16 questions you should be asking your Sales Manager

1. What will happen to our figures if we lose our top 3 customers?
2. When was the last time you did some sales training with your team?
3. What is holding your team back from reaching their target this quarter?
4. What differentiates our sales reps from our competitors?
5. What tasks or activities are restricting the sales reps from seeing more customers?
6. What is our customer retention plan for our top 20% of customers?
7. How realistic are most of the opportunities in the pipeline?
8. How can we get more opportunities into the pipeline and move them through faster?
9. Why don’t we have more sales reps like Anna? (And less like Troy?)
10. What are you doing to develop your own sales and leadership skills this year? (And when)
11. How many calls are you doing each month out in the field with the reps?
12. Why aren’t you doing more coaching calls in the field?
13. Should we put on some telemarketers or telesales reps to replace some of our low performing field sales people?  (how much would this cost / save / make us?)
14. How could I provide you with more support to help you ensure you and your team hit your targets this year?
15. Why am I paying you so much money?
16. Can you explain to me, again, the process you used to select the last sales rep we employed?

Posted in Sales; Tagged Sales, Sales Management; Posted 2 April 2009 by Steve Herzberg