Congratulations! You have already taken a step higher in your career ladder as a sales manager. But being a successful manager in sales doesn’t unfold overnight. In fact, you are given a wide scope of responsibilities and opportunities which are more than what a regular salesperson does for the most part. And you are expected to perform these duties with utmost proficiency.
So to make sure you are on the right track with your managerial role in the windy city, we advise you to continue reading as we will tackle this topic about sales jobs in Chicago: the mistakes that new sales managers should avoid in today’s corporate guide.
1. Micromanaging Sales People Under Your Umbrella
While some sales employees require a certain level of support and guidance from sales managers, you also have to bear in mind that you are dealing with people who have different levels of experience in sales. In particular, seasoned sales representatives prefer working independently with some amount of support from you as needed while rookie salespeople are the ones that need your full guidance. Hence, it would be unwise to micromanage experienced sales reps are this will affect their work performance in a negative way.
So what we can advise you to do is to avoid constantly monitoring what your sales reps are doing and focus your energies on honing the sales job Chicago skills of your team particularly and conduct coaching sessions to rookie sales reps from time to time.
2. Making Too Much Effort On Being Liked
It’s common knowledge for sales managers like you to not get the favor of your team members at times because of the tough decisions you have to make. That’s why some managers take extra effort into pleasing their members for the sake of reaching their monthly sales objectives. And as a result you make decisions based on the aspect of likeability instead of developing your performance as a team, which also encourages leniency and complacency in the wrong sense.
So be firm and try to set relationship boundaries by creating guidelines, expectations, and consequences with your sales reps (if they don’t perform) right from the start.
Of course, friendly relations are still vital to make your team effective but do remind them that as sales reps, they are expected to deliver results. Also, remind yourself that you are there to be their leader first and their friend second. And you are bound to uphold the limitations that you have set in your guidelines.
3. Avoiding Conflicts
Often, we tend to believe that conflicts will be resolve on their own that you might apply this notion while handling your managerial duties whenever there’s conflict within your team. But sales experts advise against this because what you’re supposed to do is to talk to the parties involved, identify the root cause of the problem, and come up with a solution to best solve the issue.
This way, you’ll be able to maintain a healthy working relationship among your team members and motivate them to work together in reaching your goals rather than competing against each other. After all, at the end of the day conflict is part of your job. And you are paid to solve disputes within your team.
4. Trying To Impress Team Members Instead Of Empowering Them
Inspiring a team in the sales job Chicago industry is always good, but showing them how great you are in sales will not actually help them to better at selling.
So instead of trying to impress your subordinates, you have to empower them by providing your team with a scalable and repeatable method that will help them to be great at sales.
And empowering them with effective sales techniques either from established processes or personal experience is more effective since you are imparting useful knowledge that they can apply to close deals with clients.
Your purpose as their leader is to guide them so they can advance in their career eventually. And achieving your sales goals as a team will be easy if everybody is empowered to become better salespersons now and in the future.
5. Striving Your Team To Be Perfect
Finally, setting unrealistic goals as a sales manager in the sales job Chicago industry is highly discouraged. And the reason for that is it will only create more pressure on you and your members, which can affect the performance of the entire team.
Always keep in mind that there’s no such thing as perfect. Of course, striving for the best results is okay, but make sure to be realistic with your approach.
So make it a point to set attainable goals and expect some setbacks along the way. After all, you are there to guide your people whenever they face challenges. And that’s what makes you a good sales manager because you are always putting your team first above all else.
Visit SalesRecruitersChicago.com if you want to learn more about managing sales people.