Sales Management Capabilities Required to Compete Today

The Sales Leader Might Be One Person, But They are Not One Job

Sales management is more than just one role: it's a dynamic set of skills. The modern sales organization requires sales leaders to shift between many skills within the course of a day or even a single conversation. Doing so requires agility.

Richardson's Sprint Coaching^TM training program builds the foundation for an agile approach to sales management. But we know the responsibilities of sales managers are vast, and being truly effective requires expertise in specific leadership areas. That's why we've introduced 11 new sales management capability training modules.

These short, hyper-focused courses can be added to your comprehensive enterprise sales training or can be taken independently to build leadership competencies where you need them most.

Below, you can explore each module and see how it aligns with your sales management goals.

Types of Sales Management Capabilities

Sales management capabilities refer to the skills, knowledge, and competencies that sales leaders need to effectively direct a sales team to achieve their organization's goals and objectives. Sales management capabilities are essential for optimizing team member performance, driving revenue growth, and contributing to the overall success of the organization.

Sales management capabilities fall into three skill categories, each tied to a specific aspect of effective sales leadership:

• Creating a Sales Culture
• Leading Salespeople
• Driving Sales Performance

These categories encompass 11 specific capabilities. Here, here we explain each capability why they matter, and how they work.

Create Sales Culture

Creating a sales culture that drives success requires sales leaders follow an intentional process by holding themselves and their team accountable and reinforcing the culture consistently.

To build a strong sales culture, sales managers need to hone the following capabilities:

• Driving Sales Person Accountability: Accountability requires team members to have a well-defined understanding of what is expected of them. To provide clarity for sellers and drive commitment to performance, sales managers must practice assessing sales realities, determining key metrics, defining necessary accountability changes, and monitoring individual results.
• Leading Sales Team Meetings: Over time, sales meetings can devolve into a habitual formality. Capable sales managers can prevent this drift and make the most of meetings by using a structured approach that emphasizes simplicity, recognition, and skill development.
• Strengthening the Sales Culture: Collaborate within the sales organization to build a sales culture plan based on management best practices; rewards and recognition; people development; and effective use of systems, tools, and CRM.

Lead Salespeople

Leading salespeople demands a commitment to ongoing coaching and personalized skill development for each team member.

To effectively guide salespeople to their next level of success, sales managers need to build the following capabilities:

• Having Vital Conversations: Without a plan, performance reviews can become emotional, contentious, and disorganized. Use a five-part methodology to handle sensitive conversations about performance improvement.
• Leading Strategic One-on-Ones: Learn a framework for productive one-on-one meetings that benefit the seller, the sales manager, and the organization consistently.
• Managing Different People Differently: Use a fresh approach to understand each sales team member's qualities and tap into their unique motivators.
• Motivating Sales Professionals: Explore four key concepts that help sales managers build intrinsic motivation by helping sellers see how the characteristics of the job connect to their inner drivers.

Drive Sales Performance

Driving sales performance requires helping sellers make an impact where it matters most, this means they are presenting well to customers, prioritizing important opportunities, and speeding up the sales pipeline.

To effectively boost performance, sales managers must develop the following capabilities:

• Coaching in the Field: Field coaching differs from one-on-one coaching as it focuses on a specific moment, unlike annual or quarterly reviews that analyze trends. While it occurs during a sales activity, it's not spontaneous and involves preparation. Sales managers must learn to utilize a framework for observing, supporting, and providing feedback on a seller’s performance in live meetings.
• Pipeline Management: Pipeline management is crucial for organizations to maintain visibility, efficiency, and control over their sales processes. Sales managers can follow our three-step approach to collaboratively track and analyze opportunities as they move through the pipeline - prioritizing the right opportunities, accelerating sales, and closing more deals.
• Opportunity Review: Improve qualification, forecasting, resource utilization, and closed sales by conducting effective and consistent opportunity reviews to make individual sellers and teams more efficient.

Building Sales Manager Capabilities with Richardson

Succeeding as a sales organization means knowing what skillsets sales managers need to drive performance across the team. The 11 capabilities described above are the answer. However, they must be learned and developed – they do not emerge on their own.