CONGRATULATIONS IF YOU’VE PICKED up this book because you’ve received a promotion to sales management. I am sure that promotion is well deserved because you have been a top salesperson for years, producing consistent and profitable sales results.
It could also be that you are a sales leader who’s been leading sales teams for years and want to learn new ideas to motivate your team.
In either case, before you read any more pages, I’d like you to slow down and ask yourself if you really want to be a sales manager. Do you like sales management? I know this might sound like a crazy question but I’ve seen more than one salesperson accept a promotion to sales management that turned out to be a promotion to misery.
Years ago, I was hired by a company for a large engagement to provide our Ei Selling® program. After the training, this company opted for the sales managers to teach and reinforce all of the key learnings. Unfortunately, most of the sales managers failed miserably.
The biggest reason for failing was that many of the sales managers didn’t like conducting consistent one-on-one coaching sessions with their teams. They were fully equipped with training tools to debrief sales calls, pre-brief sales calls, set up role-plays, and drill skills with their teams. But reinforcement takes time and these sales managers always gave in to the pull of instant gratification and kept prioritizing other things over coaching.
These sales managers weren’t bad people. Like many successful salespeople, they’d accepted the role of sales management when they really preferred the role of a seller. These sales managers simply liked selling and closing deals better than they liked developing salespeople.
Know Thyself
Apply the emotional intelligence skill of self-awareness. Self-awareness is knowing and understanding yourself. It’s the conscious knowledge of one’s own feelings, motives, and desires. It’s the mega soft skill, because that which you are not aware of you cannot change.
Carve out quiet time, ask and answer the following questions to make sure you want to take on—or continue—the role of sales leadership:
• Will/do you enjoy your new role as a sales leader as much as your role of an individual seller?
• Will/do you enjoy your current role as sales manager? What are possible blind spots that could be or are affecting your success as a sales leader?
• Are you willing to go through the steep learning curve required to learn the new set of skills (such as hiring, training, coaching, and holding salespeople accountable) to lead a team?
If the answer is no, that’s okay. I admire CFOs but I certainly don’t want to be one. Know thyself.
Hiring and Selection Skills
Sales managers are promoted because of their business development skills. Many love the thrill of finding new opportunities, holding provocative sales conversations, and closing business deals. You are still prospecting in your role as a sales manager, but the target changes. You are now focused on prospecting for the best sales talent. Instead of qualifying prospects, you now have to fine-tune your interviewing skills to qualify potential sales candidates. Should this prospective candidate even be in your people pipeline? As a sales manager, the most important deals you’ll close are the ones around hiring great salespeople.
Self-awareness questions: How energized are you about filling a salespeople pipeline? Are you as motivated by “hunting” for potential sales candidates as you are about identifying new prospects? What’s your level of commitment toward learning new skills such as recruiting, running behavior-based interviews, reference checks, and vetting resumes? Are you as excited about closing a new sales hire as a new prospect?
Training and Coaching Skills
Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, says it best: “When you take on a leadership role, it’s no longer about you, it’s about them.” You may have been a great seller but, unfortunately, your great selling skills are of no use or value if you can’t transfer these skills, habits, and attitude to your sales team.
If I didn’t enjoy teaching and coaching, I wouldn’t have signed up for sales management or entered the field of speaking, training, and coaching. Teaching looks like a lot of fun—and it is. It also can be tedious, as mastery requires a lot of repetition and practice to elevate a salesperson’s selling skills. The coaching sessions require a lot of patience.
Self-awareness questions: How jazzed are you about pre-briefing sales calls, debriefing sales calls, conducting role-plays, and more role-plays? Do you have the delayed gratification skills, the patience, to put in the work to develop salespeople? Would you rather be closing the deal yourself or teaching others how to do it? How motivated are you to put in the work to learn how to be a great teacher and coach?
Accountability
Great sales managers are comfortable setting high standards for the sales team and holding them accountable to metrics and outcomes. Sales leaders are always raising the bar of excellence because they know their best competitors are constantly raising the bar. But raising the bar can raise objections from the sales team. This pushback happens even when new goals, systems, or standards will help your sales team be more effective. Anyone reading this chapter still fighting the “I don’t want to put it in my CRM” excuse? Salespeople are humans first—and as you will learn, human beings don’t like change.
Accountability often requires having the tough-love, truth-telling conversations with salespeople and pointing out blind spots or not-so-blind spots. When you accept the role of sales management, you accept the role of growing people and profits. It’s similar to being a good parent. The best parents understand that raising kids isn’t a popularity contest and refuse to cave when their child says, “None of the other kids’ moms expect them to . . . everyone else gets to . . .”
Self-awareness and reality testing questions: How comfortable are you holding salespeople accountable to metrics and outcomes? Do you have the self-confidence to stay the course when your sales team wants to take an easier, less productive course of action? How committed are you to learning the new feedback skills required to hold truth-telling coaching conversations?
Balancing People and Profits
My experience in working with hundreds of sales organizations has exposed me to different types of sales managers. Typically sales managers fall into one of three buckets: the field sales manager, the corporate sales manager, and the all-around sales manager.
Field sales managers are those sales leaders who stand by their sales team no matter what. They defend any and all actions of their sales team, refusing to understand or endorse corporate initiatives. They don’t really understand or care how the company makes money. Field managers enjoy a lot of love from their sales team but also limit their company’s growth and profits.
The corporate sales manager is . . . corporate. These sales managers never leave the comfort of their offices. They spend their time buried in reports, analyzing data, and attending internal meetings. Little or no time is invested in talking to their sales team. They are kind of like an athletic coach trying to coach a team from an air-conditioned suite, rather than on the field or on the court. Because they never leave the office, they are clueless about the real demands and needs of their prospects and customers.
The all-around sales manager “gets it.” This sales leader achieves that hard balance of presenting the sales team’s issues to fellow executives while communicating and enforcing corporate objectives to the sales team. They are good at managing up and down, earning trust and respect from all parties. The all-around sales manager is good at achieving the balance of managing people and profits.
Self-awareness questions: What type of sales manager are you? Do you enjoy achieving that fine balance of meeting company strategic initiatives and the real-world needs of your sales team? Are you committed to learning the new skills required for managing up and down?
Get Out of the Office
Many years ago, when I was vice president of sales, I was traveling with one of my top salespeople to meet an important customer in Florida. She was a terrific salesperson and on more than one occasion had asked if our company could offer a bundling option for our customers around a particular line of business. I was buried in other work and had given her the same answer without any action. “Yeah, that’s a great idea.”
Upon meeting with this customer, I asked why she wasn’t purchasing a specific line of business from us and the customer responded that it was because one of our competitors offered a bundling option. I’ll never forget the shocked look on my salesperson’s face when I replied, “Oh, we have a bundling option as well.” When I returned to the corporate office, I immediately put together a bundling option! That conversation was a great lesson for me. When I saw and heard firsthand that our client was taking her business elsewhere, it got my full attention. It made me realize that I was spending a little too much time in the “white house,” the corporate office, and not enough time in front of clients.
I was humbled and reminded of the power of accompanying salespeople on calls. It’s easy to get sucked into other demands but nothing is more important than meeting the people who write our paychecks—our customers.
Sales Process and Playbooks
A sales leader cannot scale revenues quickly without a duplicable sales process. Try constructing a building without blueprints. How many of you would feel confident purchasing a car where the manufacturer encouraged their staff to “do their own thing?” Unfortunately, it happens in sales organizations every day.
Study high-performance teams such as professional athletic teams and while you will have top athletes that have been playing the sport for years, every great sports team has a playbook, one that the players are expected to study and flawlessly execute. Can you imagine the response a rookie player would receive if he went up to the coach and said, “Hey, I’m more comfortable using the playbook that I was taught in college. Are you good with that, Coach?” That would be a very short conversation because professional coaches know you can’t coach twenty different playbooks. And neither can sales managers.
I’ve seen more than one company hire a process-averse sales manager, one who doesn’t believe in the power of a sales playbook. Their sales departments look like the Wild West because there are no defined metrics or approaches to winning the right business. Each salesperson is running his or her own playbook with varying results.
No defined playbook forces the sales team to enroll in the University of Hard Knocks. Most salespeople flunk out of this university, creating stagnant growth or excessive turnover.
I’ve also worked with sales managers who embrace process—they just didn’t want to be the ones to document their company’s sales process. I don’t blame them. It’s hard work; it’s detailed work. Coaching and training are fun, but the reality is you can’t coach and train unless you have a defined process from which to do so.
Sticking with the Script
Dan Flanagan is the chief sales officer for BluSky. They are a great success story as they have grown revenues from $20 million to $225 million in eight years and they are well on their way to $500 million.
This company does a lot of things right. They have a great sales culture—one they fiercely protect by hiring salespeople who play well with others and enjoy learning. They understand the power of team and they continue to invest big dollars in retreats and sales meetings to ensure their sales team is on the right page of their comprehensive sales playbook.
Dan learned the power of a sales playbook during his college years when he went door-to-door selling educational books for the Southwestern Company. Southwestern requires their young recruits to learn a script, and as Dan quickly learned, the successful sellers didn’t deviate from it. The “dropouts” from the program usually wanted to execute their own scripts, which didn’t achieve sales results. Dan took those early lessons into his role as chief sales officer, documenting his organization’s best sales practices.
Augment your efforts by tapping into sales management resources. Suzanne Paling, author of The Accidental Sales Manager, shares a lot of great tools and templates in her book that will help get you started. You don’t have to go it alone.
Self-awareness and reality testing questions: What is your attitude toward installing sales processes and systems? Have you invested the time to document scripts, questions, selling stages, and approaches? Do you rebel against process or embrace processes that can be measured, adapted, and changed? (If you don’t want to be in charge of installing and documenting sales processes, that’s okay. But do yourself a favor and stay or return to your role as a seller.)
Sales managers, it all starts with you. Sales leadership is rewarding, but only if the responsibilities of the job align with your strengths and motivators. Apply the emotional intelligence skill of self-awareness and make sure that you want to be a sales leader.
If your answer is still yes after reading this chapter, great! Let’s dive into building a high-performance and emotionally intelligent sales team. There are three areas I will cover in this book:
1. Hiring and selecting emotionally intelligent salespeople.
2. Tools and tips for teaching your sales team the soft skills needed to win business and retain business.
3. Developing key emotional intelligence skills that will help you be a more effective sales coach and leader.