Cambridge Business Association
The Sales Manager’s Guide to Greatness
Book

The Sales Manager’s Guide to Greatness

Ten Essential Strategies for Leading Your Team to the Top

Kevin F. Davis
Greenleaf Book Group, 2017
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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Applicable
  • Well Structured
  • For Beginners

Recommendation

Superior sales depend on your sales team’s top performance, but most sales managers – having never learned to be good coaches or teachers – don’t know how to make such an achievement a reality. Sales consultant Kevin F. Davis offers these managers a basic course on how to help their reps sell more effectively. He outlines 10 specific strategies and explains them thoroughly with useful theory, valuable insights, helpful action steps and illustrative sales management stories. getAbstract recommends his manual to all sales execs, especially those new to sales management.

Summary

Coaching Sales Reps

Most sales managers invest less than 8% of their time in coaching their salespeople and – to make matters worse – what most sales managers describe as coaching isn’t really coaching at all. Instead, they conduct performance reviews, a subset of performance management. Discussing sales representatives’ performance matters – but so does coaching.

Sales managers should practice “development coaching,” a program of monitoring and teaching that’s crucial to sales success. Sales managers need to begin with the right mind-set; they must adapt to dealing with meetings, emails, voice mails and the “avalanche” of other business that steals their time away from leading their reps. They must think strategically, manage their time and set their priorities so they can give their salespeople authentic developmental coaching.

To do this right, put 10 sales coaching strategies into action: 

1. “Embrace a Leadership Mind-Set”

If shipping dock crews don’t meet their production quotas, factory managers don’t hassle them to load trucks faster. Instead, the managers investigate their production lines to determine...

About the Author

Kevin F. Davis is president of TopLine Leadership, a sales and sales management and training consultancy. He also wrote Getting into Your Customer’s Head.

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