Six common sales manager mistakes

As a sales manager, it’s imperative to keep improving your skills and work at eliminating any bad habits that may have crept in.

There are plenty of common mistakes made by sales teams and their managers so here we suggest six areas to focus on.

Managing a sales team badly can cause morale to plummet and this will lead to a visible dip in sales performance. Although some of these afflictions can be minor and not cause noticeable damage, they can escalate to severely damage your company’s profits.

Here are six very common Sales Team Afflictions

1. Wasting sales representatives’ time
2. Poor sales meetings
3. Poor strategy
4. Capping or reducing income
5. Lack of positive feedback
6. Favouritism

Wasting your sales reps’ time

Delegating non-sales tasks to your sales teams means they are spending less time selling. If possible try to delegate tasks such as managing product recalls and filling out reports to other people outside of the sales team. This will maximise the productivity of your sales people.

Unnecessary sales meetings

The principle aim of a sales meeting should be to increase sales. If you are having routine meetings just for the sake of it, you will be wasting your sales teams’ time. A good sales rep will know when time is being wasted and this will not inspire confidence in management. So make sure that meetings are clearly purposeful and worthwhile.

Bad strategy

As all good sales managers will know, a poorly planned marketing or sales strategy will have a negative impact on sales. Invest in experts to come up with good sound strategy and make sure the resources are in place to ensure it works. Putting on special promotions as an attempt to place a band-aid on poor performance due to a lack-lustre strategy is not a sustainable solution. Of course, special promotions can be an effective tool to boost sales when done in the right way, but the main focus should be on wider strategy.

Capping or reducing sales team income

Managers resentful of their sales team’s earnings may be tempted to try to cap their earnings in various ways. This is very dangerous as it damages morale and can cause good sales people to jump ship. If it is absolutely necessary to reduce commission or other income sources, this should be done in a sensitive manner.

Lack of positive feedback

Of course, there will be times when questions about performance and carefully-worded criticisms are needed to ensure sales professionals are on the right track. But if the majority of feedback coming from the sales manager is negative, then bad feeling and the urge to move jobs will breed pretty quickly across the team. Plenty of positive and encouraging feedback goes a long way – giving team members an incentive to try harder, and greater confidence to follow the strategy with energy and positivity.

Favouritism

It almost goes without saying that special treatment of individuals will cause disruption and bad feeling within the team, and ultimately breed resentment. You need to work towards building a cohesive team spirit as a manager, and by showing favouritism you are damaging the team.

Sales teams that are managed well will perform better, so it is worth making sure that your management strategy and techniques are up to scratch.

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