Sales Management

No apologies are being offered for this statement: if you do not have your finger on the pulse of sales management skills you should not be calling yourself an entrepreneur or a manager. These insights are for everyone, up to MD level. They are the equivalent of being able to ride a bike in the life of a child. Whatever your level, whether directly in sales or not, you simply cannot lose by learning these highly practical and effective skills.

Whoever you are, no matter how successful or experienced, it always pays to further refresh and deepen your consciousness in this area. Of course, you may actually be a sales manager or a sales team leader!

There is no such thing as a team that is perfect; they are all underperforming, not because they are bad and wrong but because their focus, over time, tends to dissolve. A good leader has the instincts and the techniques for regaining focus so immediately to hand that performance can be kept close to optimal, all the time.

To be that leader you need to feel comfortable with your ability to analyse the situation, to recognise the bottom line for underachievement, to measure what is happening against key performance indicators, to plan new initiatives and set new targets… In short, you need to have confidence in your own judgment and the intellectual tools to reinforce that confidence.

Some of this is intuitive in the sense that it is about listening, observing, communicating, knowing and motivating. We can all make action plans, but we also need to have a feeling for the role of leader in human terms, because questions such as these will always arise:

• do you know how to coach and motivate your teams in a genuine way so that they are really on board and not just going through the motions
• do you know how to lead under pressure, coping with conflict and under-performance; have you enough knowledge of behavioural styles and responses to turn situations around
• do you know how to encourage, reward and promote fun in the workplace, without coming across as a caricature from "The Office"

Of course you already are a good manager. But ask an artist: every new work takes them forward, depends the responses, refines the skills. That is exactly what we are doing here.

Because without brilliant management in this vital area you cannot be the "sales led organisation" that you need to be in order to survive, prosper, develop, grow and build confidence in the future. Good things breed good things and we seriously encourage you to look at this again through our eyes.

And remember: we work internationally.

sales management training