To effectively hold your sales force accountable, everyone has to be working toward the same goals. As Steve Deist wrote in The Sales Manager's Best Friend, good sales managers "will appreciate having clear objectives that relate directly to the company's goals." Providing sales managers with a detailed sales management process allows them to provide better direction to the rest of the sales team.

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While some sales managers may view the idea of having clear objectives and a system of accountability as "someone telling me how to do my job," the reality is that having uniform, objective performance metrics can actually help them avoid being micromanaged by their bosses.

And the greatest value from having a strong sales management process is in the strengthening of the relationship between the manager and his reps. In Deist's experience, the single most valuable activity of a sales manager is the regular, one-on-one territory review, and a well-structured sales management process can improve how sales managers approach those reviews.

The process subtly changes the dynamic of the conversations. Instead of saying, "I think you are lousy at prospecting," the manager says, "How can we work together to improve your prospecting score?" The review is no longer about evaluation – that has already been taken care of by a scorecard and comparisons to the mutually agreed upon, explicit goals.

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The Sales Manager's Best Friend