Tom Ferrari discusses what sales managers should focus on: financial oversight, pipeline progression, and revenue forecasting. He warns against becoming a spreadsheet manager when pressured by sales ops and finance to over-report numbers.
Chapters
Let's transition to the business manager. What does the business manager look like? What do they do on the scale piece?
The business manager is someone who is well across the financials of their business. So what does that mean? You know, what's the size of the account base? What's the size of the total addressable market in your territory? You know, they're looking one, two, three quarters out to look at pipeline. They're looking at pipeline progression. They're looking at pipeline build. These are really important vital signs of any sales business. But you know, it's really important to get you know that in a in a consistent and repeatable manner. You need to be able to get in. for an hour or 2 on a Monday morning and perhaps an hour or 2 on a Friday morning and look at where the business is at and measure the business in terms of how it's performing. Why? Well, you need to be able to commit revenue, and that's a really important part of what any sales leader does is committing revenue and delivering that revenue at the end of the quarter consistently. And so, what you have to do there is you have to be very disciplined and very consistent and get across the detail in your business. But again, the flip side of that is, you know, we've all had, you know, the stories about, you know, they're a spreadsheet manager and that's because there's so much pressure brought down from sales operations and finance to be across the detail of every, you know, of every minutia of your business that it can consume you because that's where all the pressure is coming from.
