Welcome back to our blog series on the Eight Essentials for Scaling Sales Success. Last week, we discussed the importance of identifying your sales organization’s limitations and closing those capability gaps. Once these capability gaps have been closed, it’s time to really start moving forward.

When implementing a new strategy into your sales organization, you can’t just go from zero to sixty. You need to steadily build momentum, and in this case, your mangers are the drivers and their teams are the car. Your managers are the ones that create the momentum you need to scale sales success across your organization. This brings us to our sixth essential for scaling sales success: Driving Momentum Through Your Managers.

A few weeks ago we talked about the importance if building buy in for the strategy among your sales team in Essential #2. But if you don’t have the support from your managers, any kind of momentum you created is stopped dead in its tracks. Managers are the key to driving momentum because they are on the frontlines moving the sales teams forward. Managers are the ones coaching, mentoring and encouraging your reps every day and if they don’t buy in to the new strategy themselves, their teams will undoubtedly head in a different direction.

I heard a colleague of mine say recently that if you are trying to drive a significant change in your organization, managers can be like gasoline, making the fire burn brighter and accelerating the change.  Or, they can be like water, putting the fire out and preventing the change from being successful.  That being said, here are some best practices to ensure your managers are creating positive momentum for your organization’s strategy:

1. Engage the managers early in the process to build buy in and ownership from them
2. Show the managers how championing the best practices benefits them
3. Give the managers support (training, tools, etc.) to support them in front line, field coaching
4. Recognize managers who are effectively moving their teams towards the desired behaviors and results

Using these best practices will help ensure that your managers will be more like gasoline and less like water when it comes to helping the fire burner brighter for your new strategy. Check back next week as we discuss the seventh essential to scaling sales success: Remove Barriers to Execution.