How do you earn an “MBA” in Sales?
I earned my “MBA” in Sales the hard way, from the school of “hard knocks”….
To paraphrase Rodney Dangerfield, Sales gets “no respect” when it comes to learning about the real life challenges and job skills required to build and manage succesful sales teams. There are few academic programs that teach you how to set up sales teams, and fewer still that understand the realities of running a business where you have real people and real quotas. MBA4Sales is about what it takes to do both. Getting your “MBA for Sales” is about real life tools and techniques that you can use to build and manage your team.
Here’s my story….
When I first became a Sales Manager, I was the best sales person on my team. Management had high expectations….
After all, if I could excel, why couldn’t I just “improve” my entire team?
We all know it doesn’t work that way. A good Sales Executive does not always make a good Sales Manager. There’s a lot of critical things you have to know:
- Putting together the weekly sales revenue forecast
- Holding sales team meetings where your team now gets to “sand bag” you!
- Determining what your sales people are really doing, so you can make sure that they are accountable for their results.
- Creating a new revenue budget for the team you’re going to bootstrap!
- Figuring out how to make the marketing materials you despised as a sales person work for your
sales team.
I soon realized that I needed a PROCESS to manage the team. I needed the skills and tools to sort out the good deals from the bad deals, to determine if reps were “sandbagging”, and to tell management what was really going on (and actually believe it!).
I knew that if I didn’t build the right skills, I wasn’t going to be a Sales Manager very long!
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