In most medical industry organizations, the sales manager is usually responsible for ensuring that the sales team meets its quotas, recruiting & training sales reps, creating sales forecasts, analyzing performance, and creating (then improving) the overall sales strategy.
The skills needed for sales manager success can be widely varied because of these differing priorities. What are the most important sales manager skills? How can you develop these skills to increase success for your own sales team?
Here’s a short sales manager skills list to help you drive success.
There are innumerable “soft” and “hard” skills for sales managers that might prove useful. However, nobody has the time to master absolutely every skill that could possibly be remotely useful.
So, it’s important to identify the best skills to hone and focus on those before moving on to others. Some of the most important skills needed for sales managers in the medical sales industry include:
One of the most important tasks any sales manager faces is building up their sales team. This includes activities like recruiting new team members, providing training to improve existing team members, and letting go of poor-fit team members when needed.
But, how can sales managers make the best decisions about whom to hire, what training each employee needs, and whom to let go? Having the ability to assess others in a consistent and objective manner is a good start.
Learning how to get a feel for the skills and personalities of others (and how well they mesh with your existing team) is a prime example of a “soft skill.” It’s hard to know a person completely—especially after just the first meeting for a job interview.
One of the best ways to develop this skill is to practice repeatedly. For example, you can gain experience through conducting new hire interviews. Then, you can validate your assessments by checking sales rep performance later on. Over time, you can learn how reliable your “gut” feelings are, what traits are consistently present in successful (and unsuccessful) applicants, and which questions are the best at identifying the traits for success.
A key part of ensuring that the sales team meets its goals is keeping reps motivated and engaged with their work. Disengaged sales reps will not only perform to a lower standard than their engaged counterparts—they’re more likely to quit, too. In fact, there’s a popular saying in corporate management that goes something like: “People don’t quit their jobs; they quit bad bosses.”
Sales managers can have an enormous impact on the motivation and success of their team members. In an article she posted on LinkedIn, Brigette Hyacinth, author of Leading the Workforce of the Future, stated that “75% of workers who voluntarily left their jobs did so because of their bosses and not the position itself.”
So, being able to motivate employees is a must-have skill for sales managers in the medical sales industry (or any industry, really).
Becoming a great manager who can motivate everyone isn’t going to happen overnight. However, there are quite a few things that sales managers can work on to beef up their motivational skills—such as:
If a sales rep isn’t being given the time and resources they need to close deals, can they really be held responsible for meeting their sales goals? A lack of resources can hamstring sales department performance—and sales managers need to be able to provide the right resources to sales teams to remove obstacles to meeting sales goals.
So, mastering the art of resource planning is a must for sales managers. Some aspects of resource planning include making sure that there are enough sales reps on hand to handle the company’s needs, providing the right software and/or hardware to let sales reps carry out their daily work with minimal distraction, and scaling up (or scaling down) sales team resources to account for changes in needs.
Start by asking your sales team what their biggest challenges or obstacles to meeting their goals are. Then, carefully consider ways to remove those obstacles or gather the team to brainstorm some ideas.
It can also help to go to other sales managers (or even managers in other business units) to ask them about how they identify and remove obstacles to productivity. Learning how to leverage enterprise resource planning (ERP) software can also help.
While assessing employee skills can play a major role in the recruitment process, being able to analyze an employee’s actual performance is vital for monitoring the overall “health” of your sales team.
When analyzing employee performance, it’s important to know which metrics are the most important for your sales organization. In a lot of organizations, this will typically mean objectives-based metrics like the number of deals closed, total deal value, and/or average deal size.
Some organizations also like to track activity-based goals, such as the number of calls or meetings a sales rep arranges, time spent in calls/meetings, or the number of emails sent. This can be useful for establishing best practices by correlating what top performers do to their results.
The most important thing is to practice data analysis over time. This can help you learn how to set reasonable expectations.
Also, it can help to learn how to use performance tracking software to automate the collection of employee performance data so you can make sure your performance analysis is as accurate as possible.
Part of building the perfect medical sales team is ensuring that they have all the skills and knowledge they need. So, employee training is an enormous part of a sales manager’s toolbox.
However, imparting knowledge isn’t always easy. Employees may be reluctant to spend time they could be selling on non-sales activities.
Others may learn just enough to get past the training—only to forget it as soon as they’re done. This phenomenon is called knowledge decay.
Knowing how to impart knowledge and reinforce it after the fact so employees retain the information and can apply it is a huge challenge. Sales managers need to know which pieces of information are most relevant to their teams, how to keep training engaging for them, and how to follow up with employees after training is complete to refresh that knowledge as needed.
Periodically conduct training with the entire sales team and ask them for their feedback. Try to get an idea for which training concepts were too easy, too hard, or just right for each employee.
Alternatively, look for any major skills gaps that are common in your sales team by conducting an employee survey or test. If there’s something that everyone should know but most don’t, then that’s probably a very good candidate for your next training session.
Offer coaching to sales reps who might be struggling to meet their goals. For example, you could listen in on a sales call and provide some pointers after the fact—then work that into a training session.
It also helps to work on demonstrating how training materials relate to a sales rep’s everyday work. Showing how training can help in the day-to-day could be vital for improving knowledge retention after training.
Finally, consider conducting random tests or asking employees questions related to training topics in other sales team meetings.
The above is just a short list of some of the best skills for sales managers to work on—it’s far from being comprehensive, and some organizations might have more need of some skills than others.
However, not every organization has the time and resources to build and maintain an internal team of sales reps and the management needed to ensure their effectiveness. This is where sales management services from a contract sales organization (CSO) like Axxelus can help.
Axxelus can source, recruit, onboard, and continuously train a dedicated, highly skilled team of medical sales representatives to help your organization meet its sales goals consistently.
Are you ready to build your medical sales success? Reach out to the Axxelus team today!
Subscribe to Our Blog!
written by: