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1. What is a Sales Manager?

A sales manager is responsible for leading and guiding a team of sales representatives within an organization. They set sales targets and quotas, develop sales plans, analyze data, conduct sales training, advise team members, and participate in the hiring process. 

Sales managers also maintain contact with distributors and dealers. They analyze sales statistics collected by their staff, both to determine sales potential and product/store inventory needs and to track customer preferences.

2. Roles and responsibilities of a Sales Manager

A sales manager is responsible for managing the company's business plan. They train high-performance sales teams and lead to generate revenue and meet customer needs. 

To understand a sales manager's responsibilities, it is important to understand their position within the organization and the implicit roles and characteristics they exhibit. 

The sales manager's main goal is to meet the company's sales targets through the activities of their sales representatives. In other words, they leverage the direct reports' power, boosting the sales force's productivity and extracting the best performance from each employee.

A sales manager achieves this through a range of methods. For example:

- Taking responsibility for coaching and advising their representatives to improve performance, as well as recruiting and training new sales representatives.

- Achieving goals through effective planning, setting sales targets, analyzing past performance data and forecasting future performance.  

- Ensuring the sales department works cross-functionally with executives from other departments. For example, collaborating with marketing to generate new customer lead sources and expand target customer bases, or with R&D teams to ensure meeting customer needs.

A sales manager simultaneously plays three main roles:

- Staff management: Recruiting, developing and nurturing a team.

- Customer management: Strategies to promote customer engagement. 

- Business management: Directing the business.

3. Characteristics of a Successful Sales Manager

The characteristics, skills, and talents of a successful sales manager differ from those of successful sales representatives. In practice, most sales representatives make poor managers. The main characteristics of a sales manager focus less on sales skills and more on communication skills that enable leadership. 

Rather than doing it themselves, they teach and guide others, allowing for others' sales efforts. They develop leadership, recruiting and training abilities while ensuring their team uses accurate sales behaviors and activities to meet sales goals.

Key characteristics, skills, and traits of a successful sales manager include:

- Communication skills: They listen first and speak second. They do not publicly or privately chastise others. They understand the message they convey to their team, how it's conveyed, and how it's received.

- Honesty and trustworthiness: They never ask representatives to do anything unethical, illegal, or against company core values. 

- Ability to build relationships with peers, multi-functional partners, and senior management: They are committed to helping others succeed.

- Empathy and understanding of customer/client perspectives 

- Ability to unite a team under a shared vision and knowing what motivates each member

- Analytical skills: They use data-driven reports to drive sales training and empower representatives to own their opportunity pipelines. They understand pricing, profitability, and discount impacts. 

- Effective time management skills.

A sales manager focuses more on developing leadership and people skills to guide their team, rather than individual sales abilities. Communication, integrity and analysis are especially important for the management role.

4. Daily work of a Sales Manager

Here are the typical duties of a sales manager, including recurring daily, weekly, monthly, and annual tasks. Exact activities may vary by industry, company and cultural team:

- Set rigorous, objective sales targets and implementation plans for representatives.  
- Meet with representatives weekly to review performance, progress, and goals. [Weekly]
- Provide performance evaluations for each representative individually once or twice a year. [Biannually/annually]  
- Personally coach representatives via phone and potential assistance sessions to improve sales performance. [Weekly]
- Develop sales processes.
- Ensure representatives accurately use sales technologies like CRM.
- Plan and implement training programs. Organize regular skills training with internal or external sales trainers. [Monthly]  
- Plan and lead weekly team sales meetings. [Weekly]
- Organize in-house team-building events. [Monthly]
- Recruit and train new sales representatives.
- Motivate and incentivize the sales team through monetary and intrinsic tactics like sales competitions, profit-generating packages, and awards.

Customer Needs Management

- Maintain a deep understanding of customer needs and track preferences.
- Handle customer issues and complaints regarding sales and service.  
- Provide input when establishing and adjusting pricing and discount plans.
- Provide advanced negotiation expertise.
- Connect the company with field customers and sales employees in the industry.

In summary, a sales manager juggles personnel, client, and business management responsibilities through regular touchpoints and process oversight to develop their team toward revenue objectives. Communication and analytical skills are key.