Tracy - Sales Management

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BRIAN TRACY

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tracy, Brian.

Sales management / Brian Tracy.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8144-3629-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8144-3630-1 (ebook) 1. Sales management. 2. Leadership. I. Title.

HF5438.4.T73 2015 658.81dc23

2015009452

2015 Brian Tracy

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

This publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of AMACOM, a division of American Management Association, 1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

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Printing number

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When IBM ran into financial trouble the early 1990s, the company brought in a new president, Lou Gerstner. He immediately called in his friends from McKinsey & Company, one of the largest and most respected management consultancies in the world. He asked them to use their investigative skills to determine why IBM sales, market share, and profits were falling. They immediately went to work.

In less than six months, the consultants were back. They assembled the senior executives and told them, We have found your problem.

They asked, What is it?

The McKinsey consultants replied, Low sales.

The executives agreed that this was the problem and then asked, What is the solution?

The McKinsey consultants said simply, High sales.

Again, the senior IBM executives pointed out that these two answers were obvious. But how would these high sales be achieved?

The answer became known as the 75 percent rule. In their research, they found that as the result of certain company policies, salespeople and sales managers were spending too much time in the office filling out forms and too little time in the field face-to-face with customers.

They recommended that this situation be reversed immediately. The 75 percent rule simply said that from now on, the salespeople should spend 75 percent of their time in the field with customers talking about IBM products and services. In addition, the sales managers, who had been stuck in their offices most of the day processing the paperwork that the salespeople were generating, were to spend 75 percent of their time in the field with salespeople calling on key customers.

Within a year, IBMs sales reversed completely. Huge losses turned into huge profits. The company turned around and again became a giant of American industry.

At the end of this study, the McKinsey people explained their most important finding: In a sales-driven organization, the sales manager is the pivotal skill. Nothing will bring about faster and more predictable increases in sales performance and sales results than training sales managers to do their job more effectively.

As a sales manager, you are the most important person in the sales-driven organization. You have more influence on the level of sales and, ultimately, the level of profitability of the company than almost any other person. You are vital to the success of the company.

The sales manager is one of the most valuable and often one of the least appreciated executives in the company. It is the sales manager who sets the standards and quotas for the salespeople and sees that they achieve them. The development of excellent sales managers is an essential requirement for all successful business enterprises.

Welcome to Sales Management. This book is based on years of experience and study into the attitudes and behaviors of successful sales managers. Throughout the pages ahead, you will learn a series of key ideas, methods, principles, and techniques that you can use, starting immediately, to make your sales force more effective, to produce more sales, to work more harmoniously together, and to advance your own personal career and prestige as rapidly as possible.

Sales management is an inexact science because salespeople are very different from most other employees. A sales manager must be a friend, a counselor, a confidant, a stern taskmaster, and an efficient business-oriented executive, all at the same time.

Salespeople have emotional highs and lows, selling booms and slumps, and a variety of eccentricities that require a person with tremendous patience and superior human relations skills to manage and control them.

The superior sales manager is a person who can mold a variety of different personalities into an effective sales team that can produce predictable and consistent sales results, month after month. Persistent application of the principles taught in this book will allow a sales manager such as yourself to achieve better sales resultsstarting immediately.

Remember, however, that there are no final answers in dealing with salespeople. There are exceptions to every rule. Because of the complexities of the human personality, an excellent sales manager is always aware that the person facing him across the desk may be an exception, either positive or negative.

With the ideas contained in this book, ambitious sales managers will discover they have more positive, productive people working for them and fewer negative, unproductive people. Lets begin.

The number one role of the sales manager is to generate the sales that are essential to the survival of the company. The sales manager achieves these sales results by working with and through other salespeople.