Tips For First Time Sales Managers

Author: Ryan Lallier - CEO, RepTivity @RLallier

Did you recently enter into sales management? If so, the transition from everyday sales person to everyday sales manager can give you anxiety. I laid out a few tips to get you started:

Going From Individual Contributor to the Individual Responsible for Multiple Contributors:

This is by far your biggest challenge. If you've been successful as a sales person you'll immediately want to impose your philosophy upon your new team. However, this may not be the best approach. At least not in the beginning. My advice is to survey your new sales team and ask them what they do on a daily basis that contributes to their success. Repeat the same process for identifying their weaknesses and areas they wish to improve. The output is a team scorecard which you can use to properly evaluate the skill set of your team.  The key here is to listen first, analyze and respond to their needs. One thing that always pissed me off about my past sales managers is they never listened to my concerns. It was always a "my way or highway" style of management. Listening is a quality that goes a long way in earning respect from your new sales team.

On Day One Get Out of the Office:

I always recommend getting your sales team out of the office on day one of your new role. Pull out your credit card and spend a little money. First take them to a nice lunch.  Keep the conversation light in the beginning and mid way through lunch go around the table and let each sales rep share their business background with the team. This is also a great time to lay out your expectations and share some of your experiences. On Friday of your first week, take your team to happy hour. They will come back on Monday recharged.


If you would like to connect, you can find me on Twitter: @RLallier.

Choosing the right "App" on the AppExchange:

If your organization uses Salesforce.com then you've probably been on the AppExchange a few times. Choosing the right application add-on for Salesforce can be challenging. I've outlined a few suggestions you can use when selecting an application from the AppExchange:

1.) Difficult Deployment Equals Difficult Learning Curve: Add-on applications with long and complicated deployments will mostly result in a challenging learning curve for your users. Adding an application to Salesforce should not be as time consuming as deploying Salesforce itself. Look for applications which you can install yourself with minimal support from the vendor. This is usually a good sign of a well built application that is intuitive and easy to learn.

2.) Customer Reviews: Customer reviews offer some real value but I wouldn't place much weight on them. Sadly, some customer reviews are paid for, fictitious and misleading. One negative review for example can deter a prospect from evaluating a product that might be a solid fit for their organization. Don't be that person. Look past such reviews and evaluate the application and judge for yourself.

Have a great week!

You Call These Leads?

Author: Ryan Lallier - CEO, RepTivity @RLallier

People who downloaded a white paper:

Why do marketing departments include white paper downloads in their lead generation metrics? These are not leads. In fact, they are the farthest thing from leads. People who download white papers are not looking to buy a thing. When someone wants to buy something, they request information on the product or service. If your goal is to frustrate your sales team, continue to fill their lead queue with useless white paper downloads that do nothing but waste everyone's time.

People who let you scan their badges at a trade show:

Wow, thanks for the "hot" lead! NOT! People who let you scan their badges at trade shows are not buyers. They are not decision makers. They are "chotchkie" shoppers who will waste your time. Sorry for the reality check but, do us all a favor and don't send your sales reps the "scanned badges list" from the last trade show. And, absolutely do not upload this list into your CRM or lead queue. Bad data in equals bad data out.  Everyone knows any "hot" lead from a trade show has already been claimed by the sales rep who manned the booth.

People who attended a webinar where your company was a sponsor:

Don't you just love webinar leads? Especially those who attended a webinar on an industry topic and not for your specific product or service. Isn't it great when marketing loads up a bunch of "webinar leads" in your queue with campaign codes that read: "webinar sponsor" or "tech target webinar?"

In summary, it amazes me how many budget dollars are allocated to marketing departments. Furthermore, it shocks me how much money they waste on shitty lead gen activities like sponsoring webinars, scanning badges, giving out junk at trade shows and producing white papers. All of which cost companies thousands of dollars and produce ZERO ROI.  

This leads me to my final question: why don't executives increase the lead gen budget for sales teams and give sales leaders the power to choose which lead programs are best for producing new business revenue? Last time I checked, the sales team is responsible for bringing in the revenue.

Marketing Budgets vs. Sales Budgets

If the sales department is responsible for bringing in the revenue, then why does the marketing department have the larger spending budget? How does this make sense? Shouldn't sales have a major influence on how and what money is spent on with regard to lead generation?