There are many key players involved in outbound sales teams: BDRs, SDRs, and sales executives, and the list goes on depending on how complex and specialized your growth team is.
However, there is one core outbound sales team member who often gets overlooked: the sales manager. Sales managers may not always be on the frontlines of reaching out to prospects and pitching sales opportunities, but they serve as a crucial liaison between SDR teams and sales reps, boosting team morale and ensuring each team member can do what they can to convert leads into sales.
Within this blog, we’ll cover the role of a sales manager, including:
What Do Sales Managers Do?
Sales managers play a crucial role in overseeing and optimizing the process of acquiring potential customers for a business.
Some of the most common responsibilities of sales managers include:
- Being motivators for outbound team members
- Hosting ongoing training opportunities
- Collaborating with teammates to explore areas for improvement
- Ensuring sales team members hit their quotas and KPIs
- Managing where leads are currently sitting in the sales pipeline
- Helping sales team members set team and individual goals
Who Works Under Sales Managers?
More often than not, sales managers are responsible for overseeing the performance of appointment setters on outbound sales teams. This could include BDRs, SDRs, or whomever else would be in charge of reaching out to prospects and leads.
While sales managers are primarily the leaders of BDR and SDR teams, they can also be responsible for sales reps who are the sales professionals tasked with closing deals. However, for better impact, we consider having sales managers who oversee appointment setting teams and a separate sales manager who’s responsible for helping sales execs close more business.
Things to Look for When Hiring Sales Managers
When looking to hire sales managers for lead generation teams, there are several important factors to consider to ensure you select the right candidate who can effectively lead and optimize your growth efforts. Here’s a list of things to look for when hiring sales managers:
Leadership and Industry Experience
When hiring sales managers, prioritize candidates with leadership experience, especially within the industry you serve. Effective sales managers must have proven leadership skills, including the ability to set ambitious goals, deliver constructive feedback, and inspire team members to excel. Additionally, their familiarity with the market and common challenges serve as a benefit to being impactful on the outbound sales team.
Lead Generation Expertise
Prior experience in lead generation is important, whether as a manager or an individual contributor, such as a BDR or SDR. Candidates must understand the process of prospecting, nurturing, and converting leads into opportunities. Their practical knowledge ensures they can navigate the complexities of the lead generation process and further drive business growth.
As a best practice, we suggest having sales managers be BDRs and SDRs first, specifically with serving these roles within your company. When they’re BDRs and SDRs first, they know the challenges that come from being in this role, so they can empathize with them. Additionally, hiring from within is impactful because the candidate already has a firm understanding on your product or service, as well as the process you have in place, making the transition from BDR and SDR to sales manager more seamless.
Read our blog here for an in-depth analysis into why we encourage SDRs to be BDRs first.
Good Communication
Effective communication is an important trait to look for when hiring sales managers. Candidates should be able to express ideas clearly (both written and verbally) and adapt their communication style to align with what preferred from outbound sales team members. This skill helps foster strong connections with team members, boosting morale, transparency, and respect from one salesperson to another.
Foster Team Building
When looking to hire a sales manager, evaluate their ability to build, maintain, and grow a unified team. Look for candidates who are capable of encouraging collaboration between team members, resolve conflicts, and cultivate a positive workplace. Their ability to foster teamwork and maintain a good environment is essential for achieving lead generation goals and sustaining team morale.
Strategic Thinkers
Sales managers must be strategic thinkers in regards to lead generation. As you interview sales managers, ask about their track record in crafting lead generation strategies and their ability to adjust these strategies in response to evolving markets. Their ability to create a strategic approach ensures long-term, sustainable success and boost the ability to adapt to a competitive landscape.
Results- and Data-Driven
When interviewing sales managers, take a look to see what kind of results they’ve generated for their BDR and SDR teams, and how they’ve used data to help salespeople growth in their sales careers. Assess their capacity to leverage data and analytics for informed decision-making, process optimization, and tracking vital KPIs. It’s important to seek candidates that have a history of helping outbound sales teams meet and exceed their lead generation targets.
Problem-Solving Skills
Sales managers should have excellent problem-solving skills with previous instances to showcase it. During sales manager interviews, request specific instances on how they tackled obstacles in previous roles. Additionally, introduce hypothetical lead generation problems and ask them how they would approach resolving them. This approach highlights their ability to overcome challenges, a critical skill in BDR and SDR team management.
How to Be a Good Sales Manager
Sales managers can excel in their role by adopting several key strategies and practices. Here are a few of the main ones to consider in order to be a good sales manager:
- Lead by example: Demonstrate strong sales skills and work ethic to inspire your team.
- Foster open communication: Foster open and transparent communication within the team, providing clear expectations and feedback.
- Help team members set achievable goals: Set realistic but ambitious goals and help your team develop actionable plans to achieve them.
- Be a patient coach and trainer: Continuously train and coach your sales team to improve their skills and knowledge.
- Consistently motivate sales team members: Understand individual motivations and use them to inspire your team.
- Present reward and recognition: Acknowledge and reward outstanding performance to boost morale.
- Obtain a customer-centric mindset: Instill a customer-centric mindset, emphasizing the importance of understanding and meeting customer needs.
- Be adaptable: Be open to adapting strategies based on market changes and feedback from the team.
- Prioritize team building: Cultivate a collaborative and positive team culture.
- Handle conflict resolution: Address conflicts swiftly and constructively to maintain a harmonious work environment.
- Use data to track team performance: Monitor team performance and provide regular feedback.
- Have emotional intelligence: Understand and manage your own emotions and those of your team members, even when sales are down.
- Encourage self-care and work-life balance: Maintain a healthy work-life balance to prevent burnout.
By embracing these principles and practices, sales managers can enhance their effectiveness, drive team success, and contribute significantly to the organization’s growth and profitability.
Key Takeaways
While often overlooked, the role of a sales manager is crucial to continuously support outbound sales teams, specifically BDRs and SDRs. When handling outbound lead generation in-house, many businesses choose to cut corners, which often includes not hiring sales managers because they don’t have direct contact with prospects and leads throughout the process.
However, this is a huge mistake and can ultimately lead to the downfall of an internal lead generation strategy due to employee burnout, BDRs and SDRs not knowing how to improve their sales skills, and not knowing how to analyze data to improve performance. Luckily, there are outsourced lead generation companies out there where you can hire a full outbound sales team for a fraction of the price of an internal team. And that’s where Abstrakt comes in.
At Abstrakt, we give growing B2B companies access to a full outbound sales development team for less than the cost of a single internal sales employee. When you choose Abstrakt as your leading outsourced sales and marketing firm, you have a team of experienced SDRs and a sales manager to help set your sales reps with high-converting sales meetings.
Contact the growth experts at Abstrakt today to outsource an outbound sales team that yields long-term, predictable results.
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