Aspiring to become a sales manager? Congrats there! You have made a wise choice. 

Sales management is an exceedingly rewarding career. You get to be the steering force behind the success of an entire sales organization.

But know that – not everything is going to be sunshine and rainbows in your sales management career. Your job can get very demanding and stressful sometimes. In fact, a survey found that 73% of sales managers rated their role as “highly stressful”. 

You need to master an array of skills for sales manager to succeed in your field. These sales manager skills will help you lead a team of sales reps, create a successful sales strategy, analyze data, and hire the right team.

Still wondering if being a sales manager is right for you? Then, take a glance if you possess the following list of sales management skills. These are the traits every successful sales manager has.

Skills You Will Need To Become An Efficient Sales Manager

Being Confident Always

As a sales manager, you must have confidence in what you are selling, whether it’s medicine or makeup. Trusting and believing that the product you are selling will solve your customer’s problems is essential. That’s because customers can easily tell when you are not a fan of the product.

Your sales manager skills should also extend to having confidence in your sales team. Your reps should see you as someone they can learn from. Not just an annoying boss who tracks results and directs them to sell more.

You must have confidence in yourself and your decisions too. If you are not confident, you will find it super hard to make tough choices, lead meetings, and communicate with your team.

Leading And Not Micromanaging

Most sales reps don’t have an issue when being asked to do something by their manager. It’s part of the sales manager’s job afterall. 

But your sales manager skills and tactics shouldn’t be to bark orders at them, interfere with what they are doing, or micromanage them. This is very intrusive. 

So, never try to micromanage your sales team. Instead, create and share sales goals with your team. Allow them to come up with their own ideas to accomplish those goals.

You can also leverage technology to efficiently lead your team. Use the right technology to keep track of your team’s performance. Learn what they are doing, and measure productivity and close rates without intruding on their day-to-day routine.

Then, use this information to lead your team. Offer each sales rep feedback, support, and motivation on how to succeed in their field.

Implementing, Innovating, And Streamlining The Sales Process

As a manager, you must have the sales manager skills to create easy-to-follow sales processes. Having a clear sales plan, packed with process documentation and templates ensures your team is on the same level. It will encourage your team to perform consistently.

You have to implement the plan at the right time and make sure your team follows it. Keep a close eye on it during the implementation process. Get rid of the things that are not working in favor of your sales goals and tweak things to make them better.

Regular sales process planning and implementation maintain a successful business model that helps your team and company grow over time. You can learn these sales manager skills by developing your own version of a sales plan. Or else you can update an existing plan.

Another essential sales manager skills are to streamline certain tasks for more efficiency.

Coaching Sales Reps

The overarching goal of coaching is to hone the skills of sales reps and make them better. For a sales manager, mastering the sales manager skills of coaching is particularly important. 

As a sales manager, you must know that placing priority on coaching will build confidence among team members. Therefore, you must seek opportunities to provide guidance that will make your sales reps better. Don’t hesitate to drop everything to help a sales rep solve a problem.

Choosing the Sales Team Carefully

As a sales manager, you will need to hire reps on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. As such, impeccable hiring tactics should be one of your top sales manager skills.  You need to find and retain the right sales team to improve sales performance and results. 

Picking the sales team carefully also means knowing how to leverage the strength of high-performance outliers. And when to part ways with under-performers. 

Rational Problem Solving

Sales managers have to frequently face challenges or problems that need to be addressed immediately. For instance – a stalled deal, a dissatisfied customer, or a frustrated team member. 

In such cases, the sales manager needs to use rational problem-solving skills. They need to anticipate potential issues and find proactive steps to resolve them. All these while, they must also maintain control over their emotions. 

Rational problem-solving skills help sales managers to maintain their calm under pressure. This sets the right example for sales reps to do the same when they face a similar stressful work situation.

Analyzing Sales Performance

Lastly, you must have the sales manager skills to tap into your team’s sales performance. Review them and make actionable decisions to reset and achieve sales goals. 

A sales manager with strong analytical skills can also effectively leverage data. You can forecast the revenue your team can generate in a given period. Once you have the revenue forecast, you can use this data to set goals for individual sales reps. 

Want To Master These Sales Manager Skills Effortlessly?

Then, begin your climb to sales management success with RoofTop Sales. Our exclusive sales management training courses can efficiently train and equip frontline sales managers. With our leading sales coaches, you can acquire the knowledge, skills, and tools you need to achieve outstanding sales results in an increasingly competitive world.

Drive and inspire towering sales performances today!