8 Tips for Becoming an Effective Sales Manager

In my humble opinion, a sales manager plays the most important role in any company. Of all marketing and sales leadership roles, the sales manager is the one that wears the most hats.

Most sales managers direct day-to-day sales operations, ensuring sales quotas are met, assigning sales territories, establishing training programs, resolving customer complaints, and leading and supervising sales representatives, among the many hats.

They set sales goals, coordinate training programs, perform market research, oversee regional or national sales teams, are inundated with sales reports, and ensure that each sales rep on their team has a job growth opportunity. At the same time, they manage the company’s strategy to drive the projected growth rate.

And that’s not all… Whew…

Being an effective sales manager means having the skills and abilities to lead a team, inspire your employees, and help them reach peak performance while dealing with all the other business administration.

Oh, don’t forget that sales managers recruit too. Many sales managers do not have a recruiter who sources their job openings. Yep, they do it all themselves.

Wait, so why do sellers aspire to become sales managers?

Reasons to become a Sales Manager

Because despite everything, we still aspire to have the dream job and accelerate our career to the next level and beyond!

We take pride in helping the organization’s sales representatives to achieve greatness or the same level of success that we did. Because we love to develop strategies and communication skills that will take us to the next level and help the organization expand.

And since the sales manager position requires exceptional leadership skills at all times, this role is undoubtedly challenging but, in my opinion, the most rewarding experience I have ever had.

This article will cover eight strategies to be an effective sales manager and help you make this job a little easier to manage.

The No. 1 challenge for a Sales Manager

Part of your sales managers work is to give your team confidence and keep reps focused on the goals. You must manage your team correctly so they don’t waste time on unnecessary and unproductive tasks. Instead, help them focus on new customers or growing the existing base.

The sales department relies on effective communication, and communicating well is one of the sales manager’s most crucial tasks. Communicating with the marketing department, writing emails, sales prospecting messages, LinkedIn connection requests, preparing sales quotes for the company’s products, and filling out data fields for company sales reports drains you and your team’s energy and reduces their time for high-priority assignments.

So what is the #1 complaint or challenge for sales managers and any member of the sales department?

TIME.

Any time not spent on selling and meetings with customers is generally considered admin time. That is why thousands of sales managers have started leveraging a personal writing assistant.

FlyMSG is an award-winning personal writing assistant and text expander you can use to increase your team’s productivity and help your sales reps save 20+ hours per month. FlyMSG lets you categorize, organize and store your best-performing sales content in the cloud and speed up your writing by using a library of pre-created sales templates for any occasion.

Using a feature-rich text editor, you can customize these templates, known as FlyPlates, according to your needs. What’s best, you can add shortcodes, shortcuts, or snippets, known as FlyCuts, to expand, augment or replace text automatically as you type. We call the message itself a FlyMSG.

To help your team type less and sell more, sign up for FlyMSG today and see how it works firsthand. It’s free!

The Sales Manager’s impact on sales team results

Whether working as local sales managers or national sales managers, they guide sales representatives toward success. If practical, they know how to detect and resolve customer complaints along the way and increase the efficiency of their sales team members. To do that correctly, sales managers should establish a solid sales process, choose the right sales prospecting tools, oversee the sales performance and provide feedback regularly.

If a sales manager doesn’t have enough time for all crucial team activities, reps will be lost and have no one to turn to. Their results will decrease, negatively impacting the profits of a company, and their overall productivity vs efficiency.

Let’s see numbers that give more insight into the importance of effective sales management.

What statistics show about sales management in 2022

While many think of sales management as purely administrative, it can be pretty demanding and challenging. Let’s look into stats concerning sales managers.

• 90% of sales managers say that utilizing technological advancements is critical for success
• 57% of B2B sales managers plan to spend more money on AI and automation
• Over 50% of sales managers say they do not have enough time to complete their work tasks
• 61% of most successful sales managers are automating parts of their sales processes
• Most sales managers have to work around these processes to complete their tasks on time

To conclude, sales managers recognize that automating sales processes and investing in technology is vital for success. For example, you can use AI to automate repetitive tasks or speed up your sales writing process. It frees up time for more in-depth customer interactions.

Let’s explore some of the biggest challenges for sales managers.

The four biggest challenges for sales managers

Let’s discuss the most significant challenges sales managers face every day.

1. Finding and retaining top talent

Every sales team needs a core group of star players to be successful, but sales hiring and finding those top performers can be difficult. You need to hire and work closely with people who can handle the pressure, the long hours, and the rejection.

2. Developing a winning sales strategy

Creating a winning strategy isn’t something you can do overnight – it’s a process that requires careful consideration and thorough research. The first step in developing a sales strategy is to look at your company’s sales performance.

You need to know where you stand right now to identify areas where you need to improve. Once you understand your situation, you can start thinking about your strategy, like how to align the sales territories better to meet existing and new customers’ preferences or inventory requirements.

3. Measuring the team’s performance

To ensure you are measuring your team’s results correctly, you must develop a sales performance measurement system and identify the key performance indicators (KPI) you want to track. Remember that you may want to track more than just sales metrics – retention, new customer acquisition, and average order value are all important KPIs.

4. Utilizing the right technology

Embracing technology can make the difference between success and failure for a sales manager, but it’s not always easy to choose solutions to implement. You can use various tools to improve your sales efforts and to measure necessary sales statistics, such as lead generation tools, sales automation tools, social selling platforms, and AI writing assistants.

How to become an effective sales manager

As with every job, success does not come overnight. To become a great sales manager, you must go through many obstacles. To make it easier, we have compiled the best tips you can follow to increase your effectiveness.

1. Hire the right people

A good sales manager understands that hiring is a critical part of establishing a strong sales culture, improving employee performance, and ensuring success in the long term.

2. Train your sales team continuously

Not training your sales staff is like having a car without brakes. Keeping them in check is hard, and they’re prone to making errors, which can lead to lost sales. Continuous training keeps your team ready to take advantage of any opportunities that come their way and allows you to optimize their sales potential.

If you are looking for reliable sales training software, you can start with Vengreso. We provide high-quality educational content and training programs that have helped over 2,000 companies increase sales performance.

Check out our Modern sales mastery for teams and Modern sales mastery for individuals to help your sales reps prospect better and sell more.

3. Define measurable sales objectives

You must define objectives to measure your team’s progress and understand if they are successful. It will also be easier for all sales staff to define expectations clearly. If you are not reaching your sales objectives, that is a sign that you, as the sales manager, need to refine your sales methodology.

4. Hold weekly meetings to stay on track

Meetings with your team are vital to overseeing the sales process and understanding their overall performance. Discussing their work helps you notice if someone is lagging and helps you as a sales manager on how to support them.

5. Give constant feedback and communicate effectively

Aside from team meetings, sales managers should organize individual meetings with their sales reps. You must constantly give them positive and negative feedback to increase their efforts. Communicate with them before issues arise; that will induce trust in them and help you avoid pitfalls.

Make sure to set clear and convenient communication channels to be in touch with your employees. Since mobile app development process is quite easy, consider investing in an app for internal communication to foster efficiency and productivity within your team

6. Don’t micromanage your sales reps

Sales managers should oversee. Overseeing does not mean you must follow every detail of someone’s work and waste your time. People do not like to be micromanaged and not given freedom; it puts too much pressure on them and is ineffective. It will also seem like you do not trust them.

7. Don’t be afraid to terminate under-performing employees

Measuring performance is there for a reason. If someone is not doing their best or is not the right fit for your company, a sales manager should not be afraid to fire them. Of course, it is always best to try to help reps and openly discuss problems to hear their perspectives. But sometimes you have to do what you have to do.

8. Find the right tools to make things easier for your team

The world is constantly changing and evolving, and staying on top of the latest trends and developments is essential for a sales manager. Technology is one of the most critical aspects, as it can provide you with the tools you need to optimize your sales process and reduce time-wasting and repetitive tasks.

One of the tools sales managers can use for hiring the right talent is Linkedin recruiter.

Another tool to increase their team’s efficiency, and productivity is FlyMSG. Let’s dive into details.

How to Increase your sales team productivity with FlyMSG

Your sales team spends a lot of time writing emails, proposals, follow-up notes, and other sales collateral. It’s a necessary part of the job but can be time-consuming and repetitive. That’s where FlyMSG comes in.

FlyMSG is a sales productivity tool that helps you decrease your time on sales writing and focus on other high-priority tasks. Instead of writing the same type of content from scratch, you can use FlyMSG to

1. Create a centralized repository of your best-performing content in the cloud
2. Customize pre-defined templates with a feature-rich text editor
3. Expand your content automatically using shortcodes while writing

FlyMSG helps you write faster, communicate more effectively, streamline your team’s productivity and spend less time on administrative tasks. It is available online for free, thanks to Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge extensions. You can also sign up for free on our website.

How does FlyMSG work?

1. FlyCuts

FlyCuts are snippets you can add to your content to expand, augment or replace text as you type automatically. You can use pre-made FlyPlates from our library or create your own. You can also choose a default category or create custom categories to store your FlyCuts.

To create a new FlyCut, click the Add FlyCut orange button in the right corner. You can include the necessary information in a pop-up window.

• You can choose the category to store your FlyCut
• You can create a shortcode, for example, -salesproposal
• You can add a title or description
• You can use the FlyMSG field and the Word-like content editor to write the message that will actually appear in your content after you add the shortcode (FlyCut)
• When you finish, click on the Save button

What’s best, you can test your FlyCuts to see if they work properly in the Preview panel and choose Simple or Rich text preview.

2. FlyPlates

FlyPlates are premium pre-made messaging templates available in Starter and Growth plans. Our sales experts created these templates with best practices in mind to help you increase your sales results.

The Starter plan costs $3.97/mo and includes up to 50 FlyPlates. The Growth plan costs $9.97/mo and includes unlimited FlyPlates.

You can use our sales FlyPlates for

1. LinkedIn connection requests
2. Prospecting messages
3. Recommendations
4. Referral messages
5. Event triggering
6. Upselling
7. Welcome messages
8. Cold outreach

Our FlyPlates will help you streamline the sales process, reduce guesswork, save time and effort and increase your sales team productivity.

Key takeaways for sales managers

We briefly explained what sales managers do and how they impact the sales team results. We also reviewed some critical sales statistics to show that sales managers recognize automation as a solution for increasing productivity and efficiency.

We also described the main challenges sales managers face and provided eight tips you can follow if you want to become more effective in managing your sales team.

We finally explained what FlyMSG is and how you can use our digital writing assistant to optimize sales content creation and increase your team’s productivity, helping sales reps save 20+ hours per month and spend time on high-priority tasks.

To start typing less and selling more, create your free FlyMSG account today.