What Does Sales Want From Their Manager?

Dave Brock (Partners in Excellence) is recognized as a thought leader, sales and marketing, new product introductions, and strategic partnering. Dave helps organizations develop and execute high impact strategies and programs in these areas.  Not only a leading thinker and strategist, Dave further distinguishes himself by supporting his clients in the implementation and execution of strategies in these disciplines.  His approach is focused and pragmatic, producing results many never thought possible.

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Dave is my guest next week for the podcast where we discussed the sales manager role quite a bit. An excerpt from next week’s podcast:

Joe:   The question that surfaces for me is what does a sales person want from a sales manager?

Dave Brock:   The sales people want somebody that helps them to be effective, somebody that helps them achieves their numbers and somebody that helps them achieve their personal goals of what they want to do through their careers. And sometimes that’s just, stay out of my way, but a lot of times or most of the time it is help me solve my problems. Help me figure out how to deal with this very, very complex situation, or help me figure out, I’m struggling with my pipeline, or I’m struggling with prospecting and so on and so forth. Help me figure out how to do that.

I think that the really top performers, even the borderline top performers are looking at how they get better, so they count on their sales manager to help them do that. Whether it’s through the coaching they provide, whether it’s through the tools, whether it’s through some ride-alongs and those kinds of things, but they’re really looking to say, how do they increase their own effectiveness and how do they get sanity in their own lives? So they look to sales managers to help them do that. Sales managers that pop to the top are those guys that do that. The sales managers that people abhor are the desk jockeys, are the ones that are continually pounding you for the numbers but don’t create any value.

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