Why Sales Managers Fail and What You Can Do About It

By Jacques Werth

Sales managers fail for two primary reasons:

1. They don't know how to manage their people

2. They don't rigorously implement effective selling processes.

Just as an engineering manager needs to be a pretty competent engineer, a sales manager needs to be a pretty competent salesperson. In both cases, however, their essential responsibility is to manage staff performance. Understanding modern management principles beyond a few readings of The One Minute Manager is critical.

Most engineering managers know that technology is evolving too quickly for them to keep up at the level of a functioning engineer. However, they do know enough about the latest technology to effectively manage the engineers deploying it.

In contrast to engineers, most sales managers believe that very little has changed in the selling since they became a manager. Therefore, they tend to manage their people in the same way that they used to sell. However, in the last 20 years, the markets for every product and service have changed dramatically. Information overload, the Internet, massive communications, increased competition, more well-informed prospects, brain science and new sales channels have affected all businesses.

Top salespeople have developed new sales processes to address and take advantage of those changing market conditions. Most other reasonably successful salespeople have not.

The key is developing a sales process that is very different from the one that you are now using. Talk to sales training companies, and look for a company that will customize and optimize the selling process for your company and industry. If you find one that fits your current sales beliefs, one that you are instantly comfortable with, keep on looking. Heed the title of Marshall Goldsmith's book, What Got You Here Won't Get You There.

Here are 10 reasons salespeople fail, and what you can do about it.

1. Most sales managers don't know how to use highly effective tools to recruit and train salespeople that will perform well in their organization. Therefore, they often hire salespeople who are incompatible with their company's culture and lack the appropriate sales aptitudes for their industry.

How to hire the right people: Contract with a service agency that will benchmark you and your best salespeople, find candidates with similar aptitudes, and select salespeople most compatible with your management style. For about one weeks pay, you can greatly decrease costly hiring mistakes.

2. Most sales managers don't have a highly effective, uniform sales process for their company's products and services. They advocate "best selling practices" based upon past market conditions and obsolete sales strategies. Therefore, they focus on the wrong metrics, which are inevitably flawed.

What to do: Adapt a step-by-step, sales process that is customized for your products, services and markets. It must include exactly what to do when and how to do it. That kind of sales process makes tracking, coaching and realistic quantification easy. Thus, it enables continuous improvement of every step of the sales process.

3. Most sales managers don't know how to train, supervise and track their salespeople's performance to optimize their sales effectiveness.

How to keep salespeople on track: Maintain a uniform and consistent process, monitoring and benchmarking all sales activity throughout the sales process.

4. Most sales managers lack skills in target marketing and prospecting. Therefore, their salespeople waste most of their time with prospects who will not buy.

How to focus on likely buyers: Set demographic, situational and attitude standards for the type of prospects that are most likely to buy. Develop criteria based upon booked business.

5. Most sales managers believe that, "You can't close if you don't get in front of prospects." Their salespeople go on as many appointments as possible, spending far more time with prospects who will not buy than with those that will buy.

How to stop wasting time with the wrong prospects: Insist that salespeople find and make appointments only with highly qualified prospects.

6. Most sales managers believe that salespeople should be able to convince prospects to buy. Therefore, they have their salespeople try to persuade prospects to buy when they are merely "interested." It doesn't seem to occur to them that their salespeople cannot consistently convince people to do anything they don't already want to do.

How to stop losing at the "persuasion game": Abandon the game altogether—there is no way to consistently win. Insist that your salespeople treat prospects with trust and respect, utilize an effective sales process, and abandon all forms of persuasion, false urgency and manipulation.

7. Most sales managers don't know the difference between qualification and disqualification. Therefore, their salespeople, who are great at qualifying, create sales resistance by attempting to sell to prospects when they are not ready to buy. That lengthens the sales cycle and decreases their closing rates.

How to shorten the sales cycle: Insist that salespeople only make appointments with prospects that are ready to buy or specify. They should temporarily disqualify all others. Closing rates will increase dramatically.

8. Most sales managers do not understand how the human mind works, and how it accepts or rejects information. Salespeople typically spew features and benefits in terms of industry jargon.

How to communicate with prospects: Use words that prospects can readily understand. Provide only the most pertinent information. Prospects will feel more motivated to keep listening, they will absorb and retain more information, and they will be more actively engaged in the sales process.

9. Most sales managers believe that most prospects make logical buying decisions. If that were true, enrolling in logic courses would be the path to success in sales.

How to really get through to prospects: Engage prospects emotionally. Recent studies in brain science have revealed that most important decisions are made in the part of the brain that deals with emotions. Incorporate that knowledge into the selling process. That results in higher closing rates.

10. Most sales managers don't know how to get salespeople past their fears. Therefore, most of their salespeople stay in their comfort zones by avoiding changes that will provide improvements.

How to get salespeople to embrace change: Teach them to accept the reality that change causes fear and discomfort; that acceptance will enable them to do what is uncomfortable and get over it quickly.

Jacques Werth studies the sales performance processes of the top 1 percent of salespeople in many different industries. He knows what they do that most "reasonably successful" salespeople don't do. That resulted in the High Probability Selling process. The book High Probability Selling has been a best seller since 1999. Visit www.highprobsell.com.