Sales Manager Tips: 3 Things You Must Do to Evaluate Your Team’s Strength

It’s a very tempting and quite frankly, common practice for sales leaders to look at the data and render judgment of their sales team strength. However, this data has a tendency to show only the results. It neglects to paint a more complete picture of your team’s strengths.

There is really only one way to accurately assess your team strengths and that is to go watch them. Go watch them do what they do. Don’t rely on what they’re telling you or the reports you see on a regular basis. Go spend time in their sales offices and observe. 

Now I know what you’re thinking. Where am I going to find the time to do this? My schedule is already full of meetings and other important sales management tasks. 

I’m glad you asked because I’m going to share three sales manager tips to help you make spending time in the field a reality. 

Block Time on Your Calendar

As the old saying goes, if you don’t have a plan for your life someone else does. Time is a finite resource for us all and trust me, no one else will be more concerned about how you spend that time than you. This is why your calendar is so important. When I’m working with sales managers, one of the first things I ask is for them to share their calendars with me. I’m interested to see what their days and weeks look like. 

Two things I see the most when viewing calendars is sales leaders either don’t have enough or they have way too much on it. These are often two separate issues and I’m going to focus on having too much because it leads nicely into our next tip. 

Be Really Good at Saying No

Take a look at your calendar right now. How many meeting invites have you accepted in the past two weeks? Now look at these meetings and ask yourself how the meeting contributes to your overall goal of revenue growth. If you’re not being purposeful about filling your calendar with activities that lead to, and generate revenue growth, rest assured other people with different objectives are glad to use your time. 

I’m not saying you shouldn’t go to any meetings but always remember when you say “yes” to one thing, you’re saying “no” to something else. 

Be Present in the Field

The very best way to gauge a team’s strength is getting out to the field to observe and coach them. Let’s do that. If we’ve learned one thing from the pandemic and the last couple of years it’s that we have the capability to work from anywhere. We can attend required meetings via Zoom from a sales office. 

Sales leaders need to be mobile and this has never been easier than it is now. Again, go back to your calendar and plan out time to be in the field. Schedule this time and honor it like you would for a meeting with your division President. 

What you’ll find when you’re in the field is often vastly different than what you’ve been told. It’s not that people aren’t telling the truth, although this happens also. It’s more so that salespeople aren’t doing what they think they’re doing or they think they’re doing better than they’re actually doing. This is why the field day portion of our training for Shore Consulting is so critical. We get to work with sales pros to actually see how they’re executing on the training they received. 

None of this will be as easy as looking at the sales reports and making judgments based on results. Doing the necessary work to ensure maximum performance is rarely easy. You probably didn’t get into sales leadership by pressing an “easy” button and therefore have the capabilities to make this a reality.

Controlling your calendar and making time to be with your people provides the best opportunity for accurately evaluating your team strengths and changing people’s worlds.