Effective Performance As A National Sales Manager For Solar Company

1.Demonstrated consistent effective performance within your own organisation or a client organisation if appropriate

2.Used your skills and expertise in leading people and managing change in a professional and ethical manner in accordance with the CMI Code of Conduct & Practice

3.Learned from your experience, being committed to ensuring your Continuing Professional Development (CPD).

I have completed my MBA and currently studying law. The organization that I am presently working for is Solar Company as the National Sales Officer. My designation in the company is that of the National Sales Manager and the scope of my responsibilities are fairly large in the company. In regards to my educational qualification, I did my Masters in Business Administration from the Ballarat University. I started my Juris Doctor in 2017 and finished it in 2019. My job role as the national sales manager for Solar Company has been challenging and varied at the same time. I have participated in tasks that encompassed the all-round performance requirements for the company. Solar is a professional, scientific and technical organizations that provide various types of solution to its client organizations.

I have been a high-achieving national sales manager for the company. In solar industry I have been able to garner 8 years of essential experience. I have been able to develop skills that help me to attract newer customer and boost revenue earning capacity of my organization. I consider my essential talent as being able to deliver sales that are impactful. Moreover, I have been able to develop skills for effectively educating and motivating my team members. My essential job functions are establishing and adjusting the selling prices through cost monitoring and analysis of supply and demand. I also negotiate and close agreements with the larger customers of the company. I take part in meeting customers provide sales presentations that can essentially help the needs of the customers. I have to take part in the effective management of my team. Moreover, during my long run in the company I was also involved with training and developing sales leaders that were exceptional. I also take part in drafting plans for sales and help the company to form effective future strategies. My job role is as challenging as the functional activities of the organization itself.

My key achievements as the national sales manager of the Solar Company have been many. This has boosted my confidence in the industry and at the same time provided me with experience that can be said to the most valuable assets I have garnered in the industry. I was able to establish and adjust selling prices through effectively monitoring supply and demand, costs and competitive forces on consecutive occasions. I have been consistent in negotiating and closing agreements with high profile clients. Many of these agreements have resulted in providing the company ground breaking productivity and profitability. I have been consistently successful in the maintenance of budgets, quotas and the effective maintenance of regional territories for my subordinate team members. Some of my most remarkable achievements have been predicting essential shifts in the market both at a regional and the national level through the usage of my knowledge of the market essentials and factors governing the market. I have managed national level sales programs, effectively supervised 7 sales representatives. I have helped the organization to form effective sales strategies that have resulted in subsequent high margin of profits for the company.

Key Achievements

I entered Solar as a team manager in the sales department of the company. In the last 18 months of my stay at Solar I have come across many opportunities to excel at my job role. I have succeeded in making most of them count and increased my potential for further excellence in the industry and my future corporate life. I have been able to provide consistent performances to the organization in the last eighteen months. One of my first significant achievements was becoming the employee of the month in only the third month after my inception into the organization. This helped me to garner much required respect among my colleagues and managers in the company. However, at the same time this also created a lot of expectations in regards to my performances moving forward. I struggled to keep up the levels of my performance and provided consistent performances. After two more months I was again able to become the employee of the month. Moving forward, I created a marketing plan that considered in providing various changes to the existing marketing strategy that was being utilized by the company. The company was able to garner 20% more revenue than before after the strategy was implemented in the very first month. The profitability later increased further when it was implemented for a longer time. I was able to suggest changes to some of the operational areas that helped the company to improve its operational effectiveness. I suggested that special responsibilities to be given to the senior team members to assist the juniors in the initial stages of their work. For this the seniors are to be given a certain level of leniency. This worked greatly towards improving the performances of the teams. The senior members got greatly motivated and accepted the changes as their work load was slightly reduced due to the implementation of this measure. In the later months I became consecutive employee of the month and manger of the months for 4 months. I became the national sales manager for the company. In order to recognize me as an employee that have led to the implementation of innovative ideas within the operational framework, I was provided the most innovative employee award when I completed 9 months in the company. However, one of the bigger achievements was becoming an effective manager. I was able to help my team become one of the best performing teams in the organization. As a manager I was able to highly motivate my subordinates towards giving better performances in every aspects of their job. I assisted my subordinates and even by peers not only in regards to their professional matter but the severe personal matters that were potentially dangerous towards the progress of their professional lives. After I became the National Sales Manager, I was able to help my team become one of the most effective teams in the organization. The performances of my subordinates changed for the better and this resulted in further profitability for the organizations.

Leading People towards Outcomes

As a result of my achievements, I was given the increased responsibility of handling sensitive issues that could have led to the organization suffering from losses or great profitability opportunities. Hence, I had to handle clients that were unhappy with the services and wanted to cancel the contracts in the middle of the projects. I handled these types of cases and was able to save some important projects that could have otherwise ended in the organization suffering huge losses. I had emerged successful after negotiating effectively with clients that were completely demotivated in regards to their relationships with the company. I was subsequently awarded the national sales manager of the month on two occasions. Upon completion of my first year as the employee of the company I received the 2^nd most important performer for the company for the year on a national basis. Thus, I was able to consistently perform on a yearly basis. I was able to garner much essential experience and the achievements served to increase my confidence further. At the end I was able to turn around the business of the sales department of the company. It was much important step towards the all-round development of the department and the profit margins generated from the department were 20% more than the previous year.

As the national sales manager I had to motivate and lead people towards achieving significant outcomes. These outcomes were both in regards to their personal growth and the growth that they can provide to the company. As a leader I mostly focused towards motivating my subordinates in regard to the creation of short-term and long term personal growth goals. As mentioned previously I entered the organization as a manager. I focused towards achieving significant small scale growth goals initially. I lead my small team to success and achieved the distinction of the best performing team of the department in just the third month as a team leader. My team became the best team in sales and I was awarded the employee of the month in just the third month of being a team leader. I usually focused towards setting essential goals for both my team and myself (Romme et al. 2015). I used the senior members of my team to effectively guide the juniors. Hence, I focused on the exact motivations that were required for my team members. I catered to the queries and requirements of all the team members individually and understood their specific requirements from the job. Hence, I became close to the members to motivate them further. I helped them identify their specific goals which in turn helped them to perform better.

I understood that although money was a good motivator for work, different people have different perspectives on money and its usage. Hence, I focused on motivating people not only in regards to the money involved with performances but factors such as experience, team bonding, self-realization and survival in the sometimes harsh corporate conditions (Vakilbashi et al. 2017). However, I did not perform any unethical acts towards leading my team. I always focused on nurturing integrity, honesty and positive attitudes among my team members. I was self-motivated and focused on sales leadership. Later on I kept the same attitude when I was given the bigger role of the national sales manager. The benefits I received from nurturing these motivational and result oriented attitudes among my subordinates was to gain their trust and respect. My subordinates began to perform for the team and the organization. I helped them to understand that they would have to consider the organization as an extended version of themselves (Oster and Braaten 2017). The team members began to perform as individuals, as team members and as essential assets of the organization. Rather than reminding them of their duties towards the organization I focused on the responsibilities that they have concerning their peers and colleagues, the organization and the clients. I led by example and focused on honesty, integrity and team work. This also helped me to improve myself when larger responsibilities were given to me. I used the man management techniques that I garnered as a manger to manage the clients. This improved as I went on to handle more clients. My skills also helped me to devise strategies through which the motivated employees can be utilized for providing better productivity. Hence, I was able to form effective strategies for the company.

I had to develop few essential sub-skills in order to achieve the key outcomes throughout my employment in Solar. The three sub-skills I developed are:

1. Man management
2. Motivational leadership
3. Empathetic team management

Man management skills are important for effectively managing team members. It helps to generate a group motivation that can nurture essential bonding between the members of a team. Since, I worked as a Sales manager for the past eight years it was extremely essential for me to develop man management skills as it would help me manage the people who were working under my guidance. As a sales manager I had the responsibility of training and developing leadership skills among people. Now it is obvious that guiding and managing a group of people is not an easy task. People have their own opinions, emotions, and principles, values that makes them unique and enables their individual functioning (Bolman and Deal 2017). Henceforth, adjusting and guiding distinctive people with varied characteristics required me develop man management skills. There were a number of methods that I applied in order to implement man management skills. For instance, one of the most basic yet important method is to maintain a good communication flow among all the members of the team. Communication is a two way process and in order to channel a good communication it is important that the flow of information comes from both the sides. However, being a sales manager it was my responsibility to encourage people to have an open communication process within the team. Henceforth, an open communication session was organized in every one week so that the team mates could put forward their problems and clear their doubts related to the job.

Another sub skill that I developed over the period was motivational leadership, now as mentioned above it was my job role as a sales manager that I had to train and develop other sales leaders for the purpose of enhancing their skills even more. Henceforth, motivation comes in as a very significant element when training and developing someone’s skills (Brown 2014). Therefore, I developed motivational leadership skills in order to efficiently fulfill my job role as a Sales Manager. The methods that I adopted in order to implement this skill included analyzing the sales leaders and the things that motivate them. It is important to know what motivates an individual as each individual have distinctive motivations in them. Therefore, critically analyzing the team mates and then identifying their distinctive motivations is a key method that I applied. Once identified it was easy for me to inspiring them to perform better and achieve the objectives they aim in life. Another method applied was appreciation and praising the team mates. Praising and appreciating an individual for his or her good work or attempt motivates that individual to further perform better. Henceforth, I implemented the method of appreciating people in order to motivate them.

In order to achieve key outcomes during my employment in Solar I developed another sub skill and that was to channel an empathetic team management skills. Management itself is a tricky role to execute since it involves supervising people with varied characteristics. Now one of the leadership skills that is extremely important and works best in managing people is showing empathy or implementing empathetic team management (Prakash et al. 2015). The methods that I applied to execute this was to get to know more about the team members. Knowing more about your team members did not only help me get an insight about their feelings and thinking towards their job but also enabled me to efficiently channel empathetic team management.

Now from the above discussion it can be said that over the period as a National Sales Manager in Solar I developed and learned an ample amount of skills that acted as principal learning lessons. These learning lessons would help me in my career progressively. Some of the key learning lessons that I acquired over the period were –

Working as a National Sales Manager I had the responsibility of administering varied group of people. During that procedure I learned that each individual have their own unique strengths, weaknesses, characteristics, opinion, values and so on. In order to apply management techniques, I learned that adapting according to the varied people and environment is extremely significant. Applying a singular leadership pattern or strategy to guide and administer people is not very appreciable. Henceforth, I learned a key lesson of amending your leadership strategies and techniques according to the people you are dealing with and the situation you are in.

Another key learning lesson that I acquired during my employment in Solar was that of developing skill to work in difficult circumstances. Now it is quite obvious that difficult situations or circumstances are bound to arise in any working environment. However, prior to my working experience I did not possess the ability to handle difficult circumstances and it is extremely essential for any manager to develop this skill. However, as I gained more and more experience in this field I was accustomed to handle any difficult situation with ease. I developed the ability to be flexible to varied difficult situations and how to handle them without putting too much pressure on other team members.

In addition to this, another principle learning lesson that I gained was to stay positive. Being positive in your attitude simplifies any difficult circumstance. Additionally, it also motivates other people to perform better and enables them to have a positive mindset in accomplishing a given task. Whereas having a negative attitude towards a task will only make the task to more difficult to accomplish. I also learned that adopting a positive approach enables to accomplish the task more efficiently. Negative attitude can only give out negative results and nothing good can come out of it. Positive attitude and positive approach is a key element in accomplishing any task and also to inspire other team members towards betterment. Henceforth these are the few principal learning lessons that I gained over the period of my employment in Solar.

The expertise that I have been able to garner in this short period of time will definitely help me in my future corporate endeavors. Hence, I am confident that I can essentially use whatever I have been able to learn during these 18 months for better realization of future opportunities. However, I can definitely say that my learning is not complete. Leadership is a multifaceted discipline and has many complex aspects that can only be mastered through experience. In this regards it is important to gain experience and focus on learning things that matter most. I was a sales leader in the company and learned many things about buyers decision and client buying psychology and sales maximization. However, the future things I want to learn are opportunity creation for sales, psychological targeting of the clients, effective promotion and other similar technical skills in the field of sales. However, the technical aspects of my work are not the only thing I want to learn as I want to focus more on being an optimally effective leader.

My aims as far the organization is concerned is primarily, to gain essential experience. I want to work more for Solar and want to become the National Sales Director for the company. I want to gain as much expertise in sales that I am able to reach the highest designation of the sales department of the company. However, I would like to move to other departments as well and also gain subsequent expertise about operations, management and finance. Hence, I can broaden my job profile to include significant expertise in all aspects of organizational functions. I want to become one of the directors of the company in the future. Later on moving forward in my corporate life I would want to become an organizational sales expert and provide valuable sales tips and motivational leadership skills in seminars and organizational events. I would ultimately like to start my own business venture and develop it to reach further heights.

In order to achieve the following I would like to first garner as much effective experience as possible. Moreover, the degree from the Institute of Management and Leadership (IML) of Australia will give me further confidence. I will merge my essential learning from the course I took at the institute with my experience. I am sure this combination will guide me to greater success in my future. The degree is important as I believe that it will give validation to my efforts in both the academic and organizational levels. I will use to its full potential whatever I have been able to learn and will be able to learn throughout my organizational life.

References

Bolman, L.G. and Deal, T.E., 2017. Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership. John Wiley & Sons.

Brown, C., 2014. The Effects of Emotional Intelligence (EI) and Leadership Style on Sales Performan 

Oster, C.A. and Braaten, J., 2017. Psychological Safety: A Work Environment Characteristic in a High Reliability Organization.

Prakash, A., Héritier, A., Koremenos, B. and Brousseau, E., 2015. Organizational Leadership and Collective Action in International Governance: An Introduction. Global Policy, 6(3), pp.234-236.

Romme, A.G.L., Avenier, M.J., Denyer, D., Hodgkinson, G.P., Pandza, K., Starkey, K. and Worren, N., 2015. Towards common ground and trading zones in management research and practice. British Journal of Management, 26(3), pp.544-559.

Vakilbashi, A., Obumnaeme, O.E., Zamil, N.A.M. and Mokhber, M., 2017. The Impact of Ethical Decision Making in the Individual and Organizational Context. Advanced Science Letters, 23(9), pp.9337-9341.