Every sales manager has some degree of legitimate dedication to both their company and professional development. That’s a big part of how you get to be a manager in the first place.

Those qualities are almost a given in sales management, but the very best managers don’t stop there — they exhibit some other key traits and behaviors that take their management skills from good to great.

Here, we’ll review six of the most crucial qualities that every ambitious sales manager should fold into their day-to-day operations and broader aspirations to take their management skills to the next level.

1. A Consistent Commitment to Personal Improvement

The best sales managers lead by example. They inspire their teams through their own dedication and, in turn, get more from their reps. That’s why exemplary sales managers never stop trying to improve.

Complacency is a detriment to effective sales management. As a manager, it’s on you to fight any inclination to remain stagnant in how you take on your responsibilities. You have to want to be better and consistently deliver on that motivation.

Attend sales management seminars. Make a conscious effort to better understand and approach the aspects of your job that extend beyond directly managing your team. No matter what you do, remain grounded, open, and ambitious when it comes to your ongoing professional development.

2. The Ability to Identify and Hire Quality Candidates

The sustained success of your team rests primarily on the talent you bring in. The best sales manager in the world can only get so far with a rep who lacks the ambition, skills, or cultural fit to thrive and actively contribute to their team.

Onboarding and ultimately letting go of an ineffective hire is a massive drain on time, effort, money, and company resources. So you need to be able to get ahead of that potentially disastrous process. That’s why sound hiring skills are so crucial to your success as a sales manager.

Understand the skills and attributes that you want to hire for — as well as the questions you need to ask to uncover them. You can learn those by touching base with and learning from your more experienced colleagues.

Once you have a firm picture of those components, relay those ideal traits to your recruiters. That way, you’ll ensure that the crop of candidates you bring in is more likely to successfully pan out.

3. A Willingness to Construct and Commit to a Sales Process

Cohesion and consistency are a sales manager’s best friends. They’re central to maintaining a tight ship and keeping operations as fluid and efficient as possible. You need your whole team to be on the same page so it serves you to give them a solid framework to abide by.

That’s where a well-structured sales process comes into play. If you can establish, monitor, and facilitate an effective sequence of steps for your reps to follow when conducting their sales efforts, you can make both your and their jobs easier.

There should always be some degree of rhyme and reason to your team’s sales efforts. The best managers know it’s on them to define and enforce what that will look like.

4. A Firm Understanding of Relevant KPIs

Managers need to understand how both their and their teams’ success will be gauged and measured. You have to understand how to interpret and apply relevant KPIs like average sales cycle length, average deal size, and discovery-to-close rate.

You’ll also need a firm understanding of how those metrics will be reported. Being able to read and make something of the necessary reports you’ll be referencing is key to identifying areas for improvement in both your and your team’s performance.

In some cases, you might have to work with your managers to get a solid feel for this aspect of the job. Don’t be reluctant to touch base with them about the how and why behind the KPIs and reports you need to have a grasp on.

No matter what it might take to get there, you have to know the ins and outs of the figures used to measure your performance.

5. Objective, Fair Conflict Resolution Skills

Sales reps don’t always get along. Conflict is natural in the workplace, and as a manager, it’s often on you to resolve any potential clashes between your team members.

When confronted with that kind of situation, the best sales managers know how to remain calm, impartial, and objective. Conflict doesn’t have to mean confrontation, and effective managers can ensure that that kind of tension doesn’t boil over and interfere with how their team functions.

They know how to hear every side without playing favorites and make sure that disputes get resolved constructively — minimizing friction, sustaining high morale, and ultimately making their operations run smoother.

For more information on how to develop effective conflict resolution skills, check out this article here.

6. Firm but Compassionate Communication and Feedback Skills

Coaching and offering feedback are two of the most important responsibilities that consistently fall on sales managers. It’s on them to provide personal insight that will get the most out of their reps.

Typically, doing both right means leading with empathy and providing constructive guidance. You need to understand who your reps are. No two team members are built the same. They’re going to be receptive to different kinds of coaching.

If you can tactfully tailor your messages and feedback to accommodate your reps as individuals, you’ll put yourself in an excellent position to be the best sales manager you can be.

Now, by no means is this list exhaustive. There are plenty of other qualities exceptional sales managers generally exhibit. Still, that doesn’t make the behaviors and tendencies listed here any less valuable. If you’re a sales manager, it’s in your best interest to add these components into your management repertoire if you haven’t already.

There are four leadership styles that managers use to guide their teams: visionary, democratic, transformational, and coaching.

All of these styles focus on helping employees achieve their goals, but some emphasize pushing employees out of their comfort zone, while others focus on motivation through promotions and bonuses.

Management by Objectives (MBO) is a type of democratic management style that measures employee success by their contributions to overall company success. Various industries can benefit from this strategy, and it’s common in sales-driven environments.

In this post, we’ll go over how an MBO model can help businesses reach their sales goals, and the steps sales managers can take to design a successful program for their employees.

Employees work with their managers to create a set of tasks they’re meant to complete within a specific time frame that will help the company achieve its overarching goals. Establishing employee objectives is intended to provide them with a holistic view of their responsibilities and how those responsibilities relate to company-wide objectives. This helps sales reps understand what is expected of them and why so they can be more productive.

You can think of it like this: a computer software company wants to shorten their sales cycle by the end of the year. An MBO model would mean that managers work with their employees to outline goals that they’ll need to achieve within the calendar year to help the company reach their desired cycle length. This could mean having team members focus on being more efficient in their conversations with customers and assigning quarterly sales-length benchmarks that they should meet.

Benefits of an MBO Model

Peter Drucker, who introduced the concept of Management By Objectives in “The Practice of Management,” stated that the overall benefit of using an MBO model is to empower employees through allowing them to see the value of their work in relation to company success. Ideally, employees involved in setting their own work-related goals feel empowered through this process and experience increased productivity and work morale.

An MBO model also improves transparency between employees and upper management, as higher-level business intentions must be made clear to all. It also enhances transparency between managers and their direct employees, as managers need to be upfront about expectations, and employees must be honest about what they think they can achieve.

Overall, MBO goal setting focuses on reward rather than punishment, as employees can designate their course of action and enact strategies they know they can achieve.

Five Steps To Creating Your Own MBO Model

Managers who lead through an MBO sales model can follow the step-by-step process that Drucker outlined in his book.

1. Define organizational goals with employees.

The first step to creating a successful MBO model is to define organizational goals with your team members.

Ensure that employees understand what the company wants to achieve and the time frame they want these achievements to happen.

For example, maybe a business’s goal is to increase sales revenue by 25% by the end of the calendar year. While that goal gives a specific time frame, upper management may have other actionable steps that they’ll want to take to ensure that this happens. Maybe they want to increase revenue by 7% every quarter, or maybe they want to increase revenue by 5% for the first three quarters of the year, with a final sprint towards a 10% increase in quarter four. Employees should be aware of all of these details.

2. Create employee objectives.

After you define company goals with your entire team, the next step is to work with individual employees to establish their job responsibilities.

Using the specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goal structure can help with this process. When you establish goals in this way, employees have a holistic understanding of your expectations for them.

Continuing with the example from the first step, if a company’s end goal is to increase revenue by 25%, employee objectives must directly contribute to this revenue increase. That could look like employees committing to closing 10% more deals per quarter.

During this stage, you may also discuss bonuses and rewards given to employees when they meet their goals. Since these are also discussed and set in collaboration, employees may be motivated to be productive to receive these bonuses.

3. Continuously monitor progress.

A pillar of the MBO model is hands-on interaction and discussion between managers and employees. This means that you continue to check in with employees throughout the timelines you’ve established together.

Continuously monitor their progress, and assist them along the way if factors are in the way of their success. If employees have fallen off course, reinforcements and reminders from you can help them get back on track. While you’re outlining employee objectives, you can also set check-in timelines.

4. Evaluate and reward employees.

While monitoring employee performance, you’ll get a sense of your employees’ levels of efficiency. If you’ve set timelines for employees to meet their goals, you should view the end of these periods as opportunities to evaluate performance.

Employees who meet their goals should be given the rewards and bonuses agreed upon during step two. The MBO model doesn’t focus on punishment. So, if you have employees who have not met their goals, you can provide them with employee development resources that will help them succeed in the future.

5. Use technology in your favor.

Even though you’re already monitoring employee progress, these check-ins likely aren’t occurring every day. Consider using technology to get a sense of employee performance during hands-off periods.

For example, HubSpot’s Sales Hub can generate reports to track team-specific sales activities, like sales calls and deal information, based on dates or individuals.

The Sales Hub software is also a valuable tool for managers outside of check-in periods to see how employees are progressing toward their goals. For example, if you decide with one of your employees that they’ll close 10 deals in a month, you can use the Closed amount metric to view the number of deals closed during that period.

The image below is an example of the Count of deals view that displays the number of deals opened, lost, and won.

MBO emphasizes employee growth and development.

Overall, an MBO mode helps companies achieve their goals through employee empowerment. Managers and their teams take the time to understand business goals, collaborate on establishing job functions, and create actionable timelines.

Employees who meet their goals are rewarded and can see how their success impacts company success.

Closing deals involving complex price modeling, a need for extensive product knowledge, varying potential discounts, or any other atypical standards and practices isn’t exactly intuitive. It might require some insight, expertise, and materials beyond a conventional sales org’s reach.

In those cases, it can help to have something called a deal desk in place — a resource that can smooth out the harsher, more convoluted sides of highly complex deals.

Here, we’ll get a better understanding of what a deal desk is, an overview of how to put one together, and a picture of some of the metrics to measure one’s efficacy.

A deal desk is essentially a sales-supporting brain trust. It’s a forum where multiple departments within an organization can contribute their expertise and perspective to help close highly complex deals that might be beyond most sales reps’ skills and know-how.

Aspects of the deals most commonly passed off to deal desks can include components like atypical contracts, the need for extensive product knowledge, and intricate pricing structures. A deal desk provides a way for a salesperson to reference the information, resources, and advice they might need to cover those bases.

For instance, say you — a salesperson — are on the brink of closing a massive, high-value deal with a SaaS giant. The deal itself is for a new, complex product as it’s being released. You’ve discussed offering a sizable discount to this company in the hopes that its support will boost your new product’s prestige.

With a well-constructed deal desk, you could have a readily accessible location for documentation and insight that can inform how you negotiate the deal, the proper price modeling you should use, what kind of discounts would be appropriate to offer, the degree of product knowledge you can bring to the deal, and the how you need to approach the deal from a legal perspective.

Putting a Deal Desk Together

What do you want your deal desk to do?

What do you need your deal desk for? In some cases, a deal desk is solely a resource for reviewing factors like pricing and deal structure, but many desks extend beyond that.

As I touched on earlier, a deal desk might have a role in other aspects of the deal-closing process, including providing advice on negotiation strategy and insight about product knowledge. So if you want to put a solid, productive deal desk together, you need to establish exactly what you want from it.

Who do you want to involve?

A deal desk can incorporate input, expertise, and materials from a variety of sources. Again, you might include stakeholders from departments like sales, legal, product, and finance.

Anyone who can smooth out and expedite the deal-closing process can have a presence in a deal desk. If you’re putting one of your own together, you need to tap the right, relevant people to carry out the responsibilities you defined in the previous step.

Which deals will it cover?

This point is central to ironing out a deal desk’s purpose. You need to have a firm picture of what kinds of deals you want your desk to cover. How big, complex, or important does a deal need to be to warrant attention and effort from the team?

You also have to pin down where in the sales cycle where you see it fit to involve your deal desk. Understanding the point in the buyer’s journey where your deal desk should come into play will help you get the most out of that team without exhausting too many of the resources it takes to maintain it.

1. Profit

This is one of the more straightforward metrics you can use to measure the efficacy of your deal desk and the value of the deals it touches. Profit can tell you whether the data and insight from the stakeholders at your deal desk are actually paying off.

If the highly complex deals your deal desk informs aren’t as profitable as you’d like them to be, you might want to reevaluate the strategies and materials that come from it.

2. Win Rate

At its core, a deal desk is a resource to support the process of moving highly complex deals through a pipeline. Its primary purpose is ensuring that as many of those deals are closed as possible.

That’s why win rate — the percentage of closed deals that involved contributions from the deal desk divided by the total number of deals the desk was involved with — is such a relevant, important metric when gauging a deal desk’s efficacy. It’s the purest measure of how efficiently and effectively a deal desk operates.

3. Deal Size

Typically, the kinds of deals you tap a deal desk for are larger than most. So, naturally, it helps to understand the average size of those deals when trying to gauge the efficacy of and need for your deal desk.

If you’re noticing the deals you close with the help of your desk aren’t as significant as you think they should be, you might need to adjust how the various stakeholders involved are communicating with your sales team.

You might also need to determine whether the desk’s materials are thorough and up-to-date enough to help your closers get larger deals through the pipeline.

A well-constructed, active deal desk can be a major asset to your sales org. Having that kind of resource — one that incorporates the know-how and skills of a variety of stakeholders — can help push highly complex deals through your pipeline more consistently and efficiently.

If you’re interested in incorporating one into your org’s broader sales efforts, be sure to pin down its ultimate purpose, who should be involved, what kind of deals it will address, and the most relevant KPIs to tell you if it’s doing its job.