Okay, you’re the sales manager for a 15 million dollar board shop located in the Midwest. Your sales team consists of 6 direct regional sales people and five independent sales reps; together they cover the entire U.S. and Canada. Besides managing the sales team, you also handle the company’s marketing and yes, you are also starting to dabble into social media. In short, you have your hands full, so much so that you could easily be overwhelmed if you don’t have good scheduling skills. Since I work with sales teams and specifically sales mangers I thought it would be interesting to talk about how a good sales manager spends his days.

First, a sales manager must manage just like a baseball manager, he should make sure that he is fielding the best team possible, let’s assume that has happened and that these sales people are good. Now that we have established this let’s move on to what the sales manager should be doing with his day.

Make sure that you reporting system is set up. This should consist of:

• An annual forecast: month by month customer by customer
• A weekly sales status report from each sales person. (reps are handled differently we’ll talk about them later)
• A daily dashboard which shows the sales people what they book that day and where they stand in terms of their forecasts both monthly and annually. This report needs to go to the company’s other managers as well.

Touching base with your sales people daily. This is just a quick phone call to see what they are up to. Ask each sales person what they will be booking today, what challenges they are facing and what you can do to help them. This does not have to be a long phone call, just long enough to get an good understanding of what they are up to. This will also serve to keep them on their toes.

Work with the rest of the managers communicating with them and passing on what you learned from your sales people. Remember as the sales manager you are the company’s number one sales advocate with everything that entails. You are responsible for making sure that the customer is always present at the table.

Check in with your reps. I don’t recommend you call them every day but at least once a week. I would urge you to set up a weekly call with each of your independent sales reps to go over their accounts. This is also the time for you to communicate to them what is going on at the company. The true value of keeping in touch with the reps is to make sure they are working for you. Realizing that they have other principals and products to sell, you are competing for their time. The more time you invest in your sales reps the more you will get out of them.

Work on your marketing. This is more important now than it has ever been. A few years ago when we called someone a Manager of sales and marketing it meant that they spent 99% of their time on sales and 1% on marketing and what they were really doing is working on a new brochure every couple of years. Now that has changed drastically. Now a manager of sales and marketing has to spend as much time on marketing as she does on sales. Besides making sure that the literature is up to date, she also must make sure that the website is as well. She also has to work on a value-added newsletter that should go out at least one a month. She also has to be more involved in social media, keeping up the company’s LinkedIn page and sending out frequent pertinent attention-getting tweets as well.

Get in touch with some customers. This is the one that most sales managers skip and arguable the most important one. Make it a habit to call customers and ask how things are going? It’s a good way to create a one on one relationship with your customers. A great sales manager will try to develop relationships with the customers’ upper management. This will greatly benefit both parties.

And finally, cheerleader in chief. A great sales manager is also the person who talks about hope and talks about the future of the company. She will be the company’s strategist helping to set the direction of the company based on her knowledge of the customers and the market.

A great sales manager will keep these plates spinning making sure always that the company is delivering great customer service, keeping its’ customers happy and its’ revenue growing.

It’s only common sense.