The end of the 1st quarter! How are you doing as a sales manager? Remember those commitments, goals, changes you set out for 2025? Progressing, struggling or stalling? Let’s walk through a checklist of 20 +1 questions that you might answer with a ‘Yes’, ‘No’ or ‘Not Sure.’ Reviewing your answers can allow you to congratulate yourself, make 2nd quarter changes, or give you a wake-up call to improve your sales leadership or team performance.

Over my 30 plus years of consulting on sales productivity and training sales teams, I have observed over and over that the top performing sales managers have positive attitudes that motivate sales teams to meet and exceed revenue or customer retention goals. Gone are the days where sales managers can just “sit in their chairs.” Today’s younger salespeople require a sales manager that is active in supporting their achievement of exceeding their sales KPI’s.

Your sales managers are either the strongest or weakest link in your sales revenue-producing process. How effective they are directly impacts the revenue growth of your organization and it’s long term competitiveness. There are three major components of a sales manager to produce sales revenue through his/her team. Recently, I discovered that the Rain Group has produced an insightful research report on what makes a Top Performing Sales Manager.

As a B2B salesperson, we are faced with two facts in the marketplace: first, skilled & motivated B2B salespeople are worth their weight in gold, and, second, their sales manager can accelerate or stall their sales career success. Is your sales manager a lid lifter or a lid to your sales success?

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Time to “ELAvate” your sales team for record breaking revenue generating 2022. Here are my favorite planning and execution tools to drive and motivate your sales teams in 2022.

The effective sales coaches differ widely in their temperaments and abilities, in what they do and how they do it, in their personalities, their knowledge, their interests—in fact, in almost everything that distinguishes human beings. But all effective sales managers perform only necessary tasks and eliminate unnecessary ones to achieve sales revenue targets.

Research indicates the top competency for B2B sales manager success is the “willingness to train and coach.” This is buttressed by the three pillars of “focused on quantitative results,” “conducting joint calls” and “taking initiative for sales success.”