Should you manage your sales team yourself? Or is it time to hire an in-house sales manager? Here are some tips to help you decide.
There are two key times to consider using an in-house sales manager:
(1) after your company has grown to the point where you have added so many salespeople that you don’t want to supervise this sales group yourself; and…
(2) when you are first setting up your sales program, and you have sufficient product and funding either to start with a substantial sales group or work with a team of outside salespeople, and don’t want to be in charge yourself.
Of course, one issue in using an in-house sales manager is deciding whether you want someone else supervising the salespeople, or would rather do this yourself. To decide, take into consideration your own priorities, strengths, and weaknesses to determine if you would be better in devoting your time to this sales management function or to something else.
In the early stages of a company’s development, the owner or organizer may end up doing a little bit of everything to help get the company off the ground. But as the company grows, it becomes important for people to specialize and for functions performed by one individual to be separated off, and new, more specialized jobs with these functions delineated. Likewise, you need to make some decisions about what you want to do in this growing company. Do you see yourself specializing in sales or marketing, or do you see yourself shifting over into some other role in the company? To help you decide whether you want to end up supervising sales or doing something else, you might ask yourself questions such as:
* What kinds of activities or functions do I most like to perform in this company? As positions become more specialized, what position would I prefer to have (i.e., director of administration, finance, production, research and development, marketing and sales)? Unless you have selected marketing and sales as your long-term goal, you would probably do well to consider hiring a sales manager or supervisor as soon as feasible, and take this into consideration in your hiring decisions early on, so that possibly one of the people you hire in the early stages can step into this management role when there are enough salespeople and the company is large enough for this to be practical.
* What do I do best within this company? What are my key strengths? What do I do least well? What are my biggest weaknesses? Be as honest as you can in assessing and evaluating yourself.
Then, if you are strong in selling and marketing skills yourself, you may want to give strong consideration to stepping into the sales management role. But if you are weak in this, then it may be best to bring in someone else.
Often, there will be a match between the kinds of things you most like to do and your strengths, and the decision will be easy. However, if there is a disparity-such as you don’t like to sell, but you are good at-think about what it is that the company most needs at this time, to help you reconcile what to do. Generally, in this case you may need to choose to do what you do best or what you are strongest at rather than what you like to do, until the company is larger or stronger, at which time you can take more latitude in following your preferences, while turning over the functions you like less to someone else.
A CEO of what has become a large design and production company with a mixture of products in jewelry, fashion, and crafts is a good example of this. She was always more interested in the creative end of her business-designing the products, researching what people liked, and coming up with new products to satisfy them. And she hated selling. She hated calling prospects, going to trade shows, meeting with sales reps, and the like.
In the early stages of her business, there was no one else to do this, and so she did it herself, setting up a network of sales reps to sell her products, as well as working with a couple of local salespeople to contact local stores. But then, once the business got big enough, she hired a sales manager to take over, and she stepped into the more creative research and development role. In the beginning, she couldn’t do this; now she can.
Gini Graham Scott is a contributing writer at MedioCom.net. This well designed and easy to navigate site has quality and affordable feature stories, articles and images about timely and relevant topics. Custom content is also available. All products are available in English and Spanish and are easily accessed through. Check it out today!
