Great salespeople are worth their weight in gold, but great managers of salespeople are worth even more. First-line sales managers have the biggest impact on sales productivity because they play an outsized role in determining who sells, how and where they sell, how (and how quickly) they improve, whether the best ones remain and how well they embrace accelerating change (both within and outside their company). To create a winning field sales management team, executives must decide to what degree their first-line managers play and master three roles: people manager, business manager and customer manager. Then they need to map out the job's appropriate competencies, select the right people, provide training to continually improve management skills, establish appropriate rewards and compensation, develop processes and systems to support the team, and manage their performance.
Presented as a keynbote session at SMA's 2011 Conference by Andris Zoltners of ZS Associates and Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University,this presentation provides a framework for developing an outstanding sales management team.
