Managing a high-performance sales team can be challenging. One of the main challenges is that the job requires multiple management styles. For example, one day you could be on ride-alongs coaching your reps, the next day, working on new territory plans for your team. So if you don't want to struggle in your role, here are seven management styles you must adopt to be successful.

You don’t have to be a baseball fan to enjoy the movie Moneyball with Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill. The movie is an account of the Oakland Athletics baseball team's 2002 season and their general manager Billy Beane's attempts to assemble a competitive team on a minimal budget. In the film, Beane (Brad Pitt) and assistant general manager Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) used sophisticated analytics to break the game of baseball down into leading indicators and metrics that can predict success (in this case, scoring runs and winning games).

One key takeaway from the pandemic is the heightened importance of how sales managers communicate with their teams. Since the beginning, managers have dealt with a myriad of employee issues that require empathy and understanding. Unfortunately, many managers who were steeped in simply telling their teams what to do struggled as those messages fell silent. This was especially true with sales professionals who realized that they had many more employment options given the robust labor market (i.e., power had shifted from the company to the individual).

Like a championship sports team needs great athletes, exceptional salespeople are the lifeblood of a high-performing sales organization. But if you have recently recruited new salespeople,  you probably have also experienced how brutal it is to try to hire top talent in today's market. Even during more favorable hiring conditions, hiring sales executives is risky. Every sales manager has horror stories of hiring promising candidates who later were poor performers. 

What is the most expensive decision you can make as a frontline sales manager? Hands down, it's deciding who you'll bring onto your team as your next sales hire. Let's take the time to figure out what the cost per hire could look like.

Sitting next to me, collecting dust, is a relic of a by-gone era: my desk phone. My company recently moved away from a stand-alone office phone system to an integrated platform that combines virtual meeting functionality with chat and telephony.