HR is more than hiring and firing. Learn the HR practices of successful sales managers with our free guide.
Whether you fancy yourself a savvy salespro, crackerjack closer, or a proficient persuader, you’ve spent years honing your sales chops.
Now it’s your time to pass down your wisdom to others as a sales manager.
Sales managers can come into the role from all types of industries and backgrounds, but they all have experience moving leads through the funnel to close deals and meet targets. These skills will serve you well as you coach your reps to do the same.
But are you also prepared for the human resource management side of your new role?
HR is the practice of hiring employees and providing an environment for them to perform well.
As a sales manager, your HR responsibilities may include:
- recruiting,
- hiring,
- onboarding,
- identifying areas for improving your reps’ sales skills,
- keeping your team motivated,
- managing compensation,
- evaluating performance,
- letting people go,
- and being an empowering leader.
But, screening candidates and setting up professional development courses for your team probably isn’t what attracted you to the sales manager role, is it? You likely came into it for the challenge of championing a team to crush your company’s sales funnel.
However, you shouldn’t think of the HR and sales portions of your job as two separate sets of responsibilities, or that one is less important than the other. Instead, consider how proper HR practices can support your sales funnel.
For example, you want your sales reps to be firing from all cylinders from their first day on the job. You want them to get up to speed on your sales practices and seamlessly integrate into the team quickly.
This requires hiring the right people—sharp, motivated people— from the beginning and properly onboarding them.
Or, maybe you’ll have a rep on your team who always seems to get stuck at the same phase of the sales cycle, lead after lead. It’s your duty to identify the problem and come up with a course of action to improve your employee’s performance.
The HR aspects of being a sales manager have a direct effect on your sales figures. If you want to post solid numbers, you’ll have to solidify your team.
Sales managers typically have a knack for understanding and cooperating with people (hence why you’ve found so much success as a sales professional that you’ve arrived at this place in your career), so even if you have little formal HR training or support from an in-house HR manager, adding human resources to your sales skill set shouldn’t feel like too much of a stretch.
To help you with this transition, we put together The Sales Manager’s Guide to HR to give you a good overview of the human resource basics that you should be familiar with to successfully build, manage, and grow a thriving and successful sales team.
What’s covered in The Sales Manager’s Guide to HR
Our free guide covers the general human resource duties that most sales managers will be responsible for and details what to consider in order to be successful in each:
Keep your talent funnel full
Being a (wo)man down can wreak havoc on your sales. Start thinking about how to keep your talent funnel topped up so that you always have candidates in the wing should an opening crop up.
With our guide, you’ll have an understanding of how to craft a job posting, interview candidates, and streamline your hiring process.
Building a sales team
Building a sales team is both an art and a science. Learn why it’s important to have a diverse mix of seasoned sales pros and rookies, and how to strike that balance.
Compensation
It’s imperative your wages are—at minimum—on par with the going rate to retain good salespeople. Learn about the different components of a salesperson’s compensation package, and how to ensure that what you’re offering is competitive enough to keep and attract top talent.
Onboarding
Onboarding means getting new hires adjusted to their jobs quickly, effectively, and comprehensively.
A great way to ensure a successful onboarding is to give new team members your sales playbook, which includes all of the content your reps need to close a deal, such as ready-made messaging and scripts.
If you don’t already have a playbook, The Sales Manager’s Guide to HR will give you a brief overview of what to include. For a more detailed outline, check out The 8 Essentials of a Successful Sales Playbook.
Sales training
Everyone on your team, no matter their level of experience, will benefit from continuous sales training.
In our free guide, we explore the different types of sales training resources, and the benefits that investing in training can result in such as keeping up on relevant industry techniques, and greater insight into the psychology of leads.
We also break down how you can set and manage your expectations of your reps’ participation in sales training, and tips on how to ensure your employees get the most out of it.
Motivating your team
As the head of your sales team, it’s up to you to inspire and empower your team to do their best. After reading The Sales Manager’s Guide to HR, you’ll have a sense of ways to keep your team driven that don’t involve money.
Evaluating performance
Monitoring your reps’ performance is key to ensuring they achieve the goals set out for them. Our guide breaks down metrics that are helpful in gauging your employees’ success and discusses how to conduct a performance review.
Performance issues and letting people go
Sometimes hires don’t work out, and that’s an unfortunate reality of being a manager. We’ll give you advice on how to address the issue of underperformance with an employee, and a step-by-step guide to termination.
Being a good leader
Your team is relying on you to be a great leader. We’ve highlighted a few of the qualities you should exemplify in your position at the helm of your sales team.
Your sales success relies on your HR chops. You won’t generate the sales you want if the people driving them aren’t being managed properly.
The Sales Manager’s Guide to HR will give you the confidence to handle all of your HR responsibilities and lead your team to bigger and better business.
