What are you paid to do - cont'd.

Found this today at The Business of Print It's managed by Mike Philie, a vice president and consultant in the Print Consulting Services Group of NAPL,

We spoke about expectations; as the new sales managers, what does your boss, owner, management team expect from you? Only two of them felt somewhat comfortable about knowing the expectations that lie ahead. Not a good thing.

Alignment in all that we do is a critical component of successful companies. How can we work together as a team if we don't fully understand our goals and objectives?

The problem is that sometimes no one in the company has a goal more than "Get more.. work or customers or money" or "We've got to improve our customer service or marketing or production efficiency or most often "People have got to work harder!"

That's fair enough. But without knowing who has to do what, when to achieve those goals, it's just time wasting bs.

The job of a sales manager is to oversee the sales process and make sure the team has what they need to succeed. But it takes time to do and time to think and time to listen. And time is the thing we don't have plenty of.