Interviewing for the sales manager role? It’s time to release your secret weapon – your own definition of process, roles and responsibilities. And you can get that here.
First lets understand the backdrop. The people hiring sales managers are rarely experienced in the job themselves. They might be C level executives, or general managers. Quite often they’ll be accountants of one type or another.
When interviewing for a sales manager they’re looking for specialist expertise – not sales skills but the ability to interface between the sales guys and the rest of the business. They won’t understand the job, and will know that. But they will understand a model comprising process, roles and responsibilities.
Give them your vision of that model and the rest of the interview will be checking for reasons not to offer you the sales manager job. You’ll have closed the deal already.
That’s dealt with one side of coin, but what about the other interviewees?
The fact is sales managers are very rarely trained. They might be familiar with the job in another business, maybe more. But it’s highly unlikely they’ll have a generic understanding which can be adapted to suit different products or business models.
With proper sales manager training under your belt you’ll be unique, or if unlucky, only close to unique. Either way you’re streets in front of the competition.
Ok so that’s all very well, but where do you get that training, if nobody does it?
This blog is an excellent place to start.
Our Sales Management Best Practice is one of the most popular articles.
We have a lot more sales manager specific articles in our Sales Manager category.
And our category Sales Qualification has more general comment on when to hold em and when to fold em.
There’s a lot of reading here – too much for one visit so you might prefer to download some of our free White Papers. That way you’ll have a library of comment to carry around.
Good luck with the interviewing. When you get the job come back and see us for a Front Office Box – it’s designed to help make our ideas work in ways you’ve interpreted them.
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