Important Sales Management Lessons

As challenging as it can be to get the right sales agents working for you, keeping them can be a greater effort than you'd think. Managing an aggressive sales force takes consideration of the corporate culture, their overall goals, and how the people in it work together.

First and foremost, understand that getting any social structure (be it a church group or business) to work is a matter of balancing reward mechanisms. You will get the behaviors you reward, and it's worth it, when looking at management structures, to ask what behaviors you intend to reward and how they scale as you go up the management ladder.

For example, if you want your sales managers to grow the business, you need to compensate them for what their subordinates do; you can't compensate the sales agents in ways that aren't mirrored or extended to the sales managers, otherwise there will be dissatisfaction across the board, and you'll find yourself in a situation where the sales managers are pushing salespeople into goals that aren't suitable, because they make the manager's job easier or more secure.

Let's look at a hypothetical case. You have a manager running a sales team; one of their top sales agents has gotten an order with a high dollar amount, but a low margin. The company wants the order, because it's got positive cash flow. Yet, if the manager is compensated by margin percentages (a common compensation strategy for managerial positions), there's a disconnect between what the manager wants, what the sales person wants, and what the company wants.

If the sale is consummated, the manager gets a smaller check (due to his compensation being matched to margin percentages). If the manager tells the sales agent to go in and ask for a higher quote, they may lose the sale (and puts the manager at odds with the company's goals). This also jeopardizes the relationship the sales agent has with the client.

The answer to this is to go up the chain of command; under the right circumstances, the sale can be consummated, and the manager compensated fairly for the work done by the salesperson – but this takes some solid guidelines and organizational structure in place to make happen…and it should be prevented at the beginning by making sure that the goals and compensation strategies are aligned properly, so that nobody "takes one for the team" when a successful sale is completed.