3 major sales-management sins

Overview

When they misallocate key players, small to medium-sized businesses tend to go into one of two directions, says Jack Daly, business speaker and author of Hyper Sales Growth. They either stay small to medium, or they go out of business. When you ask why, it most often comes down to a violation of one or more of these three sins of sales management. Having the right people in important spots is absolutely the secret to success.
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1. The CEO or business owner is also the sales manager

With this first sin, Daly says, youre essentially relegating both the CEO job and the sales manager job to part-time status. In other words, youre saying that youre only growing your business part-time. If you want to grow, grow your sales force and you need someone managing that full-time, he says.
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2. The best salesperson is promoted to sales manager

With this next sin, Daly says it can sometimes work out, but seldom actually does. In this scenario, what happens is you lose your best salesperson and get a mediocre sales manager, he says. Being effective at one of those jobs is not an indicator that a person will be equally effective in the other. So, make sure your salesperson doesnt get disenchanted by having to do more managerial tasks, which take much more patience than the instant gratification of selling and could cause you to lose this person to another job.
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3. The best salesperson is also simultaneously the sales manager

This sin is the most concerning to Daly, as these are two separate jobs. The persons focus will remain fixed on the customer, as that is how their compensation is driven, he says. Accordingly, the sales team will be under served, missing the opportunity for leveraged growth.
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Conclusion

Owners of benefit brokerages have enough on their minds trying to save their agencies from the ever-evolving changes with the Affordable Care Act. The last thing you want to have to worry about is sales mistakes. So, dont hold the company back from achieving its growth, Daly says. Dont commit these three sins and instead help save your company.
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