7 Things Sales Managers are Sick and Tired of Hearing

Sales managers have a tough job. If your team doesn’t meet their sales goal, you are the one who takes the heat. And if you do crush your team quota, chances are you rightfully take a back seat and let your sales reps have the spotlight.

As a manager, it sometimes feels like you’re getting dished on from every angle – your reps complaining about leads, the Marketing Department thinking they should get all the credit for everything, and your VP of sales yelling at you to increase your goal. After a while, you just can’t listen to any of it anymore.

If you’re a sales manager, I’m sure you can relate to these 7 things most sales managers are sick and tired of hearing:

1. These leads are all crap. – From your sales reps

One thing salespeople need to remember, is that your manager isn’t directly responsible for all the leads you receive. As a manager, we’d love to deliver vetted, golden eggs that are all slam dunks. But, we don’t have that power. So please, if you are a sales rep, stop complaining to your manager about how sucky your leads are. Just pick up the phone and start selling.

2. These leads are all amazing. – From the Marketing Department

Almost as frustrating as hearing from your team that their leads are terrible, is hearing from the marketing department on how wonderful the leads they are producing are. When in actuality, they’re bad. If your team is having a tough quarter, having marketing make off-hand comments about how wonderful their lead generating tactics are, just doesn’t help.

3. I’d be great at sales. – From everyone who knows nothing about sales

It comes up at every party, “Hey, what do you do for work”? When you say you’re a sales manager, 99% of the time, someone in the room will make a remark about how they think they’d crush it in sales. Just because you are outgoing, or good at talking to people, doesn’t mean you can survive in a sales role. Don’t dismiss the hard work and determination it takes to succeed in sales with your comments. And no, I shouldn’t hire you, so stop asking.

4. Sales is just a numbers game. – From Finance, the numbers people

It’s true that to have your team make their goal, they need to have a certain number of deals close, at a certain amount to hit that specific target. But that doesn’t mean if you feed us XX leads a month, we’ll hit that quota. There are many other factors that come into play, such as dealing with the customer’s timing, fit, and budget. Having Finance assume that 2+2=4, doesn’t get the deals done.

5. I only raised your goal by 50%. – From your VP of sales

As a sales manager, the pressure is always on. Even if your team has hit their target for your current quarter, you still have your end of year goal hanging over your head. To hear from your VP that they ONLY raised your goal by a little bit, without giving you additional resources, better leads, new software, or more incentive, is never what you want to hear. As the manager, you then need to deliver the news to your reps that they have work smarter and harder towards a bigger goal, all the while keeping the team upbeat.

6. Sorry, but you gotta let a few salespeople go. – From the overstaffed HR department

This is the most dreaded thing a manager can hear. Unfortunately, sales is a cut throat career and if a rep doesn’t make their number, there is the chance they’ll get canned. As a manager, most of the time there isn’t anything you can do to protect your reps if the numbers aren’t adding up. It’s still not easy to hear this directive, and then have to deliver the message to someone on your team.

7. Hey, we’re changing the required fields in our CRM again! – From the IT department

The dreaded required field! You want your reps doing what they do best – talking to customers, landing meetings, and closing big deals. Having 98 required fields for every account makes your team’s job harder – they spend more time doing data entry than they do selling. And with every change to your CRM, there is a learning curve. Please IT, just leave us in peace to sell, sell, sell (which is exactly what Spiro lets you do).