YourSalesManagementGuru by Ken Thoreson, Acumen Management Group
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Strategic Sales Management Demands Rigors of Cadence
At a recent workshop, "Building a Business in Challenging Times," we discussed the role of sales management. I started to describe the various job functions of a sales manager, or what we believe at Acumen Management are the actions that must be focused on to build a high-performance sales organization.
I covered the concepts of training, metrics management, hiring/interviewing, sales coaching/mentoring, marketing campaigns and general operational management items that make up the day/week of any sales leader. The result of the discussion brought out Acumen's theorem on "the rigors of cadence."
Successful sales organizations are managed with discipline, accountability and control. We will explore each of these words in the next three blogs. But let's start with the concepts in the rigors of cadence, which means that sales managers must be rigorous in their expectations, challenging on training programs and they must perform their management duties of training, coaching, and operation management with a rhythmic pattern. This ongoing standardization and expectation brings a professional approach to everything, from the Monday morning sales meeting, to regularly planned sales training events, to the monthly sales management dashboard evaluation and to the quarterly salesperson development plan and formal review.
Successful sales managers build process and a prescriptive methodology that creates the discipline, accountability and control that creates predictable revenue. Future blogs will discuss what we mean by discipline, accountability and control, and how to bring the rigors of cadence to your sales organizations.
Posted by Ken Thoreson on February 23, 2009