Management Cadence and Execution
Sales Leaders who execute a defined frequency for communication, coaching and interacting with their sellers will significantly outperform those that do not.
Frontline sales leaders are continually being pulled in many directions; jumping to help move a deal forward, or reviewing pricing with finance, or supporting a customer issue, etc. As a result it becomes easy for their focal point to be driven towards the immediate with less and less of their time being spent on the drivers of long term success such as developing their team through observational coaching or ensuring prospecting activities are happening. If this pattern goes unchecked, it does not take very long to start losing sales momentum with fewer new opportunities opened and declining conversion rates. Inevitably, you can quickly find your team scrambling to consistently hit plan relying heavily on your top performers and pushing larger long term customers for more business to fill the shortfalls.
To summarize, without a defined management cadence or rhythm, it becomes very easy for a hard working and engaged sales leader to fill their day and calendar with stuff other than consistently communicating, coaching and interacting with their direct reports with the objective of continuous sales skill improvement. This will eventually lead to a sales performance gap where sales momentum is slowing. In a well intentioned effort to be a superhero sales leader, they quickly find themselves in the kryptonite of shrinking pipelines and lower conversion rates.
What is Sales Management Cadence?
Within a sales environment, a management cadence refers to the frequency, format, and sequence with which a manager meets with the individuals on their team and where individuals have an opportunity to interact. Development or changing of a particular selling behavior needs regular practice and feedback to take root. Management cadence provides the foundation for this.
Sales managers who have a defined frequency for communication, coaching and feedback with their sellers will significantly outperform those that do not.
Management Cadence Service
We have found that a clearly defined and executed sales management cadence is essential to the foundation of a high performance sales culture. It allows sales leaders to monitor and advance their sales team, create trust with team and accountability to expectations.
Our Management Cadence Service called Nitro© assists you with tools, dashboards and process for implementing and executing your optimal management cadence framework. As you team gets into a rhythm you will increase accountability and proactively develop sellers skills through constructive coaching and consistent interaction.
Closing the Sales Momentum Skills Gap
Establishing a management cadence cycle provides a system to close the gap between current selling behaviors and skills and your company’s desired selling behaviors and skills.
Define: Define measurable sales behaviors that are critical to your team. These are usually associated with you selling process and selling methodology, what components will be measured and what behavioral expectations are required
Measure: Provides visibility to the individual selling skills gaps so that managers know what and who and what skills to focus on for continuous improvement.
Coach: Defined management & structural cadence to optimize observation feedback and training as required into targeted areas for improvement with visibility and accountability to senior leadership.
Re-measure: provides visibility into improvements and allows for a new benchmark to be established
Momentum: Leadership must define the measurable, consistent and repeatable activities that will drive forward momentum for their sellers. For example, to achieve the development of core selling skills needs regular practice and feedback in the field to take root and generate leveraged results.
Outcomes of our management Cadence Execution Service (Nitro©)
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Create structure that will ensure that the team builds consistency of behavior around required activities such as prospecting, pipeline, forecasting, targeting, follow-up and more. It generates a fluency for the consistent and effective completion of core tasks with a visibility to support coaching and continuous improvement
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Target and improves selling success factors for increased conversion rates
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Balance leader’s time across all individuals and to get better results out of all individuals.
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Increase accountability and engagement