Manager Onboarding with a Twist

As much as we all agree that sales managers are critical to driving growth, across the membership there’s actually little consensus as to how to go about maximizing manager effectiveness internally. And, in light of the great deal of change occurring inside member organizations in recent months, properly onboarding newly minted sales managers has become a hot button topic for many.

We all know the stakes are high for first-line sales manager failure—according to one member company the average cost of a failed manager for them is nearly $4 million. So, it’s critical to put our best foot forward to support folks that are new to the world of managing sales people.

But who is responsible for this development? Senior sales executives? The training organization?

At Bombardier Aerospace, they use peer networks to aid in manager development. By organizing their front line leadership into peer groups, it not only allows new managers, but managers of all tenure to be exposed to different approaches and philosophies employed across the organization.

To accomplish this, Bombardier organizes and facilitates “peer consulting cohorts“. These are groups of managers organized from across internal silos, tasked with pushing one another’s thinking and developing novel approaches to real-world business problems.

To summarize, each month a different manager from the cohort will play the role of a “client” and bring a particularly difficult deal to his cohort for consulting advice. And, while the session is based on an actual deal that the manager is currently working with one of their sales reps, it’s also meant to be a kind of role play. The “client manager”, just like any client in a consulting engagement, requests a specific kind of feedback from their “consultant” manager peers (whether that’s brainstorming on how to advance that particular deal or input on how they might effectively brainstorm with their sales rep for that given customer account).

Worth noting, this isn’t just a regularly scheduled manager “conversation hour”. In order for these ideation sessions to really work, they’ve got to have a formal structure and a clear goal—otherwise chances are it would devolve into an unfocused, non-productive gripe session.

For Bombardier, it’s about creatively pushing managers’ thinking to increase deal size and scope, likelihood to close, and also help their less tenured folks leverage the collective knowledge of the manager community.

SEC Members, to learn more about Bombardier’s Peer Consulting Cohorts, review the best practice and listen to the event replay. Also, read the key findings on building innovative sales managers and visit the Developing Managers topic center for world-class practices on driving manager effectiveness. For ideas on how to design and facilitate sales manager innovation workshops, download the Ideation Toolkit.