Blog: Interim sales management – the springboard for your sales team

Interim sales management – the springboard for your sales team

How can sales teams work continuously on achieving their quotas fully, regularly, and repeatedly without the real-world constant disruptions?

Some example disruptions are: When sales managers leave the company, or the skills of the sales reps do not match the requirements of the changing market, or the best sales reps switch to the competition.

Since profitable sales performance is the base of any commercial success, the management needs to address these disruptions. An interim sales manager can be a great help for 3 reasons: Time, continuity, and knowledge transfer. Let us look at each of them.

 Time                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

Time is not only money, but also the scarcest resource for all of us.

It can take weeks, or even months to find the right sales manager, especially if you are looking for a highly skilled one. Many companies try to solve this problem by appointing a CXO – or another high-ranking manager – to cover temporarily. The trouble is that hardly any CXOs have the capacity to execute two fully loaded jobs. Even for the most efficient ones, the day still only has 24 hours. As a consequence, one of the duties naturally suffers.

Experienced interim sales managers are available much faster and very time flexible in the amount that they can devote to the company, compared to the lengthy permanent job search.

In addition to that, they can add 2 slight edges:

• They can help select the new permanent sales manager. Here, their extensive experience in people management comes in handy.
• Once the new permanent manager is hired, the interim manager can help get them up to speed in an unbeatably short time.

Summing up, we can revert back to the first sentence of this point with the well-known phrase: Time is money.

Continuity                                                                                                                                    

Performance is measured by numbers rather than opinions. “When the cat is away, the mice will play.”

The working morale of self-motivated and self-disciplined employees can vanish fast.

Continuity of business focus, discipline, and regularity is what an interim sales manager offers. Put simply, the interim sales managers can make sure that the forecasts do not degrade to fairy tales – performance is measured by numbers rather than opinions, and the forecast meetings do not mutate to open ending discussion clubs.

Not only this, but people management means primarily devoting a manager’s time to their direct reports. Irrespectively of the study you take, it is always more than 50% of their capacity that good managers should spend with their team members so that they feel valued, respected, and advised.

Without it, the unwanted lack of motivation and discipline effects will quickly creep in.

Also, the clients’ point of view should not be neglected. Bad news can spread fast, and no customer wants to buy if the rumours suggest their supplier might be in a dishevelled state due to a bad management structure.

   Knowledge Transfer

Knowledge transfer is the crown jewel of any interim sales management role.

It enriches the current company view on business processes and the best practices available on the market. It can sometimes be a painful realisation for the recipient but it’s worth giving the company the option to adopt it.

Knowledge transfer can help each sales rep in adopting high-performance sales habits. These are based on improving and practicing sales motivation, skills, and systems to create habits that pave the path to attaining the goals.

Each of these require a lot of management, training, learning, and/or coaching efforts. As validated many times, these high-performance sales habits bring visible results.

They are so good that the interim management grows from a bridge between two permanent sales managers to a springboard, enabling the next level of success and self-confidence of the sales team.

To talk to us more on Sales Management, please get in touch by emailing info@sbrconsulting.com or call us on +44 (0) 207 653 3740.

You can sign up to receive regular updates and join over 4,000 others who enjoy access to our unique research insights, expert guidance, and advice.