A Sales Leader’s Focus: Meetings Or Management?

A manager’s job is to train, educate and develop their people, and to make them as successful as possible. To be effective, managers should be buried in people, not in paper or meetings.

For Managers, Time is Scarce

Too often today, managers operate at extremes. They either focus on meetings and paperwork rather than management, or they are overwhelmed with business issues so processes fall by the wayside. Either way, customer service suffers and the business implodes because managers fail to do their jobs.

It’s rare to find a manager today that doesn’t complain about not having enough time. They spend their days grappling with issues, running from meeting to meeting, and putting out fire after fire. As a result, managers have less time to focus on their jobs. Managers are under incredible pressure to perform, but very few attend to what’s important, their people and their customers.

Performance Suffers When Managers Fall Behind

This trickles down to every employee. If managers are too busy to do their jobs, they don’t take time to train and develop their people or to keep a structure in place. When this happens, customers may be “helped” by people without proper training and who are unsupervised.

Salespeople pick and choose whom they want to work with, leaving some customers unattended to aimlessly wander around until they leave. This stretches managers even further, as they run from one problem to another.

Their people start to feel left out or alone, communication breaks down, and everyone at the business starts to work off of assumptions. Processes break down and people start to “make it up as they go.”

As a result, performance suffers, employees become discouraged and leave, customers buy elsewhere and sales revenues and profits decline. Essentially, the entire business starts to implode.

When this happens, who gets blamed? Who loses their job? Managers do because their people didn’t perform and weren’t held accountable because they didn’t have time to do their job.

Sound familiar?

Observe, Coach, and Develop

A manager’s job is to train, educate and develop their people, and to make them as successful as possible. To be effective, managers should be buried in people, not in paper or meetings.

It’s only when managers know what their people are doing — or not doing — that they can help them to be more productive. To do this, managers must make it a priority to observe, coach, and develop their people.

This can only happen when managers streamline their days and refocus their attention on what matters most. Managers need to say, “No” to meetings. Instead of agreeing to meet on every issue that comes up, managers should prioritize and resolve as many issues as possible in a daily, 30-minute team meeting.

This frees everyone’s time so they can all focus on doing their jobs to have a more successful day. For managers, this gives them the time they need to focus on working with their people.

Focus On What Really Matters

Businesses almost always implode from within not because of external forces. They implode because managers get distracted and lose sight of their jobs. They fail to manage their people and processes and end up working reactively, not proactively.

Isn’t it time for you to start saying, “No” to meetings? When you do, you’ll be surprised at how much time you really have in the day to focus on what really matters – selling products or services and making money.

This FREE Ultimate Interview Guide will teach you how to conduct more effective sales interviews to recruit, hire, and retain top talent for long-term sales success.