It’s not easy to manage a small salesforce. There are only five ways to manage a small sales team, and all of them have warts.
Many business owners see the cost benefits of an empty seat of a sales leader or attempting to squeeze in time to lead the sales team among with their 35 other jobs.
The hard cost savings may be obvious, but the soft costs of not having a true sales leader greatly exceed any hard cost savings. 
Only you know the real cost of these items, but here are just a few of the unintended consequences of a company lacking quality and consistent sales leadership.
- Lost deals that could have been closed. The lifetime value of these deals could be millions.
- Salesforce turnover. Sure, every salesperson on the planet prefers to be unmanaged, but expert management equates to higher commissions, and every salesperson votes with their wallet. If they can’t make enough working for you, they will go somewhere else that runs a tighter ship.
- It’s tough to get business owners to admit it, but the most significant cost of an unmanaged or undermanaged salesforce is the stress it causes the business owner. There’s always that sinking feeling that you could be doing much better.
- Never in the history of business has a CEO awakened and said, “Gosh, today’s going to be one of the best days ever because I get to manage the sales team.” Crossing sales management off the CEOs to-do list has value to all other areas of the business.
- Margin stress. Undermanaged salespeople cut worse deals than well-managed salespeople. This causes unnecessary margin erosion and stresses every area of the business.
It’s always difficult to justify spending hard money on soft costs. However, after helping hundreds of business owners tune up their sales departments, it became obvious that soft costs can be turned into hard profits.
