Leading Growth

14Cadence

A CADENCE IS an operating tempo. Much like in a musical performance, it outlines what a sales leader needs do to reach their goals by ensuring that individual salespeople hit their targets. With a cadence in place, you will have a much easier time handling one of the most difficult roles in business: sales management.

Unless you've had a sales manager that used a cadence, you may not have any idea what to do, when to do it, and how to manage your own work. The salesperson who finds themselves promoted into a sales management role often finds the work to be so different from what they know that they decide to keep the title but keep selling. These managers spend much of their day running around trying to close deals, something consultant Neil Rackham described as “buying a dog and barking yourself.”

Your cadence allows you to build a calendar of events that ensures you stay on track throughout your sales year. Like all disciplines, it prevents you from being reactive and running from fire to fire, a practice that makes it impossible to do the proactive work that will improve your growth rate. Whether you call it a cadence or an operating tempo, the more you work in a disciplined, focused way, the better your results—and your team's results.

Some of the pieces of your new cadence will be familiar from Chapter 8. However, here we will spend more time exploring how to get everything onto a calendar. Our goal is to create a sense of control and perspective about what you ...