Follow-Up for a New Manager with an Inexperienced Team

April 30th, the end of another month! Let's do a little follow up on the last post.

Some of the other action items for a new manager with an inexperienced team are these.

Make sure your sales people are getting to the decision maker! Want to make yourself crazy? Work with a salesperson who has a primary contact and who has worked for months to develop a super strong relationship with someone who has can't buy what you're selling! The contact loves his/her account representative, but can't say the words, "I'm convinced, here is the contract." All the time, effort and resources have been expended for NOTHING!
This is a point that needs to be drummed and stressed to anyone new to sales, if their contact can't buy, be polite and courteous to them, but have them introduce you to the person who will do the purchasing. If they are well respected and have the DM's ear, make sure you stay in contact with them since they are probably an influencer. But you need to meet and speak to the decision maker at some point in the sale. They might delegate and have their trusted staff do the preliminary evaluations, but they will decide who is awarded the business, with input from their staff.

Know the Purpose of your Call or Meeting - Is the purpose of the call to prospect and introduce your service to a business that doesn't know your firm? Is the purpose of the phone call to make sure your proposal has been read and determine next steps? Is the purpose to arrange a face to face meeting? Is it to find out who the decision maker is? Is it to close the sale? Is it to invite the decision maker to play golf? They need to say different things and need to reach different people depending on what they want to accomplish.

Generate some buzz - I would want to try to have a contest of some kind to stimulate activity and interest. It might be a team contest or I might try to get my team to pull together and challenge another manager's team to some kind of contest. It might be closing sales, making cold calls, making appointments, but I would want to get them jazzed up.

Thanks for reading. Enjoy the nice NY Weather they're predicting for this weekend.