Are your Sales Managers Equipped to Handle the MADness?

Are your Sales Managers Equipped to Handle the MADness?

Two decades ago, as a freshly graduated sales manager, I was swell with pride, but couldn’t say that I was equipped to manage teams already. Like most successful sellers I, too, was made a part of an ambitious Management Development Program. This helped me in goal setting, recruitment (which covered interviewing and managing a talent pool), managing pipelines and managing sales teams basis segmentation. Essentially, I was learning to manage the sales teams tightly like a ship. Things were structured and defined for me.?

Not anymore.?

Circa 2022, not just the competition has gone up, also, there is a change in how Sales Managers need to deal with the situation. The complexity has gone up exponentially, and the role has evolved to being accountable for Profit & Loss -? like a CEO for the market.?

3 factors that seem to be urging for Redefining Sales Management by creating challenges: MAD

1. Micro Markets - With the evolution of the business and readily available access to data, organizations can create data actionability like never before. This starts permeating in the strategy, including choice of products and SKUs based on consumer choices in the chosen micro-markets. While good on paper, the excessive data availability leaves the traditional sales managers gasping for breath. Now, they need to learn to analyze data to create actionables for their sales teams beyond the KPIs. Not only that, but also they need to learn the art of using data to create hypotheses and in decision making.????
2. Attritions – The trends on Attrition seem to be hitting across sectors, and the ramifications are visibly manifold. What started with the onset of the pandemic has snowballed into everyone trying to try new things. Sales, too, has been equally impacted by this phenomenon. Managers have to strive to understand how to Develop and Retain sellers, and are also tasked to identify new segments for the Talent Pool. They have to? uncover what resonates with this segment, and how to create an Employee Value Proposition within the defined Organizational constraints. With new segments, managers may also need to struggle with the challenges on time-to-productivity for new employees.?????
3. Disruptions – Outputs have been primarily impacted by business cycles and seasonality. Add to it the volatility in the markets, and you get an even shorter window of opportunities. Sales managers traditionally combat this by discovering new client segments, but, recently, they are being pushed to have an ear to the ground as well. What it means is that Sales Managers’ roles are getting redefined, as they now have to make sense of the impacts of disruptions on consumer behaviors, and become more agile in coming up with a response to maximize output.??

As someone who is responsible for developing Organizational capabilities or as a Sales Leader who is accountable for managing Sales outputs, you may need to evaluate if your current Sales Management can handle this MADness. You need to think of tools to sustain sanity amid redefined sales management.?

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