Evolving sales roles towards greater accountability and added value, to enhance sales efficiency – L’Envol
From Manager to “Manager-Coach”
To train future Managers, the key skills to transmit and acquire include managerial skills (leadership, strategic perspective). For example, Hubspot offers 12 weeks of training on the following themes: defining and developing your managerial style / Giving positive or negative feedback / Successful mentoring and coaching. To facilitate the acquisition of these skills, it is possible to engage external “change management” specialists or utilize digital tools.
For team engagement, contests are also key tools to strengthen team spirit and belonging.
Finally, it is recommended to provide greater transparency to sales professionals to help them take ownership of their performance.
Download our white paper and learn how to allocate your coaching budget for maximum impact.
All these actions legitimize the Manager in the eyes of their team.
Sales Professionals Taking Ownership of Their Performance
Sales professionals should ideally co-construct their training plan with their Manager. Teams are also encouraged to get involved in developing compensation, training, and objective plans. These elements are all ways to foster engagement and accountability for everyone within the team.
It is also advisable to let “aspiring Managers” train newcomers before official promotion, as a quick “trial run”.
The adoption of a best practice exchange process, particularly through Peer-to-Peer sharing, should also be encouraged.
Operating methods fostering accountability for all.
Repeated testing is the key to rapid and effective innovation for continuous improvement. These concepts appear to hold true within companies themselves, as living organisms in perpetual motion.
Fanny Péchiodat, the founder of My Little Paris, a wildly successful Parisian tips website acquired in 2013 (63% of capital – 92% today) by Auféminin.com, values instinct and impatience: “it’s better to try quickly than to think for a long time” .
More broadly, it is about encouraging the development of a corporate culture centered on innovation, to keep the organization alert and agile, enabling it to adapt—and ideally anticipate!—market realities and innovate.
For example, Hubspot, an American sales and marketing company, notably launched its Value Added Reseller Program, initially considered a simple experiment. The desire to foster a culture of innovation was a driving force behind the success and perseverance in implementing this program.