A sales manager job can be tiring as well as quite stressful as the yardsticks are too high and time given or received is way too less. Punching the numbers and thereby generating the revenue is quite a tough task as the market conditions and demands change rapidly. It becomes necessary to bust the stress and moving ahead in the correct path, leading the team aptly. Let us see what sales head do and what induces the pressure along with some valuable way outs to combat work pressures
It is a famous yet a fact to go with, globally, within the corporates that a company runs on its sales department. The fact has a stone foundation owing to a simple fact that sales team bring in revenue, earn monetary advantages for the firm from the clients and the market. A product developed will have no value until and unless it is marketed well, true but what if it is marketed correctly and still the product stays in the store. Well, this is where sales department comes into play.
Unlike any other managerial job role, this is one top level role that is not merely limited to managing the workforce or reporting to one's own bosses. It is more than that, which encapsulates a great deal of pressure. But the point to ponder over is that, "pressure is a part of job" and such roles are attached to stressful situations, like forever. So the need is to get a way out or at least the do's and don'ts to avoid or keep such stress levels at bay.
Sales Head/Manager: Job Role and Expectations
The job role of a sales head is not merely restricted to keeping a tab on the sales targets of the staff but goes beyond this. A manager of the sales department, as followed by all the corporate bodies, is given a slew of job responsibilities.
A brief view of the job role of a sales head, as described in the corporate ‘black book' with few points added by the prestigious Canadian Professional Sales Association (CPSA) includes collaborating with specified project team and setting realistic goals to achieve targets, forecasting annual, quarterly and monthly revenue streams, managing assigned geographic area in order to maximize the sales revenue generated and many more.
Apart from this, the head of the sales department gets involved in planning education programs to coach the sales personnel, working under, to perform as per the changing market trends.
What's the Pressure Element Here? :
The sales head job role is one role that spans across different departments and this is the main reason behind the extra stress that creeps in. As per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a sales manager has lot of responsibilities and the position can be stressful. The head is required to travel to national, regional, and local offices and to dealers' and distributors' offices.
This can be cumbersome and sometimes achieving the goals and travelling is so much tightly intact in daily schedules that the person may experience a cut-off from the personal space.
Such pressures often creep in this profile as the market changes very rapidly and so does the demands of the clients; here keeping the workforce abreast of the rapid changes can be demanding. Moreover, enabling them to ‘hit the bull's eye' on time can be one task that may ask for a lot of efforts in practically very short period of time. This is one job profile, which ideally doesn't go by what is there on the search engine; this profile needs constant interactions and self-training sessions.
Some More Testimonials
A recent report published on a known news portal, revealed that sales job ranks on position 5 on a scale of 10, in the top 10 stressful jobs of 2013-14. This is a fact that is sad yet an eye-opener that emphasizes on the need to make use of ways to reduce the level of stress from the job. Moreover, a report on Forbes says that top management executives, belonging to any department face a lot of stress at workplace, when judged on a scale of 5; this is due to the fact that revenue generation and lives of the workforce is in their hands.
What's the Way out? :
There are certain techniques that can actually zap out the stress from the workplace of a sales head:
- Improve the sales environment by organizing sales meetings and discussing the strategies and targets set.
- Train salespeople; though it's a time taking task but still this idea has the ability to release the stress as fewer efforts will have to be put in in project related activities.
- New sales tool can be implemented as this will solve the issues that are coming from the legacy systems. For e.g. a good reporting or mobile app tool can surge a salesperson’s efficiency by helping their sales goals and their motivation
- Being a sales manager, keeping oneself at par with the market trends can be beneficial as this will enable salespersons to work in the right direction with the apt indicators
- If daily and weekly incentives can be brought in, then this might motivate the employees and boost them to work with even more confidence
Last Words:
The way outs can be tangible and intangible as well, like meditating, drinking water, exercising and many more; however, as they say stress is a part of a job role, so best can be done is to reduce it to some extent. A sales manager can feel stressful at times as the targets are huge and managing team accordingly becomes a tough action, but with the right approach and constant motivational sessions for the staff can actually let the former win the battle, halfway.
