Sales Management Forum

Last night at the Hotel Sofitel, some of the brightest and most ambitious inside sales managers from Silicon Valley gathered for our Sales Management Forum summer series. My friend and business colleague Shelly Davenport and I have designed a summer series with vibrant topics such as Got Talent?, Motivating with Metrics and Emails that Influence.

Shelly and I have talked for many years about developing this group we call the silent heroes. Shelly is a heavy hitter in the telebusiness world, having started at Oracle then moving to Hyperion and making a splash at Salesforce.com. She’s mentored many inside sales managers in her days as a Director. We complement each other well as my background is at the team level, and I’ve trained thousands of inside sales champions who are now managers too.

Today, these inside sales managers are tasked to grow, develop and drive revenues for their growing and very diverse teams. One problem- they never received any instructions, manuals or lessons on how to do this. 95% of inside sales managers started off as individual contributors and the skills that got them promoted are not the same skills they need to manage their teams. Where do they go for training? HR? Leadership training? There isn’t any training out there that addresses their extremely complex role and growing responsibilities. As inside sales continues to grow, there’s a big demand for good inside sales managers. Many of them learn as they go along, but all agree they could use some tips, ideas, cheat sheet and general validation!

So our topic on Got Talent? last night was fun and highly interactive. We focused on how to spot talent, develop it, and know when to let go of it. We discussed having a strong balance of A-B-C players in your mix and cautioned managers to not spend so much time on their A players, but have strong development strategies for growing their B players and C players too.

Would you consider yourself an A or B or C player? Tell us about your manager and if they have the ability to mentor you.