Part 1: The Role Of The Front-Line Manager

As a sales professional, you know your strengths—and what it takes to thrive and succeed at what you do best. You also know that your success is directly tied to the innovation an organization creates to drive a strong sales culture.  Innovative companies innovate in every area and leadership within the sales culture is the key to everyone’s success.

In this 3-part blog series, I’m excited to share some powerful insights from a lively discussion I recently had with Mike Weinberg—top-performing sales coach on new business development & sales strategies, and author of Sales Management. Simplified and New Sales. Simplified—and Teradata’s own Karen Thomas, EVP of Americas Sales & Services. Mike, Karen, and I talked at length about what it takes to build a truly world-class sales and services organization for sales professionals. To kick things off, it started with an exchange of ideas on the Role of the Front-Line Manager and their value-driving behaviors.

One of the main goals of any sales enablement strategy is to empower teams to have successful sales conversations, right? True. But it goes deeper than that. It also includes ongoing professional development to continuously improve sales savvy—and that begins with front-line managers. They are the key lever in the organization, a critical part of the sales enablement process, the ones that drive sales culture.

The influence of a talented front-line manager is far reaching, impacting sales teams of 6 to 12 or more—in effect, they’re multiplying themselves into the people they support. This makes their role core to the business, focusing much of their time on coaching and development to drive performance across the organization.

A common challenge among busy sales managers, however, is that so few spend their time on the highest value activities—like ensuring the right processes are in place to effectively support a sales team. This importance can’t be over emphasized, as that’s where organizations get the scale they need to drive business results.
 

Teradata builds its incentives around helping sales managers drive engagement, so they feel connected to the importance of developing talent. So while it’s fantastic to attract superhero sales athletes, Teradata looks for a little more. We seek individuals capable of coaching and mentoring, and sharing their talent across the team to help everyone up their game.

We know it’s important to see scale, but it can’t always be achieved if folks aren’t empowered to coach people up.
We are all in to support Teradata sales and services to help make sure we’re successful, along with the right tools, products, services, and capabilities. But the front-line sales manager plays a critical role in helping us drive a winning, high-performing sales culture. We have a rally cry within Teradata, “We’re all in!” You can feel this energy across the sales organization, from behind the scenes to the front line—we’re in this together to drive success for Teradata while creating value for our customers.

Part 2 - Building a Strong Sales Culture
Part 3 - Plan the Attack