Top Three List for Sales Managers

In a post by, Dave Brock on the Customer Collective, he wrote that David Batup raised an interesting question on the Sales Best Practices group in LinkedIn. He posed the question: As a sales manager, what would your top 3 activities be?"

My top three would be:

1) Communicate with your team. Get feedback, give advice, brainstorm, find out what drives them, what scares them. Especially in today's virtual world, where you are rarely in the same room with your team, it is important to make the calls, text message, IM, I even write a blog and post info to a wiki so that I can communicate with them more.

2) Talk to your customers. Make sure they are happy. Get feedback on your products, your service and your team. Ask them about their problems, plans and goals. You could blog for customers as well or do a video on why customers should care about your company and put it up on your website.

3) Create a solid sales process that you can employ using a tool like Salesforce.com and then make sure everyone is using it. This will help them become better salespeople but more importantly it gives you the time to do the first two.

What are yours?