M - Management
Management, sales management that is. It is one of the hardest and most underperforming jobs in business. In its annual survey of sales benchmarks, CSO Insights found in 2010 that of forecasted deals only 46.3% actually close. Deals that stall and don't buy anything from anyone are 23.6% and deals lost to competition are now 30.3%. This is an incrediby high rate of failure unequalled in ay other area of business. This explains why the average life span of sales managers is not 19 months and falling.
Here are the reasons that I see:
- Promoting the best performer and giving no training in sales management.
- Personality-based sales managers who think they can hire the "natural" sales talent, aim them, cheerlead, and then flog the forecast.
- Thinking that one training course is enough to train a sales force when there are 65 competencies in leading a team through a complex sales cycle.
- Weak hiring - there aren't enough "naturals" out there - you have to grow some.
- Sales goals that are set by financial types and Wall Street analysts based on stock price and growth rates that have no bottom-up input from the sales managers.
- Forecasting without a strategic review of political and competitive strategy only adds up bad numbers faster. You can win without a strategy - it's called luck.
The other problem is that there is very little management training focused on sales management and few performance reviews based on their sales process. Universities don't teach sales management or even sales. Management courses at universities are aimed at the strategic level when what is needed for new managers is blocking and tackling in hiring, deal coaching and performance management to get the most out of each salesperson.
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