From Dilemma to Deadline-A Sales Leader's Decision-Making Blueprint

If you are a sales leader or sales manager, you struggle to get everything done. You want to work with your team, but you often find yourself being pulled into meetings and conversations that have no ability to help you reach your sales targets. It can be difficult to decide what gets your attention and what doesn’t deserve your time.

One mistake sales leaders and sales managers make frequently is not addressing the strategic problems that prevent your team from reaching their potential. Because these problems harm your results, you must act on them to improve your sales results.

Distinguishing Tactical Issues from Strategic Quagmires

All day, you are confronted with problems. Some of these problems will be the everyday type you are capable of solving without having to do anything more than providing an answer.

For example, one of your sales reps has been asked to provide their prospective client with a concession, in this case, a lower price. You say yes to the lower price if they will add an additional year on the contract. Another salesperson has a big deal, and they want you to attend the meeting to ensure that the client feels important. You have no trouble making sure the client feels important and, because of the size of the deal, you want to stay close anyway. You can solve them without any trouble, and you move on to what’s next.

Dilemmas are less straightforward. This might encourage you to put them off, as they come with big decisions and often include conflict.

Let’s look at a couple examples of scenarios of strategic decisions. You need your team to prioritize the large clients you need to win, but your team spends more of their time on the small, transactional opportunities because they are faster to close. While you don’t want to discourage them from winning the smaller deals, you will fail in the future if your team doesn’t get to these prospective clients before your competitors do.

You have two senior salespeople, both with two large clients they have been managing for more than a decade. But you notice that these clients are in decline, and you are worried that one or both of these salespeople are going to lose a large client. Not only will this cause a problem for you, it will also cut the salesperson’s commissions in half. The last time either of these reps made a cold call was in the second Clinton presidency.

Unless you do something about these problems, they will persist. You need to take action, but you need a plan to deal with the strategic problems.

Mastering Strategic Issues with a Fire Board

One way to wrangle the strategic problems and manage these problems that cause you to fail to reach your potential is a fire board. By making a list of all the strategic problems in one place, you can prioritize them, listing them in order of impact. To make this work, you will need to go from dilemma to deadline, with a stopover for deliberation.

Let’s look at the sales manager whose team isn’t pursuing the right clients. The first thing you need to do is to give yourself time to deliberate. You might do this by yourself, or you may need to have conversations with other people on your team, including your senior leaders. If this problem is big enough to harm your results, you give yourself a week to deliberate before making a decision.

Once you have given yourself the time to deliberate, you need to give yourself a deadline to make the decision. It’s important that you give yourself a deadline, as the longer a behavior has been accepted the longer it will continue. Your deadline is there to ensure you don’t let any behavior harm your results.

One way to deal with a sales force that is prioritizing the wrong opportunities is to require them to have two pipelines. The first pipeline is the large, strategic the company needs to succeed. The second pipeline contains the smaller, transactional deals. By splitting the pipeline in two, you require your team to build the larger client pipeline while they roll up the smaller, easier, and faster deals.

Remember the two senior salespeople who are at risk of losing their large clients? If you don’t cause them to start making calls and replacing their accounts before they are no longer clients, they will not only lose the client, they will also lose their lifestyle. As a sales leader, you need everyone on your team to do the right thing, in the right way, at the right time. This is your responsibility at all times. No matter if these two sales professionals would rather not make cold calls, saving them from themselves will require you to put out this fire, before it consumes them.

The Sales Leader’s Blueprint: From Dilemma to Deadline-Driven Decisions

To improve your sales results, you need to remove the obstacles to the results you need to succeed in sales. To execute on this sales manager strategy, you need to prioritize the larger problems, the ones that tend to be strategic.

Even though you should dispatch these strategic problems as quickly as possible, take the time to make a decision you believe will prevent harming your results, your sales force, and your company. Give yourself enough time to deliberate before making the decision, and include others if necessary.

Leaving this article, make a fire board of the problems that you haven’t yet addressed. Once you have a list, start prioritizing them so you can deliberate, decide, and improve your leadership and your team’s results. Know that some part of this approach means raising your standards.

If any of this seems hard to you, it isn’t as hard as allowing your sales team to fail and miss your sales targets and your sales objectives. The more you remove the fires on your fire board, the better your results. Find more sales manager strategies in Leading Growth: The Proven Formula for Consistently Increasing Revenue.