training salespeople and enrolling sales managers in leadership and coaching training, that actually doesn’t have the impact that many would think it does.

Jason Jordan, a founding partner at Vantage Point Performance, taught us in our on-demand webinar The $3.5 Million Question: Train Your Sellers or Sales Managers? seventeen skills that actually boost a company’s ROI and sales.

Coaching seems like a no-brainer when it comes to improving a team, but Jason taught us that that’s not actually the case. Coaching is a vague skill, he says, and there’s a large disparity between sales managers and salespeople when it comes to application. Oftentimes sales managers believe they’re coaching more often than they actually are.

Additionally, coaching and leadership training doesn’t focus on career important skills, like pipeline management or assessing performance, which leaves sales managers unprepared.

Instead of focusing on coaching, we rounded up four of the skills that Jason mentioned as being critically important in our webinar.

1. Business Acumen

Business Acumen, or business sense, is the most impactful on revenue, even though organizations traditionally rank it as the least important skill. A sales manager with good business acumen has a quick understanding of risks and opportunities within a business and is able to discern which choice will result in the best outcome. Thus, it’s important to focus on risk management and decision making.

2. Assessing Performance

This skill involves a manager being able to quickly tell which salespeople need additional assistance in reaching quota. This is arguably one of the most important jobs that a sales manager has, and it clearly affects quota.

3. Pipeline Management

The sales pipeline refers to an organization’s leads for the upcoming months and whether the organization’s leads are growing. To train sales managers for this, make sure they understand how to align the pipeline to the buying process and are able to explain it clearly to their salespeople.

4. Sales Forecasting

Having a developed business sense is very important, as evidenced by two of the skills mentioned tieing into that. Forecasting is arguably the “backbone” of a business forecast, so it’s important to focus on skills related to decision making and forecasting profits.

Jason says a great sales manager leads to great sales performance, which translates into an average of a 39% boost in revenue. Even beyond that, 71% of the time organizations get sales managers through promoting from within.

[Webinar] The $3.5 Million Question: Train Your Sellers or Sales Managers?

Organizations have to be able to develop qualified sales managers. Learn the rest of the skills to focus on in our free, on-demand webinar here!