How Does Your Training Course for Sales Managers Stack Up?

BY Kathy Crosett
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The person you thought would be perfect as a sales manager isn’t making the impact you hoped. If you’ve recognized that problem, maybe you’ve also thought about whether your training course for sales managers helped this individual. If it didn’t, you might need to explore paying for a new kind of sales manager training course.

Training Course for Sales Managers

Do a quick online search on training course for sales managers and you’ll see that pricey institutions like Harvard University have offerings.  Or you could sign up for a course offered by an industry trade association. And there is no shortage of courses, available online or in the classroom, taught by industry professionals with plenty of experience in the field.

Your Training for Sales Managers

You may be working for one of the organizations that haven’t officially established a sales manager training program because your leaders don’t think your business is large enough. The truth is, as soon as you employ an individual to manage your sales force, you should also establish metrics on what they’re responsible for.

You want your sales reps to excel at sales skills and soft skills. Your sales managers, to be credible, should have experience in the sales field. But they don’t need to have a superstar reputation. In fact, your reps may be open to accepting coaching and suggestions from a manager who has experienced failure and learned how to change their approach.

Productive Use of Time

The best training course for sales managers will focus on how to build a leadership mindset. Managers who can stop thinking about themselves and their careers, and who show true empathy for the struggles their reps are facing, win loyalty. Because the reps feel like they have an ally.

At the same time, managers must be aware of time traps. A good training course will teach them to identify patterns exhibited by sales reps, such as the individual who needs to spend an hour a day venting about the unfairness of their assignment. Once your managers recognize this behavioral pattern, they can guide their rep to productive use of the work time. 

Setting a Plan

Your sales managers won’t do well if they don’t know where they are going. Solicit their input at budget planning time. In the first few cycles, they may need guidance from you on how to set their goals for the upcoming year. Between your advice and their training modules on budgeting, your sales managers must learn how to set realistic targets. If they set the numbers too low, their reps may not work hard enough, but if they go too high, they risk demoralizing their team.

Once the plan is in place, your managers must set individual goals for each team member and then work with them to achieve success. This work takes the form of coaching, personalized sessions in which the manager helps the rep identify the roadblocks that are preventing them from moving to the next step in the sales process. After their training programs, the manager should be able to understand the differences in motivation between reps and offer advice based on those differences.

To get the most out of each rep, managers should help team members envision their future career path. While reps will work hard to achieve this month’s quota, they also appreciate knowing that someone has their back in terms of the kind of work they’ll be doing one year or three years from now. Sales managers who tap into this aspect of coaching show they care about more than making their numbers. 

Photo by Christina Morillo from Pexels


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