Almost everyone agrees that the productivity of your sales team is a reflection of how well they are led, managed, and mentored by the senior leaders in their department. Recent research proves it, as does the plethora of research that lands on sales executives’ desks each year.

The Sales Management Study, Edition One, 2009 shows that in addition to the ability to identify and acquire talent, the way sales teams are led and managed ranks second in terms of the impact of sales management on the productivity of the sales team. 96% said these skills had a strong to extremely strong effect on sales productivity. The obvious follow-up is to ask respondents to rate their own skills or those of the Sales Managers on their team. When completed, only 69% gave a score two boxes higher and only 15% rated their leadership and management skills as “extremely strong”. The Sales Management Study separates the competition from “coaching” and the first results indicate that less than half will be in the first two boxes, with a preponderance of “neutral” to “weak”.

Add the above statistics to Bersin’s & Assoc. research showing that half of US companies have some sort of leadership development program for their management/executive teams and the numbers are starting to add up.

I find it disconcerting when organizations claim to understand the need for development, but do nothing. Think about progress:

• Organizations expect/need increases in sales revenue this year
• The revenue produced by your sales teams is a reflection of the way they are led, managed and trained.
• If production increases are needed, it would make sense that organizations also need to increase their leadership, management, and training acumen.
• Only 50% of companies have plans to improve the way they lead, manage and train sales teams.

Logically then, organizations that are doing nothing just “hope” to improve the productivity of their sales teams since they are not putting resources against what science shows has such a significant impact.

The answer to all of this…continually providing the opportunity for all of your Sales Managers to learn and develop the characteristics and skills that great leaders, managers and coaches possess. The investment to do so does not have to be exorbitant; There are resources that provide this type of programming in perpetuity.

Read the Sales Management Research Report mentioned in this article.