Finance and Business

Assembling Teams of Reps and Keeping Them Sharp

Sales managers engage in eight central tasks in their search to develop a “world class” sales organization. These tasks have remained constant for many years. They can ne though of as a combination of people-management and process-management skills.

Managers beign by recruiting, screening, and hiring reps. Task 2 involves training reps and readying them for sales asignments. Task 3 requires the manager to deploy the rep to cover markets, accounts, and geographic territority. The remaining five managerial tasks relate to the field: supervision, measurement of rep results, performance feedback and evaluation, compensation and rep incentives, and promotion of reps into managerial jobs or higher-level sales responsibilities.

With more volative crowded markets, smarters customers are demanding solutions, and with more consolidated sophisticated reseller companies, reps have changed. In the face of such changes, the old sales management task model must be updated. While reps are still recruited and hired, more of them are now college graduates, and more of them are women. Thus, selection of reps is more varied, with higher-level skills being sought.

Training is no longer as operative a descripter of managerial actions as is rep development. As one astute manager once remarked, “your train animals, you develop people.” Reps must be developed as specialists and as team players, since so much of selling is now a team effort. Deployment of reps to territories or accounts is today more complex, since some accounts ae handled by telesales personnel, some by national account reps, and others by rep teams composed of market, product, or applications specialists all working in concert. The sales manager learns to be a network manager, astute at team building and deployment as well as individual account or territory assignments.