Keep Reps Challenged
Supervision and coaching are altered more in degree than in kind. Reps still value and need individual coaching to handle problems with customers. But managers are leading by teaching rather than supervising task execution. The manager is becoming a teacher of self-managed professionals.
Measurement systems is an area of perhaps the greatest change because the old model depended on measurement of an individual rep`s results to drive both pay plans and performance appraisals. Today, with so much team selling, or mixed sales methods, more varied measurement schemes are needed. Assigning credit for sales is more problematic and complex in team selling. And new forms of sales specialization, such as national account measurement. Telesales people and national account managers cannot be measured the same way as territory reps or product specialists can.
Rep evaluations and provision of feedback by managers remain vital tasks. While reps should become self-managed, someone should help them accomplish this transition. Manager are the key people here. Their feedback can help reps analyze their sales successes and failures and set their own account goals; and the managers can provide advice about how the reps can go about achieving these self-imposed objectives.
Compensation-incentive and career-promotion tasks are more complex. Specialized selling or team selling calls for more creativity in rep rewards, because rep assignments differ so much from one to another. In addition, keeping reps challenged is more difficult because many companies have fewer management positions into which reps can addvance. Forced by competition to become “learn and mean,” many companies have thinned management ranks and flattened their organizations.
There are fewer “chief to Indians” out there. The reps needs for instrinsic rewards for achiement (as opposed to extrinsic pay or bonuses) demand that sales managers motivate the rep differently, with special work assignments, dual career-path ladders, and emphasis on “pride of profession” within the sales ranks.
Tags: management, manager, reps