Commercial team management

By team management we mean getting the best performance from the team without incurring in the loss of talent.

First, we will talk about his consistency and regularity in dealing with the commercial area.

Consistency: Being unmoving with regard to the principles of honesty, transparency, fairness, and hard work. On these topics there is no negotiation, no debate, no tolerance.

Regularity: Stabilizing your operation's routine, without upsets, except in periods of crisis. To be regular is to maintain the rhythm and manage exceptions.

If you are the commercial area manager, this is the basics, to be consistent in ethical values and to be regular in playing the "day to day".

Secondly, let's deal with the team's performance.

The good manager equips, technically and psychologically, his collaborators to give their best for the company. When I say equips, it means the inputs that you make available for the person to do their work: infrastructure, training, environment, and tools.

The environment, you can help improve, but you don't control it.

If there is a bad apple on the team you will row ten meters forward and the negative person will row three meters back.

People want to give their best performance. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, "Yay! Today is another day that I'll do nothing and hide in the corners of the company and later make excuses for my low commitment."

Assume that each person at any given time is doing his or her best.

It turns out that this "best" can be far below what we need. So the first question is: Is this poor performance (despite being the best that the person can give at the moment) a matter of days, weeks, months, or is there really a permanent drop in level?

I'm not going to exhaust human resource management techniques in one article, but I want you to have as a backdrop, that you are dealing with people.

Business areas are number-centric and the tendency to mechanize everything and everyone is very high. So always remember that we are dealing with human failures.

Let's go to the management meetings.

The numbers should be seen by everyone once a week, preferably on Friday mornings, in a 60-minute meeting. Individual performances should be handled alone and never as a group.

The management of the commercial team succeeds when it reaches the area's goals. If those are impossible, simply because management wants everyone to chase after something intangible, you will quickly have an erosion of your board and credibility will go out of the equation. If people don't believe in your goals, nothing else will be credible. You will simply have people working for a salary and doing the bare minimum so that they don't get fired, even if that minimum is a tremendous role-play.

So let's work with possible goals and work our way up little by little. There must be small victories along the way to boost everyone's morale. Indicators that responded well in a given week should go on the screen and be celebrated. And the indicators that are not responding to the effort made should be the main agenda of the management meeting.

The best structure for your management meetings is as follows:

1. Display the primary goal indicators and compare them to the previous week and previous month (same period). 2.
2. discuss the reasons why you and your team believe you generated this and that number.
3. if necessary, open up the secondary goal indicators here and there and point out correlations with the primary numbers.
4. write down the main points that the team should work on for the week so that the numbers will improve for the following week.

It doesn't matter if your week was very bad or if it was very good. Keep your weekly meetings regular. The numbers are cyclical and depending on the goals can point to permanent underperformance. That's just the way it is.

Your mission as a manager is to keep the team's morale up, to equip everyone to do their best, and to make sure that the company is evolving as a market player and that it is healthy, i.e. that it is in the blue.

Stavros Frangoulidis
Stavros Frangoulidis
CEO of PaP Solutions ⚡ Let's connect on Linkedin too

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