CSO Insights

2018 Sales Operations Optimization Study Page 1

Running in Sand:
Achieving new sales manager expectations
means abandoning old approaches.  

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CSO Insights
2020 Trends in Sales Management
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CSO Insights
2020 Trends in Sales Management Page 3

TABLE OF CONTENTS
The evolving role of sales leadership. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Demanding customers, struggling sellers, and endless change overwhelm managers. . . . . 4
Time investments skew in the wrong direction.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Management capability suffers both historical and new gaps.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Leveraging relative strengths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Key gap: Managers aren’t ensuring adoption of sales technologies.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Key gap: Sales coaching remains largely informal and ineffective.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Lack of coaching time is a legitimate, but not insurmountable, challenge. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Coaching requires improved skills and processes.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Key gap: Hiring is making things worse, not better.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Data science can help leaders improve hiring decisions.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Change means abandoning long-standing practices. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Use hiring rigor for manager and leader roles, even with internal candidates.. . . . . . . . . . . 14
Enable your sales managers directly, not as an afterthought to sellers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Equip leaders and managers with technology specific to leadership.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Measure and incent managers on more than just lagging indicators.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Concluding Thoughts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Demographics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

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CSO Insights
2020 Trends in Sales Management
The evolving role of sales leadership
Throughout our 25+ years of research, sales leadership
has proven to be as vital as it is difficult. In our work,
we see a recent and marked increase in both sales
leader and manager expectations and responsibilities,
making the stakes even higher. Of course, these jobs
have never been for the faint of heart. Such roles are
the hub of fast-paced sales organizations, and leaders
are constantly running to connect strategies, markets,
opportunities, and people.
Today’s managers are armed with more information
(but not always more data or insights) than in the
past and are expected to run their markets more
strategically. At the same time, leaders (managers
of managers1) are responsible for larger swaths
of customer experience and financial results
than in the past. These new expectations join the
traditional responsibilities of teaming, coaching, and
Buyers
Sales
Managers
Sales
Org.
© 2019 MILLER HEIMAN GROUP. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
1
For purposes of this paper, “manager” refers to those who manage sellers directly. “Leaders” refers to those who manage the managers.
© 2019 Miller Heiman Group. All rights reserved.
Page 4
communications to increase the challenge. Such
requirements come with more accountability, and
unfortunately, with the same hurdles to success
(lack of resources, support, conflicting priorities,
and more). The result is leaders and managers are
still running, but it seems more like running in sand
than on pavement.
Demanding customers, struggling sellers, and
endless change overwhelm managers.
To put the evolving role of leaders and managers
in context, we should consider the environment
within which they operate. Specifically, three major
elements of the sales eco-system are undergoing
rapid change:
1. Buyers are changing the way they buy to
de-emphasize the role of sellers.
In our Buyer’s Preference Study, over three-
quarters of B2B buyers told us they did not see
sellers as resources to solve their business
problems. In fact, 70.0% of respondents
preferred to wait to engage a seller until after
they had already uncovered and prioritized their
needs. They did not see a role for salespeople
until they were ready to hear about the product
they already believe will meet their needs. It’s
not an issue of buyers harboring ill will towards
their sellers. Most said they still saw value in
Sellers talking to sellers. It’s that, heavily influenced by
their B2C experiences, buyers want more from
their interactions than most sellers provide. As
a result, sellers are increasingly relegated to
smaller roles in the buying process.
CSO Insights
2020 Trends in Sales Management
2. Sellers are struggling to adopt the new
methodologies required for success.
The good news is that buyers still made time
for and invited early engagement from a small
subset of sellers – those who met their high
expectations. To succeed today, sellers need
to have flawless interaction skills, manage
opportunities strategically, provide the buyer with
perspective and insights to reframe their thinking,
and keep the focus on post-sale value (regardless
of whether the seller delivers the value or it is
another department’s responsibility). This move
to perspective-based sales is a nuanced one. It
is not a white paper, a provocative question, or
a step in the sales process. It is a different way
of selling. Perspective in this context is threaded
throughout the sales methodology and the
buyer-seller relationship. Our 2018-2019 Sales
Performance Study revealed that only 11% of sales
organizations had mastered this kind of selling.
3. Sales organizations are continuously
re-inventing themselves.
Faced with the above challenges, organizations
are throwing themselves into change initiatives.
The result is foregoing constancy in an effort to
keep up. When we asked 800+ sales leaders what
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Page 5
they were “dealing with or worried about today that
they weren’t concerned with 12 months ago”, the
top answer was “transforming the organization
to meet new expectations.” Ask Google for ‘sales
transformation’ resources and you will get 270
million options. Organizations have to narrow
in on a systematic approach for transformation.
And ultimately, whatever the transformation
effort, it must translate to the frontline. With
a span of control (number of direct reports) of
1:8, managers are the catalyst to organizational
change. They can amplify successes, and they
can perpetuate missteps.
Since managers sit at the intersection of the sales
organization, sellers, and buyers, these three
changes have dramatically impacted the role.
Yet despite these higher expectations, our study
shows that the approach to sales management
taken by most sales organizations has not changed
dramatically. This is not to say that no actions have
been taken. Managers and leaders are often, but not
always, provided with tools, technologies, metrics,
growing sales teams, and more. However, those
additions have had the result of focusing managers’
attention more internally than in the past.
CSO Insights
2020 Trends in Sales Management Page 6

Today’s Managers Spend More Time on Internal Tasks

2015

Internal External
56.2% 43.8%

2019

Internal External
64.7% 35.3%
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Time investments skew in the wrong direction.

Despite acknowledged talent and market issues, the
study found that managers spend a disproportionate
amount of their time focused internally. Managers
spend more than twice as much time on
administrative and forecasting/reporting activities
than they do on coaching activities (34.1% vs. 14.2%).
Managers spend twice as much time on
administration and forecasting (34.1%) as
they do coaching their people (14.2%).
Managers are also spending 21.1% of their time
selling alongside their sellers. While it can be
useful to have managers engage with clients on
a case-by-case basis, joint-selling time should
not be confused with coaching time. Too often,
it illustrates a common case of sales managers
‘going back to their roots’ and functioning as a top
seller rather than driving long-term capability-
building and team success.
Being time-crunched is, of course, a perennial
sales manager issue. However, as we look back on
our 2015 Sales Management Optimization Study, we
see the situation trending in the wrong direction.
Managers today spend more time on internal-facing
activities than they did in the past. This additional
internal time comes largely at the expense of
coaching time, which used to be 20.3% of time and is
now only slightly more than 14%.
Coaching is a Small Portion of Manager Time
14.2%
COACHING
19.6%
ADMIN
21.1%
SELLING 18.6%
ADVOCATING
INTERNALLY

14.5%
12.2%
FORECASTING/
PLANNING
PIPELINE ANALYSIS
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CSO Insights
2020 Trends in Sales Management Page 7

Management capability suffers both historical and new gaps.

Given these changes, we asked over 330 sales organizations to rate their sales managers against 11 key sales
manager responsibilities to see how today’s sales managers stack up.

Strength of Sales Manager Capabilities

}
Effectively advocate for sales team 53.0%
Top Three
Act as knowledge resource 48.2%
Strengths
Provide leadership for must-close deals, accounts 47.8%

Ensure compliance to internal protocols 46.0%

Create environment for positive seller engagement 45.1%

Support and communicate corporate initiatives 40.7%

Drive collaboration across customer-facing functioms 38.3%

Ensure timely and accurate forecast 35.9%

}
Encourage best practice sharing across sales teams 35.3%

Ensure sales tool and technology adoption 26.7%

Top Three
Coach and develop salespeople to success 24.6%
Weaknesses
Hire salespeople who succeed 22.0%
© 2019 MILLER HEIMAN GROUP. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Managers were most commonly credited for being
effective at getting things done, working the funnel,
and doing what needs to be done to close the deal.
Weaknesses, on the other hand, included hiring,
coaching, and ensuring the use of technology
tools. In other words, they are more successful
at the activities linked to short-term impact and
less successful at the responsibilities which drive
performance improvement in the long run.
Leveraging relative strengths
Before we jump into the gaps, it’s worth taking a
closer look at the relative strengths: advocating for
the sales team, acting as a knowledge resource,
and providing leadership for deals and accounts.
(“relative” in the sense that although these were the
top-scoring traits, only half of organizations claimed
them as strengths.)
Management Strengths:
1. Advocate for sellers
2. Act as knowledge resource
3. Leadership for deals and accounts

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CSO Insights
2020 Trends in Sales Management
Advocating for the sales team can lead to greater
seller engagement. We also found that it positively
correlated to quota attainment (the percentage of
sellers making goal). However, unlike the other
ten behaviors, which had strong correlations to
both quota attainment and win rate, acting as an
advocate had no positive linkage to win rate. This
is likely because such behaviors, while valuable
for situational problem-solving, don’t tend to
fundamentally strengthen the sales organization
nor capability-build for the long-term. And, if sales
managers are doing a salesperson’s job, then the
sales directors are forced to fulfill the manager role,
creating inefficiencies within the organization.
The second two capabilities: being a knowledge
resource and working as a partner on must-win
deals, rely on the manager functioning as a best-in-
class salesperson. Sales excellence is necessary to
earn seller respect and can help advance a specific
sales cycle. However, such activities are usually
hard to scale across a team or division. In addition,
they can be supported elsewhere through strong
enablement, content management systems, and
other infrastructural elements – leaving the manager
more time for coaching and strategic planning.
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Page 8
As a result, just excelling in these relative strengths
would not completely fulfill the sales management
needs of the organization as described in our first
section. In addition, as we review these strengths,
we should keep in mind that they are not universal.
Most hover around the 50/50 mark, with only half
of organizations considering them to be strengths.
Even here, there may be significant improvement
opportunities for an organization looking to take
its managers and leaders to the next level of
performance.
We move now into the three largest gaps reported
by sales organizations: driving technology adoption,
coaching sellers, and hiring new sellers. Despite
strong linkages to success metrics, these three
capabilities were claimed as strengths by only a
quarter of organizations (or less).
CSO Insights
2020 Trends in Sales Management
Key gap: Managers aren’t ensuring adoption of sales technologies.
Our 2018 Sales Operations Optimization Study revealed
that the average sales organization had deployed ten
or more sales technology tools with another four on
the way. Yet, during this time of rapid escalation of
technology deployment, there has not yet been any
marked growth in seller efficiency. The average sales
organization reports devoting less than one-third
(32.0%) of seller time to actual selling activity. Much
like managers, a significant proportion of seller
time (33.6%) is spent on administration or other
internal activities. At the same time, effectiveness
(as approximated by win rates for forecasted deals)
has remained flat.
We also know from our 2019 World-Class Sales
Practices Study that the right technology, properly
integrated into a coherent sales technology stack,
can reverse this trend and drive effectiveness and
efficiencies. So where is the disconnect?
Often, it takes root in a lack of adoption.
Organizations may have the right tools, but they
are ineffective until utilized. As the hub of the sales
organization, managers have a unique ability to drive
that adoption. However, only 26.7% of organizations
agreed this was a strength of their managers,
making this the third-largest gap in the study.
Impacting this metric requires reaching beyond a
compliance-oriented solution (i.e., tell everyone
that they must use the tools) to make it easier for
managers to drive the adoption needed.
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Management Gaps:
1. Ensuring technology adoption
2. Coaching
3. Hiring
Consider the workflow and integration. Our recent
sales enablement studies show that many of these
technologies are not integrated into the CRM
system and require separate login and data entry. In
addition, the workflow should be mapped to day-in-
the-life scenarios to define how sellers should use
the tools. Anything that creates duplicate work for
sellers will decrease usage. It is hard enough for
managers to change seller behaviors. Tools that
are inherently difficult to use make the task nearly
impossible and put managers into a compliance
mode versus a coaching one. Here, Sales Operations
can step in and create the integrations, data
definition, and workflow mapping needed to make
adoption an easier ask.
Enable managers as a distinct audience. When
rolling out the technology, organizations should
have a specific change management plan for the
manager audience. In fact, address them as the
primary audience, rather than simply as a point of
reinforcement. Give them the opportunity to pilot
tools and influence configuration and give them a
safe environment within which to learn how to use
the technologies. Sellers know when managers
aren’t engaged (e.g., “rather than me going into the
system to get your opportunity plan, why don’t you just
email a copy of it?”). They will be inclined to wait out
the initiative, knowing the organization is likely to
end up rejecting the tool to chase a new one.
CSO Insights
2020 Trends in Sales Management
Key gap: Sales coaching remains largely informal and ineffective.
Coaching was the second-largest gap in our study
and likely the longest-standing. “Coaching” gets
used to describe just about any interaction a
manager has with a seller. However, coaching has a
very specific definition.
“Coaching is the process by which sales
managers (and others) use a defined
approach and specific communication
skills combined with domain expertise
to facilitate conversations with team
members to uncover improvement areas
and opportunities for new levels of sales
success.”
- Sales Enablement, A Master Framework to Engage,
Equip and Empower A World-Class Sales Force
Coaching can involve a sales manager and a
salesperson brainstorming on how to position pricing
to a specific account. But that is just one kind of
coaching. Managers who focus only on those kinds of
interactions may help close individual opportunities
(mentioned as a relative strength above) but won’t
impact the bigger, longer-term picture. There are
five kinds of coaching conversations: lead and
opportunity coaching, skills and behaviors coaching,
funnel coaching, account coaching, and territory
coaching. The latter two tend to suffer from the least
focus, yet are often the most strategic and have the
greatest potential to impact the overall output of a
salesperson. When assessing and developing your
coaching capabilities, consider the full spectrum.
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Page 10
Number of Coaching Hours is Not Linked to
Quota Attainment
63% 61%
57% 56% 58%
< 1 hour 1-2 hours 2-3 hours 3-4 hours > 4 hours
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Lack of coaching time is a legitimate, but not
insurmountable, challenge.
Many managers will point to large spans of control
(as measured by the number of direct reports) as
a reason for a lack of coaching. Aspects of this are
certainly true. Although sales managers with larger
spans of control invest more time in coaching, that
incremental time spent is not proportionate to their
larger team sizes. As a result, the more sellers a
manager has, generally, the less coaching time each
person gets. But, at the same time, our research
does not show a positive correlation between
coaching hours per person and quota attainment.
Spending more time per person coaching does not
mean more sellers will make goal.
This doesn’t mean sales organizations should load
up managers with 30+ direct reports or minimize
their coaching hours. But, it does reinforce the
idea that a decision to increase span of control for
efficiency’s sake doesn’t have to be a death knell
for coaching, as long as the manager’s role stays
sufficiently focused on coaching and the coaching
conducted is effective. A manager fluent in coaching
CSO Insights
2020 Trends in Sales Management
skills, who can tailor coaching to specific sellers
and situations, can be very effective. But without a
consistent process, even the most effective coaches
will have a diminished impact.
Coaching requires improved skills and processes.
While the number of hours spent on coaching
did not impact results, coaching effectiveness
did. Sales organizations in which managers were
more effective at developing and coaching their
salespeople had substantially higher proportions of
their reps making goal.
24.6%
Effectively develop
and coach sellers
to success +23.8%
Quota
Attainment
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This is not surprising and is reinforced in the recent
2019 World-Class Sales Practices Study, which found
that sales coaching was one of the top practices linked
to sales success. Unfortunately, less than one-quarter
(24.6%) of the organizations in our study claimed sales
coaching as an organizational strength. As sellers move
to perspective-based selling methodologies, so too
should coaching conversations evolve to a perspective-
based approach. When coaches are trying to influence
the behaviors of a salesperson, they should be
modeling the same selling skills that a seller uses to
build a relationship with a buyer.
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Page 11
Having effective coaches is important. But, to scale
and drive growth, the overall coaching process needs
to be consistent, formally defined, and adopted.
Coaching process clarifies the kinds of coaching,
the cadence, the audiences, and the approach. We
know from all five of our annual Sales Enablement
studies that the more formal the coaching process,
the higher win rates and the more production sellers
get from their funnels.
12.6%
Use a dynamic
coaching
process +32.1%
Win Rates
© 2019 MILLER HEIMAN GROUP. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
A dynamic coaching process (formally defined,
taught, reinforced, adopted, and tied directly to seller
enablement activities), while only used by 12.6% of
study participants, led to win rates 32.1% higher than
the much larger body of participants (42.9%) who
choose to leave the specifics of the coaching process
up to individual sales managers. Those informal and
ad hoc approaches lead to win rates that are well
below our study averages.
Before sales managers can equip sellers with tools
and technology and coach them to success, they
first need to have the right sellers on the team. That
leads us to the largest capability gap in the study –
hiring.
CSO Insights
2020 Trends in Sales Management Page 12

Key gap: Hiring is making things worse, not better.

Our 2018-2019 Sales Performance Study illustrated
that attrition is increasing even as sales
organizations are continuing to grow. That means
there is more hiring activity than ever. At the same
time, our 2018 Sales Talent Study showed that a
substantial 84% of sales leaders don’t think they
have the sales talent to succeed in the future. More
hiring activity is clearly not resulting in a more
capable sales force.
So, it’s not surprising that the largest leadership
capability gap uncovered in our study was the ability
to consistently hire sellers who succeed. This was
claimed as a strength by less than one-quarter (22%)
of sales organizations. Not only does this gap hurt
current performance, but it also has a dampening
effect on future results as well. Bad (or even sub-
optimal) hires have the lingering effects of depressing
territory performance, team efficiency, and manager
productivity. The result is the need to hire again,
On the upside, hiring correctly to fill gaps (average
attrition = 15.7%) and support growth (growing sales
organizations add, on average, 8.9% headcount)
means you can rapidly address the talent issue.
Data science can help leaders improve hiring
decisions.
The hiring problem starts with a lack of clarity
on what the ideal sales candidate looks like.
Most organizations strive to replicate their top
performers. However, only 16.3% of organizations
assess their top performers, so they can’t identify
specifically why they are successful.
Hiring Tool Use vs Key Sales Metrics
60.3%
53.1%
49.5%

taking an average of four months to fill the role and

another nine before full productivity is reached. Even
worse, gaps in territory coverage (not hiring again) 25.7%
and weak performance management (being slow to 18.0% 19.8%
15.7%
exit a poor performer) compound the issue. 14.6%
11.1%

>1 year to fill sales roles and achieve full

productivity
QUOTA CONFIDENCE ATTRITION
ATTAINMENT IN TALENT

We have one and consistently use it

We have one, but do not consistently use it
4 months 9 months Do not have tool
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RECRUIT
ONBOARD

Typical quota of over $2 million a year

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CSO Insights
2020 Trends in Sales Management
Our study revealed that few organizations have a
current candidate profile. Most rely on proxies such
as industry expertise combined with subjective
interview impressions of attributes such as
‘assertiveness’. Focusing on a subset of industry
colleagues encourages leaders to poach sellers
from their competitors, often gaining less successful
sellers at a higher price point.
Using a data-based approach to identify an ideal
candidate profile and assess candidates against it
creates more clarity. It may also point your recruiting
efforts in a very different direction and open up your
search pool.
One caveat is to beware the concept of ‘top performer’
as you create your ideal profile. It may be that your
sellers with the higher quota achievement aren’t
your best performers. They may benefit from market
trends or a mature territory. Use both leading and
lagging indicators to identify the “best” to be sure you
want to replicate them. Managers and leaders should
be familiar with the profile and the competencies
it is built on and able to use interviewing tools to
supplement and validate assessment results.
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Page 13
The key is to keep everything aligned and calibrated.
While these are not new tools or techniques, our
studies show that fewer than one-third of sales
organizations consistently use them (30.6%) and
few managers have been adequately trained on
their execution. An additional 24.9% of organizations
possess such tools but are not using them
consistently. Perhaps buoyed by a false sense of
security that they were solving the problem, these
organizations were even less successful than those
with no hiring assessments at all.
Finally, while hiring is the largest pain point in the
study, it cannot stand alone. Managers need access
to a full talent strategy, from recruiting, to hiring, to
development, through to transition. As highlighted
in our 2019 World-Class Sales Practices Study,
organizations in which the sales organization owns
and drives a strategy (32.0% of the overall study
population) are more successful than those with
disconnected practices.
CSO Insights
2020 Trends in Sales Management
Change means abandoning long-standing practices.
Some of these gaps are newer challenges created
by changes in the sales eco-system. For example,
the increased importance of sales tech tools makes
leader leverage more critical. And, new buyer
demands render the talent issue more alarming.
Coaching gaps, on the other hand, have haunted
sales for decades. To prevent these gaps from
Over Half of Sales Managers are Hired from Within
33.0%
SALES MANAGER FROM OUTSIDE
6.3%
OTHER
Use hiring rigor for manager and leader roles,
even with internal candidates.
We noted above that bad sales hires are deadly
to margins, customer relationships, and results.
It’s even more important to get management
hires right. Due to span of control, bad sales
manager hires are 8X more detrimental, and bad
sales director selections impact, on average, five
managers and 35-45 sellers. Yet, despite the vastly
negative consequence of a poor-fit leader, many
organizations use an informal approach to hiring.
© 2019 Miller Heiman Group. All rights reserved.
Page 14
being a permanent part of their environment,
organizations must rethink how they are running
their leadership practices and break down some
long-installed hurdles: hiring shortcuts, a lack of
enablement, ill-suited technology tools, and mono-
focused incentive programs.
45.2%
SALESPERSON WITH ORG
15.5%
OTHER MANAGER WITHIN ORG
© 2019 MILLER HEIMAN GROUP. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
One of the reasons for the lack of formality is that
nearly half (45.2%) of organizations report that the
typical sales manager hire in their company is a
promoted salesperson. An additional 15.5% said they
commonly transferred managers from other parts of
the organization. The numbers are slightly higher for
sales director roles. As a result, many organizations
forego their usual hiring process as the internal
person is a ‘known quantity’.
CSO Insights
2020 Trends in Sales Management Page 15

There can be a benefit to internal hires, as there is Less than 1/3 of organizations claim
certainly a shorter runway for learning the business. ‘developing sales managers into success’
And, it can be more cost effective to promote from
as a strength.
within rather than hiring from the outside. However,
familiarity with a person’s current performance is
Enable your sales managers directly, not as an
not necessarily a good predictor of performance in
afterthought to sellers.
a different role. It has long been acknowledged that
Getting the right people into manager and leader
seller competencies and manager competencies are
roles is part of the equation. The next step is
very different. Organizations would be better served
ensuring they live up to their potential. Unfortunately,
by establishing a rigorous, data-based hiring process
managers and leaders are underserved in this
and using that process for both internal and external
regard. Managers report to director-level leaders
hires. Not only will this improve the likelihood of
who have a typical span of control of one director
selecting right-fit leaders, but it will also give those
for every 4.74 managers (1:5). Managers generally
managers and directors first-hand experience with
have good access to their leader. The challenge is
the hiring system, better equipping them to leverage
that time is often spent on forecasting or account
it with their direct-report hires.
discussions versus actual coaching. Less than one-
third (30.4%) of organizations rated “developing sales
This kind of process improvement effort doesn’t
managers into success” as a strength.
have to wait until a manager job opens. Assessing
all sellers upon their hiring will give you baseline
Like sales managers, sales leaders are also
predictive data, which can be supplemented with
recruited from within. If an organization lacks
behavioral data throughout their career. This helps
coaching effectiveness and process (see discussion
with succession planning and identifies those who
above), they will likely not have good models to work
might be a good fit for leadership positions. You can
from and may end up perpetuating long legacies of
develop those individuals into management positions
under-supported sales managers.
using collateral assignments, mentoring, etc.

© 2019 Miller Heiman Group. All rights reserved.

CSO Insights
2020 Trends in Sales Management Page 16

Training is another critical piece of enabling leaders.
Here we are seeing some positive movement. Our 5th
Annual Sales Enablement Study noted that two-thirds
(65.5%) of organizations enabled their managers.
This is an increase from 2018, when it was nearer to
one-half (56.8%).
Even with more attention from enablement, training
investments vary broadly across organizations,
with almost one-quarter of organizations (23.5%)
spending $500 or less per manager. Conventional
logic is that with limited resources (a common
hurdle in enablement), investments are made in
the largest populations, sellers, as they are directly
managing customer interactions.
Within the training services offered, organizations
generally agreed they did a more effective job with
process, methodology, and CRM training (training
services offered to frontline sellers). They agreed
the larger gaps were in areas more specific to the
manager role: hiring skills, salesperson performance
review, and forecasting.

Sales Manager Training Assesment

Sales process and methodologies

6.0% 28.5% 47.2% 18.3%

CRM and other systems training

6.4% 31.8% 50.2% 11.5%

Customer’s marketplace/acumen

6.9% 34.3% 41.8% 17.0%

Coaching/mentoring skills

6.8% 34.8% 43.2% 15.2%

Forecast/pipeline management skills

6.1% 38.0% 43.4% 12.5%

Salesperson performance review skills

7.1% 37.1% 43.7% 12.1%

Training on value justification

7.1% 38.8% 40.5% 13.6%

Salespeople hiring skills

7.4% 43.9% 40.9% 7.8%

Needs Major Redesign Needs Improvement Meets Expectations Exceeds Expectations © 2019 MILLER HEIMAN GROUP. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

© 2019 Miller Heiman Group. All rights reserved.

CSO Insights
2020 Trends in Sales Management
Equip leaders and managers with technology
specific to leadership.
Earlier, we discussed the need for managers to drive
seller adoption of technology tools across the huge
volume of sales tools being deployed. But the vast
majority of these tools are seller-oriented, focused
on seller actions in the lead-to-close sales process.
Only half (49.7%) of sales organizations equip their
managers with technologies designed to support
the coaching process. Another 20.2% plan to do so in
the next 12 months. Such tools, many of which are
aided by AI, can help managers more efficiently and
effectively guide their sellers.
When deploying these kinds of technologies, be sure
to avoid the traditional gap of automating existing,
ineffective processes. Consider the impact of the
technology. Will it help with the coaching process,
e.g., structuring the cadence of coaching, providing
easy-to-utilize dashboards, and offering insights
into developmental and performance needs? Will it
help with coaching effectiveness? How does the tool
and the information it provides ultimately impact the
conversations that occur between managers and
sellers? Such technologies can identify a problem
and provide suggestions to fix it. But ultimately,
the manager must give feedback to the seller and
facilitate a dialogue in a way that helps to change
behavior. That is a skill, not just an insight.
Many times, sales technologies are used to provide
input for opportunity coaching, e.g., raising an alarm
when communication activity is not aligned with the
projected close date. However, this does not replace
the need for developmental coaching or funnel
coaching. Be sure to explore coaching-specific
technologies that allow managers to break down
© 2019 Miller Heiman Group. All rights reserved.
Page 17
recorded videos of sales conversations, provide
motivational insights linked to talent profiles, and
schedule and prompt coaching activities as well as
link to learning platforms and internal content.
Coaching is just one piece of the sales leader’s
responsibility set. They have a lot more on their
plate and are likely interfacing with a range of
tools and technologies. Optimize the workflow of
the manager’s daily life and ensure that your sales
tech stack is integrated in a way that supports time
savings versus multiple interfaces and duplicate
data entry. Here too, sales managers will need
Sales Operations and Sales Enablement to take lead
positions for consistency’s sake.
Measure and incent managers on more than just
lagging indicators.
Sales exists to generate revenue for the
organization. It only makes sense that revenue
drives compensation plans for both sellers and
managers and that revenue is the leading KPI for
evaluating performance. However, revenue is too
often the only KPI that is measured for performance
or incentive purposes. Most of the organizations
(87.5%) measured and compensated their sales
leaders leveraging performance metrics. Of those
organizations, two-thirds (64.4%) used only lagging
metrics (revenue, new account revenue, margins).
Only one-third (35.6%) impacted compensation with
leading indicators (seller engagement and retention,
client retention, forecast accuracy, etc.).
Only 1/3 of sales organizations evaluate
manager performance beyond goal
achievement.
CSO Insights
2020 Trends in Sales Management
The challenge is that, if it doesn’t matter how you
achieve the number, it becomes irrelevant whether
you get there through coaching, doing the selling
yourself, or by relying on a couple of top performers.
The result is a tendency toward administration and/
or selling reflected in the time-allocation data shared
above. In addition, relying on a small set of sellers
for success leaves the organization vulnerable. Our
© 2019 Miller Heiman Group. All rights reserved.
Page 18
data shows that 60.3% of revenues come from the
top 20% of sellers. And, many sales leaders still
believe that outdated advice that “you don’t coach a
top performer, you just remove barriers for them.”
This further reinforces the tendency towards less
investment in coaching. Yet, coaching creates the
most capability within the organization.
CSO Insights
2020 Trends in Sales Management
Concluding Thoughts
In our 2019 World-Class Sales Practices Study
briefing, we talk about the importance of the
Performance Support layer within a world-class
sales system. This describes the collaboration of
Sales Management, Sales Operations, and Sales
Enablement to help the frontline execute. Each of
these functions or disciplines has a unique and
changing role in the organization. Sales Enablement
is newer to the landscape and has reached critical
penetration, growing over 150% since 2015. Sales
Operations, a longer-tenured sales discipline, has
evolved as well, with many functions taking the
opportunity to become the analytics hub of the sales
organization. Management as a discipline, however,
shows less change within our studies.
© 2019 Miller Heiman Group. All rights reserved.
Page 19
This inertia can be the fatal flaw of any sales
transformation effort due to spans of control.
Managers in sales organizations larger than 25
sellers have a span of control of roughly one
manager to every eight sellers. Interestingly, while
many organizations have pushed their managers
to wider spans of control, on average, this remains
constant. In the 2015 Sales Management Optimization
Study, the ratio was also 1:8 Due to this ratio, any
transformation effort that cascades through the
sales organization can be either accelerated by, or
derailed by, managers.
For organizations to better succeed at changing their
business and sales approaches to adapt to changing
buyers, they need to take a fresh look at their
management practices and be willing to forgo some
long-standing short cuts in favor of a more rigorous
approach. While most sellers and sales leaders have
learned to view leader excellence as a fond exception
to the rule, it will need to become the norm.
CSO Insights
2020 Trends in Sales Management Page 20

Demographics
The 2020 Trends in Sales Management Study was conducted with 337 sales leader respondents covering over
20 industries and representing a global sample.

Survey Participants by Role Survey Participants by Region

11.6% 4.8%
25.8%
OTHER
SALES
ENABLEMENT EMEA
21.1% 10.7%
EXECUTIVE ASIA
8.6%
MGMT 10.9%
SALES
OPS AUS/NZ

7.9%
22.0% 32.1%
SENIOR LATAM
FRONTLINE 44.7%
SALES MGR SALES
MGMT NA
© 2019 MILLER HEIMAN GROUP. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
© 2019 MILLER HEIMAN GROUP. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

© 2019 Miller Heiman Group. All rights reserved.

CSO Insights CSO Insights
2020 Trends in Sales Management 2018 Sales Operations Optimization Study Page 21

About CSO Insights

CSO Insights is the independent research arm within Miller Heiman GroupTM, dedicated to improving the
performance and productivity of complex B2B sales. The CSO Insights team of respected analysts provides
sales leaders with the research, data, expertise, and best practices required to build sustainable strategies for
sales performance improvement. CSO Insights’ annual sales effectiveness studies, along with its benchmarking
capabilities, are industry standards for sales leaders seeking operational and behavioral insights into how to
improve their sales performance and to gain holistic assessments of their selling and sales management efficacy.
Annual research studies address sales and service best practices, sales enablement and sales performance
optimization.
© 2019 Miller Heiman Group. All rights reserved.