What a world of shifting business currents we live in! How can you be expected to meet your sales management goals when the tides of change have become a constant condition? Sometimes these tides move in steadily, and other times they surprise us as they suddenly surge up from unknown waters. For some reason, though, they never seem to pause and rest. When these tides of change do occur, it can often be a challenge just to keep from getting swept away by their momentum. It may be hard to visualize their direction or predict where they will carry you and your team, even for a transient period. You hope, with a sense of desperation, that the tide is moving predictably toward a new reality, but that may not be the case. All this uncertainty has placed a new burden on sales managers. We can resist these forces of change or we can leverage them for greater gain. But we first have to know where they are and where they are going.

One of the first driving forces of change is technology. Not very long ago, your customers knew about the products or services your organization offered through trade shows, promotions, or personal contacts with sales professionals. Now, however, technology has given customers the ability to search out providers from anywhere on the globe. With such an enlarged supplier pool, customers are demanding multiple channels of access to your corporation and multiple tiers of support. This has led to vendor reduction plans, strategic supplier alliances, and meet-me-in-the-middle selection processes. Customers want to know less about the features and functions of your offering and more about what your entire organization can do to solve their perceived business problems.

The next driving force is the pace of business. It has sped up so quickly that there is little, if any, time to rest on your laurels. A new idea or a new approach to your customer base quickly becomes outdated by the changing demands of the addressable marketplace. If you can’t, or won’t, meet the changing expectations of those who buy from you, they will switch to another provider of similar value before you know what’s happening. This switchability means that companies and organizations must be in a state of continual reinvention just to stay even.

You can also add in such factors as globalization, evolving competition that looks very different from traditional competitors, shifting lifestyles and demographics, increasing mobility of employees and customers, mass customization and markets of one, addressable markets that are getting segmented and fragmented, etc. And let’s not forget the migration to virtual or home-office-based selling.

While all this has been occurring, changes in the economy, along with environmental realities, have led organizations to rethink their bureaucratic structure and start paring away at perceived excesses. The result has been the elimination of many layers of management that were considered ‘‘translation layers.’’ These critical personnel spent the majority of their time messaging information coming to them from above or below and translating the language into a format that would allow it to be understood by those next in line to receive it. The result of the elimination of these layers has been a flattening of the pyramid model for most businesses. Many large corporations went from as many as sixteen layers of management down to four or five. But without these translation layers, the surviving managers have been called upon to fill the communications or analysis vacuum and do the translations themselves—sometimes in functional areas of the business they knew little or nothing about.

The end result is that today’s sales managers spend less time improving the selling skills of their salespeople or becoming personally involved in the sales process than they did in the past. Today, the effective sales manager is the one who thinks and acts like a member of the organization’s management team. He or she provides critical situational realities to strategists and decision makers while structuring the organization’s requirements into a format that will be adaptable by those at the point of customer interface.

To meet this challenge, the effective sales manager must competently assume many roles and, at times, even think up new ones that will lead to greater success. Past personal sales success is of less importance to the organization than the ability to analyze, conceptualize, and strategize. The sales manager of today must understand the changing marketplace, the competition, the general business environment, suppliers, unique characteristics of all team members, cross-organizational support mechanisms, and, most important, the mission and vision of the organization as set out by the leadership team. In other words, to be a successful sales manager, you must be ‘‘the smartest kid on the block.’’