Sales manager skills, or why you don’t need a sales manager.
You run a small-medium business, make a respectable income, and you employ a team of several professionals, including an accountant, a receptionist, a responsible for the imports and purchases, 2 guys in the warehouse, 3 drivers and a team of salespeople.
And then you decide to hire a Sales Manager…Why you shouldn’t hire a sales manager and why you don’t need the sales manager skills.
Most of the time, this is a wrong decision.
Unless you are a big cooperation, as a small-medium business, you do not need a sales manager.
You should be the sales manager yourself, and although all other positions in your cooperation are needed the one of the sales manager is not only needed but is a position that can harm you in many ways.
Let me explain.
You are the owner of the Business A which produces and sells Product B to other businesses.
All your decisions are made with one thing and one thing only in your mind.
To increase your revenue and your profit, to achieve short and long terms results for your company.
You think strategically and tactically.
And then you hire a Sales Manager to help you achieve those goals.
Most of the time though, the Sales Manager has a different agenda than the one he claims he has… and a different agenda than you.
And not only that, but is very difficult to uncover his hidden ambitions until is too late.
- His goal is not to increase the sales of your organization, but to maintain his position and his good salary as long as possible.
- He is someone that does not take critique from the salespeople and most of the time the sales people do not critique him because they are afraid of their position.
- If you hired him to create for you a sales team, even worse because then, he is going to avoid hiring the best salespeople because is going to be afraid that they are going to compete him for the position he has. YOU ARE GOING TO CREATE A SALES TEAM THAT IS FOCUSED ON HIS AMBITIONS NOT THE ONES OF THE COMPANY.
- He is going to flatter you, tell you the things you want to hear, push the blame to his salespeople, keep a balance with the rest of the people in your company, he is the one that is going to tell you the comforting lies you would like to hear rather than the hard truths. When you did not have a Sales manager did the marketplace told you the comforting lies?
Sales is the head of the spear of any business, let alone for a small-medium business.
Unless it is absolutely necessary (and unless there are specific reasons where you need sales manager skills), no other should be the head of the sales other than YOU, the owner of this business, because YOUR visions, ambitions, and goals should be the visions, ambitions, and goals of your sales team.
If however, the necessity of a Sales Manager is unavoidable, then I advise you instead to hire a Sales Manager on a permanent basis, to outsource the role to a Sales Management Consultant which is going to help you bring your business forward without being dependent of you. That is therefore important because if he does not depend on you and if he does not work exclusively for you, he is going to tell you the truth and not the “truth” you want to hear.
THE FASTEST WAY TO BUILD YOUR BUSINESS IS TO MASTER THE ART OF SALES.
