As the world of sales and revenue teams continues to evolve, so do the roles managing them. The typical sales manager and sales leaders I used to see have evolved.
You can no longer be a dashboard manager sitting at your desk behind your computer screen. You can no longer be a zombie walking the sales floor looking for the next cold call to pick up so you can run over to the rep and try to coach. And finally, you can no longer be the micromanager wanting to push your reps to call 2-3x a day the last week of the quarter looking for the contract.
Then you throw in Covid, selling in a work from home environment, sales training, a sales stack, and a revenue operations team into the mix, you have a recipe for disruption.
The average salesperson and, for that matter, the average sales leader is no longer acceptable. The high-growth companies like my friends at Outreach.io have really focused on improving the human skills of all their departments and teams, ironically via automated workflows and AI-powered sales engagement and intelligence.
On the sales side, they’ve started using a term I really appreciate, “Revenue Innovator”. I love this. It encompasses so much more than the sales team and “innovator” speaks to our inner passions of loving what we do as a career.
Now, they went even further to explain there are 3 Types of Revenue Innovators:
- Revenue Innovator Leader
- Revenue Innovator Manager
- Revenue Innovator Rep
Then they started to explain the specifics of where each role could focus their energies:
- Revenue Innovator Leaders have financial and data literacy and lead with empathy.
- Revenue Innovator Managers ingest data to inform actions, coach in hybrid formats
- Revenue Innovator Reps take a digital-first approach, has a data-driven mindset
There is actually a ton more in the report they created which they have made available for free, here. Be sure to check out the 3 circles highlighting the skills of each Revenue Innovator mentioned above. There’s more than what I shared and they made it look much prettier than I ever could ever do.
Don’t be a rep, don’t be a manager, don’t be a leader. Be a revenue innovator.
Have a great 2022!
