Adam Arnett, the CEO of Element Personal Training, shares the three most important objectives for sales managers and how to succeed at each.
Every sales manager must be able to do three things: recruit staff, coach staff and hold staff accountable. Here, gain insights into how to do each successfully.
Always Be Recruiting
The most valuable attribute of any sales manager is their ability to replicate themselves into a productive sales team. Before they can achieve that, they must have a staff to work with.
Never allow yourself or your sales manager to think their team can’t get better. Your sales manager must always be recruiting. You must not let them get overly comfortable with the team they have in place, no matter how productive it is.
Being in constant recruitment mode serves a couple purposes. It keeps your current team on guard against falling below expectations and it helps create a bullpen you can call on when an employee quits or must be fired.
Another good discipline to follow would be to at minimum replace your bottom 10% to 20% of producers every six months. If you don’t, their mediocrity will begin to pull down your entire team.
Always Be Coaching
Sports are a great example for the value of coaching and leading a sales team requires the same mindset. No matter how much experience or money a professional athlete has in their bank, their coaches are always working with them on their fundamentals and rehearsing game time situations. Competence creates confidence.
Your sales manager should do the same with their team. A day shouldn’t go by without the sales manager role playing with them on how to properly speak to telephone inquiries, overcome objections or engage a stranger to offer a gym pass.
Holding Them Accountable
Failing to hold any sales team member accountable to acceptable production and behavior standards should not be condoned. Your sales manager must be able to have the difficult conversations with their team when necessary. Nothing brings down the standards of production more than letting one or more salespersons come up short of goals multiple periods in a row or show up late to work without consequence.
In membership and training sales there must not be any acceptance of failing to reach minimum daily standards of the job that require only effort and determination to achieve. Those would be: total contact attempts per day by phone/text, daily floor pull attempts, and daily amount of passes handed out.
It would be wise for all of us to remember a popular quote that stands the test of time: “The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency; not in our doing too much, but rather in our doing too little; not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities.”
