Best Careers 2011: Sales Manager

As one of the 50 Best Jobs of 2011, this should have strong growth over the next decade

The rundown:

If you aspire to this position, make sure you're comfortable with a lot of responsibility riding on your shoulders. Sales managers hold one of the most high-profile positions in a company, and are charged with running an efficient and effective sales team—and ultimately, accomplishing sales objectives to boost the company's bottom line. As a manager, you'll be in charge of hiring, supervising, coaching, and motivating a team of sales associates. Ensuring the quality and success of sales efforts is a top priority. "You've got to figure out where the bottlenecks are that are keeping people from being productive in selling," says Bob Kelly, chairman of the Sales Management Association. You'll also set sales goals, define selling roles and sales territories, and establish training programs for your staff; meanwhile, you'll build and maintain customer relationships. The job is a balancing act that requires "analytic rigor, process discipline, [and] fluency with technology," Kelly says, and "what people in the past called leadership, but now call coaching ability."

The outlook:

Overall employment of sales managers is expected to increase by 51,800 jobs, or 15 percent, between 2008 and 2018, according to the Labor Department. During the recession, companies cut spending wherever they could, laying off employees, postponing projects, and streamlining operations. "Now the narrative is all about growth—coming out of the recession with an organization that's able to sustain growth," says Kelly. "The frontline sales manager is seen as a productive place to invest because they have ... an enormous impact on sales growth." But be warned: competition is fierce for these highly coveted positions.

Money:

Excellent. Median annual wages for sales managers in May 2009 were $96,790, and bonuses can equal 10 percent or more of their salaries. Wages vary widely, depending on the sales manager's responsibility and length of service, as well as the size and location of the firm, the size of its sales territory, and the industry in which it operates. Case in point: As of May 2009, the bottom 10 percent of sales managers earned $47,660 and the top 10 percent earned upwards of $166,400 per year. Not surprisingly, sales managers at financial investment firms in large metropolitan areas earn among the highest salaries.

Upward mobility:

Sales manager positions are highly competitive because they're also highly lucrative in terms of compensation and status. "This profession is high-risk, but it's also high-reward, which reflects the value of the role," Kelly says. The high-profile nature of the job often makes sales managers candidates to move to the highest ranks of the company.

Activity level:

Be prepared for long hours. You'll spend plenty of time in meetings—with your sales team, customers, and company executives. You may be required to travel to meet with customers and to national regional and local offices.

Stress level:

This can be a high-pressure job that's difficult to disconnect from when the day's over. Sales managers are directly accountable for the performance of their team, and there's a "constant battle between reacting to incoming demands on your time and trying to be proactive in setting a deliberate course and focusing your team," says Kelly. The position involves a fair amount of internal diplomacy, he adds, such as when higher-ups put non-productive demands on your staff.

Education and preparation:

A college degree is mandatory—and a master's degree in business administration is sometimes preferred—but this is a profession that tends to value experience over education, says Kelly. The path to the corner office, he adds, usually starts in the sales ranks.

Real advice from real people about landing a job as a sales manager:

Ever heard that great salespeople make lousy sales managers? "I'm not sure I agree," says Kelly. "In the sales force, because the jobs are highly compensated, their profile is high and accountability is very high ... Salespeople are high-performing and have a real focus on achievement. If they can translate that into an interest in seeing others achieve, they can bring that into management."

By Katy Marquardt

Source Us News

Can Entrepreneurs Be Made?

Silicon Valley investors often have a picture in their heads of the type of person who is worthy of funding: young, brash, stubborn, and arrogant. They believe that successful entrepreneurs come from entrepreneurial families and that they start their entrepreneurial journey by selling lemonade while in grade school. Angel investor and entrepreneur, Jason Calacanis said as much in his recent talk to Penn State students. And after meeting Wharton students, VC Fred Wilson expressed shock when a professor told him that you could teach people to be entrepreneurs. Wilson wrote, “I’ve been working with entrepreneurs for almost 25 years now and it is ingrained in my mind that someone is either born an entrepreneur or is not.”

Jason, Fred, and Silicon Valley VCs, I’ve got news for you: you’ve got it all wrong. Entrepreneurs aren’t born, they’re made. And they aren’t anything like you think they are. My team surveyed 549 successful entrepreneurs. We found that the majority didn’t have entrepreneurial parents. They didn’t even have entrepreneurial aspirations while going to school. They simply got tired of working for others, had a great idea they wanted to commercialize, or woke up one day with an urgent desire to build wealth before they retired. So they took the big leap.

We found that 52% of the successful entrepreneurs were the first in their immediate families to start a business — just like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, and Russell Simmons (Def Jam founder). Their parents were academics, lawyers, factory workers, priests, bureaucrats, etc. About 39% had an entrepreneurial father, and 7% had an entrepreneurial mother. (Some had both.)

Only a quarter caught the entrepreneurial bug when in college. Half didn’t even think about entrepreneurship, and they had little interest in it when in school.

There was no significant difference between the success factors or hurdles faced by entrepreneurs who were extremely interested in entrepreneurship in school (and who likely set up the lemonade stands) and the ones who lacked interest. But entrepreneurs with extreme interest started more companies and did it sooner. Of the 24.5% who indicated that they were “extremely interested” in becoming entrepreneurs during college, 47.1% went on to start more than two companies (as compared with 32.9% of the overall sample). Sixty-nine percent started their companies within 10 years of working for someone else (as compared to 46.8% of the rest of the sample population).

What did affect their successes? Education — but not the college they graduate from. In a different study of the 652 CEOs and CTOs of 502 tech companies, we researched the correlation between education and the sales and headcount of companies founded. We learned that the there was a significant difference between companies started by founders with just high-school diplomas and the rest. Education provided a huge advantage. But there wasn’t a big difference between firms founded by Ivy-league graduates and the graduates of other universities.

The education and training of entrepreneurs is something that the Kauffman Foundation has been researching extensively. Over the last six years, it has invested around $50 million on academic research to understand what makes entrepreneurs tick and what policies are most conducive to entrepreneurship and to construct data bases to permit analyses of these subjects. (Kauffman has also funded some of my research at Duke, UC-Berkeley, and Harvard.) Its VP of Research, Bob Litan, says that Kauffman has learnt conclusively that entrepreneurship can be taught. The key is to provide education at “teachable moments” — when the entrepreneur is thinking about starting a venture or ready to scale it. What entrepreneurs need isn’t the type of abstract course they teach in business schools, but practical, relevant knowledge. That’s why Kauffman created a program called Fast Trac, which has trained 300,000 entrepreneurs so far.

One of the findings of Kauffman research is that of the appx. 600,000 businesses that are started every year, less than a fraction of 1% become high-growth “scale” businesses. These new firms, especially the “scale” firms, have added all of the net incremental jobs to U.S. economy since 1980 (about 40 million), and probably account for about 1/3 of GDP growth since then. So the key to boosting economic growth is to increase the number of successful high-growth startups. After all, the growth rate of our economy is nothing more than the aggregation of the growth of our firms.

That is why Kauffman (which has a $2 billion endowment) is investing heavily in an ambitious new program called Kauffman Labs. This aims to dramatically increase the ability of small businesses to become big businesses. The Labs program is built around a novel idea: that highly motivated individuals with “scalable ideas” can be recruited to be entrepreneurs and to be made successful, by surrounding them with a network of other experienced entrepreneurs; sources of money; and mentors. The goal is to educate entrepreneurs and surround them with a powerful network. This is like a Y Combinator on steroids.

Anecdotal evidence also shows that there are many more factors at play than that of genes. Note this BusinessWeek article about waves of spinoffs from Google. I doubt that all of these Google employees who are starting successful businesses were born with entrepreneurial genes. VC and former entrepreneur Brad Feld also blogged about how many of his frat buddies at MIT had become successful entrepreneurs. Were all of these people born to be entrepreneurs as well? I don’t think so. It is probably education, exposure to entrepreneurship, and networks that led these people to pursue the entrepreneurial path — which means that Kauffman Foundation may have hit on the right idea with Kauffman Labs.

The reason this topic is really important is that, as Wilson writes, “Venture Capital is a lot about pattern recognition”. The reality is that VCs like him make quick judgments about people based on the stereotypes in their minds. So, like the women that I wrote about in my previous posts, we may be disadvantaging another important segment of our population – a segment that is older, more humble, more sensible, and more realistic than the population that is getting all the attention (and the money).

By Vivek Wadhwa

Source: AOL Tech

Beware of Reactionary Work Flow

In an era of mobile devices, instant connectivity, and automated mailing lists and notifications, it is all too easy for people to contact us. As a consequence, we live our lives just trying to keep our heads above water. Our ability to prioritize and control our focus is crippled by an unyielding flow of incoming communication: email, texts, tweets, facebook messages, phone calls, and so on (and on).Without realizing it, most of us have entered the new era of what I call “reactionary workflow.” Rather than being proactive with our energy, we are acting in response to what is incoming. Having relinquished control over our focus, it has become harder and harder to embark on our work with intention.

Amidst the research for my upcoming book on extremely productive creative people and teams, I have found that the “uber productive” actively develop methods for defying this new and dangerous trend. They impose discipline on themselves and set up blockades when necessary. And, most importantly, they have a “separation of church and state” philosophy for communications and actionable stuff.

Proactively blocking out time for creating – rather than just responding – is a key tactic of productive creatives.

I've interviewed a number of people who literally quit (or minimize) their email program at certain times during the day. For example, Piers Fawkes, founder and editor of PSFK, reserves a good chunk of his morning – from 7-10am every day – to do research and digest the day’s trends and news prior to going through his email. Proactively blocking out time for creating – rather than just responding – is a key tactic of productive creatives.

You should also consider keeping the “actionable” stuff in your life separate from your email and calendars. Whether through post-it notes, action management programs (like ActionMethod.com), or even using a separate color pen or notebook for items requiring activity, try to manage your action steps in a sacred space. Doing so will empower you to prioritize and focus on the stuff you want (and need) to do, rather than living a life reacting to whatever flows in.

by Scott Belsky

Source: 99%

A new wrinkle on outsourcing

Posted by: Steve Hamm on September 02, 2005

Earlier this year, when I was gathering info for what turned into a cover story about IBM, I asked CEO Sam Palmisano whether IBM would consider handling other companies’ sales operations for them. It made sense to me. IBM’s sales force is one of its most valuable assets. You would think that others would like to tap into that expertise. His answer was that he hadn’t considered that possibility, though IBM later pointed me toward an example in Japan where they were running a client’s e-commerce operations.

Outsourcing of sales may not be top of mind for IBM, but it is for authors Erin Anderson and Bob Trinkle, who just published a book on the topic, Outsourcing the Sales Function. They argue that the long established practice in some industries of using manufacturer’s representatives should be adopted much more broadly and aggressively by companies throughout the economy. 

The authors believe that companies can get improved results from outsourcing sales because OSPs (outsourced sales professionals)--a term they coined--can bring a level of consistency and best practices to the job that's difficult to achieve with an in-house sales staff. They believe that many companies don't understand the true costs of their sales operations because many of the expenses are mingled in with other administratve expenses, making it seem--incorrectly--that it would be more expensive to outsource the function. 

Their poster boy for sales outsourcing is chipmaker Intel. After it bought Digital Equipment Corp.'s semiconductor business in 1998, it used outside sales organizations to sell three lines of products in markets where its normal salesforce had no experience and few contacts. The result was a fast takeoff and strongly growing businesss.

About 11% of all business-to-business commerce in the United States is handled through manufacturer's reps, but Anderson and Trinkle believe it would be much higher if business leaders understood the plusses. "We believe we have found a major inefficiency that's purely psychological," says Anderson, a professor of marketing at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France. "Companies are willing to outsource their back office operations. So, why not the salesforce?"

Turns out, it's partly a chicken and egg situation. Because there isn't that much demand for manufacturer's reps, there is not an abundant supply of them. In this era where no stone is being left unturned in the effort by companies to operate more efficiently, it seems likely this logjam will be removed in fairly short order.

Source: Bloomberg Businessweek