As a sales leader, the weight of your responsibilities can be overwhelming, often leaving you restless and consumed with worry. The pressure to drive revenue, manage a high-performing team, and navigate an unpredictable market can feel insurmountable. These challenges are not just professional hurdles but personal burdens that affect your well-being and peace of mind. Addressing these effectively is crucial for your team’s success and your own sanity. Here are five key concerns and strategies to overcome them.
- Fragile Economy
The post-pandemic world, ongoing wars, rising living costs, and potential recessions create an uncertain economic environment. While you can’t control these macroeconomic factors, you can equip your salespeople to navigate them effectively.
Strategy: Build Resilience and Trust
Build resilience: Focus on making your sales team resilient to change. Resilient salespeople can adapt to shifting market conditions and maintain their performance. A Dale Carnegie study showed that people who are resilient are only about half as likely to feel a high level of stress when facing an adverse situation. Managers can build resilience by improving self confidence and belief and by ensuring open communication, creating shared organisational purpose, providing adequate work resources and supporting a learning culture.
Trusted Advisor: Encourage your team to become trusted advisors. According to Dale Carnegie research, 71% of respondents prefer buying from a salesperson they completely trust over one who offers a lower price. However, only 31% of buyers trust their salesperson “most” or “all of the time,” and 21% rarely or never trust their salesperson. This highlights a significant opportunity to differentiate through trust. To do this salespeople should learn to keep I touch with customers providing added value resources and information, even when they know that the buyer is not ready to purchase. By being customer oriented vs sales focused, salespeople can build rapport and trust.
- Hiring and Retaining Salespeople
Not many people have childhood dreams of being a salesperson, so finding and retaining top sales talent is challenging. Most sales professionals end up in the role by chance and research shows alarming numbers do not receive proper sales training, and without proper training, their potential remains untapped.
Strategy: Invest in Training and Development
Ongoing Training: High-performing sales organisations are twice as likely to provide ongoing training compared to low-performing ones (Forbes). Invest in comprehensive training programs to develop your team’s skills continually.
Career Pathing: Show clear career progression within the sales role to motivate your team. Dale Carnegie’s training programmes can help outline these paths effectively.
- Pipeline Challenges
Maintaining a healthy sales pipeline across short, medium, and long-term horizons is critical. Many sales managers struggle with dedicating enough time to coaching their teams, which is essential for pipeline management.
Strategy: Prioritise Sales Coaching
Dedicated Coaching Time: A study by CSO Insights found that only 22% of sales managers spend more than 20% of their time coaching. Prioritise regular coaching sessions to provide feedback and support to your sales reps. Dale Carnegie’s Leadership Coaching Guideis a useful resource to help start.
High-Performance Culture: Foster a culture of high performance by focusing on emotional drivers such as connected-ness, empowerment, psychological safety, learning, and growth. Research highlights these as key factors in high-performing teams.
- Stress and Pressure Around Personal Sales
In many SMEs, sales leaders are also top performers with individual sales targets. Balancing personal sales performance with leadership responsibilities adds significant stress.
Strategy: Balance Performance and Leadership
Time Management: Implement effective time management techniques to balance personal sales activities and leadership duties.
Delegation and Support: Delegate tasks where possible and seek support from other team members or external resources to manage workload.
- Managing Under-performance and Sales Accountability
Addressing under-performance is one of the toughest aspects of any manager’s job. It requires having difficult conversations and implementing accountability measures.
Strategy: Practical Management Techniques
Effective Conversations: Burying our heads in the sand isn’t a solution managers need to remember that a key role of a leader is to enable individuals to achieve their potential in their roles. Providing feedback is an opportunity to add value to their future, guiding them back on track swiftly rather than reprimanding them. There are some great tips in this blog.
Accountability Systems: Establish clear accountability systems and regular performance reviews to ensure continuous improvement.
Sales managers face a variety of challenges, from economic uncertainty to managing under-performance. By building resilient and trusted sales teams, investing in ongoing training, prioritising coaching, balancing personal sales with leadership, and managing under-performance effectively, you can overcome these challenges and hopefully get a better night’s sleep.
