Responsibilities of a Sales Manager

If you're in sales, you've probably experienced a wide-variety of Sales Managers/Directors. Sometimes we describe them as "great," and other times their teams believe that their manager doesn't care or doesn't provide value. Like anything else, being successful requires planning and a road-map. If you don't plan, you're less likely to hit your goals. To this end, I've developed an "expectations" document for Sales Managers. I've attempted to capture the main responsibilities of a thoughtful, caring, success-driven leader. Enjoy the read!

1. Create and adhere to a communications plan with all of your peer leaders. This might be cadence meetings. Make sure you come prepared with updates, action items, top deals, etc. You might want to include these peers in your regular sales meetings. These are the folks who will help you succeed.
2. Create and adhere to a communications plan with your salespeople. This should include 1-on-1 meetings to review pipeline, forecast, opportunities, and issues/challenges. Agree upon deal-reviews, customer engagements, marketing efforts, and calendaring expectations.
3. Provide proactive, valued coaching and leadership to your team. Think of both strategy and tactics. Value is determined by the discrete, objective assistance you can provide the team both directly and indirectly. This includes treating each salesperson differently according to their needs, assist by looking ahead (start with the end in mind), and prepare and invest in your engagements with team members. Come to meetings with ideas/strategies. Have an agenda. Communicate desired outcomes. Don't rush decisions.
4. Be personally involved/engaged in strategic/large opportunities/customers. By getting personally involved in challenging situations, you engender trust. This includes deal prep, strategy, escalations, and assistance.
5. Manage the team's opportunity pipeline and forecast. This includes weekly thorough reviews of the opportunity pipeline in a 30-60-90 day window. Understand large or strategic deals - get details. Understand the movement of opportunities in the pipeline over time.
6. Always be recruiting. Develop a strong pool of candidates. Fill open headcount as a top priority. Use your internal recruiters. Post open spots on social media. Discuss open positions with your vendor partners and your network.
7. Be actively engaged in account planning for your territory. All accounts should be assigned to a salesperson. Account assignments should be reviewed for activity management and to avoid neglect. Account assignments should be made in the best interest of your company and the customer.
8. Demonstrate leadership through action-by-example. Keep an accurate, detailed public calendar. Use the products and services that you sell. Be on-time to meetings, calls, trainings and events. Prepare in advance. Review your week's activities in advance. Have a 30-60-90 day plan. Create annual and semi-annual goals/plans.
9. Provide active coaching/performance-management for struggling and new salespeople. It is your responsibility to assist new salespeople in becoming successful. Those salespeople who fail to develop or those who are poorly performing must be actively managed onto a coaching/performance plan.
10. Create and adhere to a communication plan with your top partners. It's critical to know leadership at your partners and have cadence calls and quarterly face-to-face meetings.
11. Be pro-active: demonstrate leadership. Don't wait for others to ask you for things like: success stories, goal planning, forecasting, executive engagement on large deals, campaign development and other initiatives. Setup your team for success. Plan management reviews in advance. Analyze the competition. Bring new knowledge to your team and your peers.
12. Have a thorough understanding of, and be able to teach/explain key tools your company uses to sell, track and measure. This includes, CRM, comp plan and commission reports, margin approval guides, and expense reporting.

With these "guidelines," you can create an environment where you really provide value to your team. With that value comes the potential for enormous success. Happy selling!