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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Key skills to make sales managers better developers of salespeople Get out of the firefighting business and into the business of developing the people who develop your profits. Successful salespeople rightfully become sales managers because of superior sales records. Yet too often these sales stars get stuck doing their old sales job while also trying to juggle their manager role, and too often companies neglect to train their sales managers how to excel as managers. That's the "sales management trap," and it's exactly what The Accidental Sales Manager addresses and solves. Full of helpful steps you can apply immediately?whether you're training a sales manager, or are one yourself?this practical guide reveals step-by-step methods sales managers can use to both learn their jobs and lead their teams. * Get tactics to stop burning time and exhausting yourself, while taking effective actions to use time better as a leader * Discover how to integrate learning into leading and make sales meetings an active conversation on what works and what doesn't * Author has a previous bestseller, The Accidental Salesperson Don't get caught in the "sales management trap" or, if you're in it, get the tools you need to escape it. Get The Accidental Sales Manager and lead your team to do what you do best: make sales, drive profits, and get winning results.
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Table of Contents
Cover
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INTRODUCTION
The Forgotten Rookie Syndrome
CHAPTER 1: Gnawing Your Way Out of the Sales Management Trap
Escape Mechanism 1: Plan Higher Level Tasks First
Escape Mechanism 2: Quit Fighting Fires You Didn’t Start
Escape Mechanism 3: Get On the Same Page as Your Boss
Escape Mechanism 4: Don’t Get Too Attached to Your Desk
Escape Mechanism 5: Cultivate the Right Relationships
Who’s Managing Whom?
CHAPTER 2: Fourteen Lessons You Won’t Have to Learn the Hard Way
Instant Sales Meeting Idea: Orienting the New Hire
Hard Lesson #1: Trust Your Instincts from Day One and Act on Them Quickly
Hard Lesson #2: Firing an Underperforming Salesperson Is Usually a Relief for Both of You
Hard Lesson #3: Salespeople Always Rebel Against “The Boss”
Hard Lesson #4: Share Control and Let Salespeople Buy In
Hard Lesson #5: Your Salespeople Will Have Problems That Paralyze Them (Temporarily) and You Will Hear About Them
Hard Lesson #6: Become Conscious of Your Leadership Style Early
Hard Lesson #7: Your Salespeople Want to Please You So Much They Will Tell You What They Think You Want to Hear
Hard Lesson #8: Your Salespeople May Not Want to Hear What Their Prospects Really Think So They Don’t Ask
Hard Lesson #9: To Surpass Old Limits, You Need Higher Standards, But Develop Them from the Ground Up Instead of Dictating Them
Hard Lesson #10: Without Standards There Is No Discipline
Hard Lesson #11: You Can Be an Umpire or a Referee. Consequences and You
Hard Lesson #12: You are in the Belief Business
Hard Lesson #13: Your Top Producer May Not Be Your Top Performer and Customers Buy In Spite of Salespeople
Hard Lesson #14: Salespeople Often Do Their Best Selling in Your Office
Power, Clout, and You
The “A” Word and You
Are You Managing for Compliance or Leading for Commitment?
CHAPTER 3: Stage 3 Tasks
The Mysterious Mindset of the
B
Player
The Seven Roadblocks
Recruiting A Players: The
Secret
of Being a Great Sales Manager
Avoid The
Warm Body
Syndrome
Hiring
A
Players Means Selecting for Traits and Training for Skills
The Interview, You, and Weeding Out
B
Players
Hire Slow; Fire Fast
Checking References in a World Where Nobody Will Tell You Anything
Training and Developing
A
Players:
Miracle
on the Hudson—The Importance of Training and Retraining Good People
Why Sales Training Doesn’t Work Like It Used To
My Epiphany
The Missing Ingredient in Every Training Program: Repetition
Buying the Wrong Thing: Bill and the
Magic Pill
The Driving Force of Division in Sales Training Today
The Coaching Imperative—Developing the People Who Develop Your Profits
Mentoring, Mantras, and Management
The Secrets of Motivation That Motivational Speakers Don’t Speak About
Motivation Is a Breeze
Closing a Sale Is the Most Motivating Thing That Can Happen to a Salesperson
How to Motivate Salespeople without Hiring a Motivational Speaker
Finally, Recognize That People Are Starving for Recognition
CHAPTER 4: What’s Changed About Selling?
Massive Changes in Selling Have Taken Place Over the Years
All Change Is Personal
The King and You: Leadership Lessons from
The King and I
How the Game within the Game of Selling Is Changing
Bo Knows Winning
The Missing Metrics
The Epidemic
Warning Signs of Clogged Pipelines
The Magic E-Mail
CHAPTER 5: Running Great Sales Meetings Every Time
Would Your Salespeople Attend if Your Meetings Were Optional?
Would They Gladly Pay Five Dollars per Hour to Attend?
Would Your Customers Be Glad They Are Doing Business with Your Company If They Were Able to Sit in on Your Sales Meetings or Watch Them on Closed Circuit TV?
To Get Faster Results from Your Training Initiative Slow Things Down
The Meeting after the Sales Meeting
Self Development and Homework
The Best Sales Meetings Get People Involved
How to End Any Meeting
CHAPTER 6: What Happens in Your Meeting in Vegas Stays in the Meeting Room
The Wake-Up Call
“Good Morning, it’s 8:30 a.m.”
A Do-It-Yourself Annual Meeting Design
The Three Segments of the Meeting
Five Factors that Foster Loyalty
The Best Damn Sales Contest in the World: The 1,000 Yard Club
Account Decision Stress and Other Maladies
How to Double Your Sales without Doubling Your Efforts
Reality Check: It’s Not a “Great Meeting” unless the Customer Thinks It Was a Great Meeting
The Courtesy Call
Your Legacy, or, Why Are You Doing This Besides the Money?
INDEX
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
CHAPTER 1: Gnawing Your Way Out of the Sales Management Trap
Figure 1.1 The Sales Management Trap
CHAPTER 2: Fourteen Lessons You Won’t Have to Learn the Hard Way
Figure 2.1 Managing the Gap
Figure 2.2 Assessing the Levels of Commitment of Your Key People
CHAPTER 3: Stage 3 Tasks
Figure 3.1 It is important to know whether you are doing one-on-one training or coaching.
Figure 3.2 The Productivity Loop. Motivation feeds on these three events.
CHAPTER 4: What’s Changed About Selling?
Figure 4.1 Analyze your last meeting with the chart to gauge the level of the relationship.
Figure 4.2 Phases of the Selling Process
Figure 4.3 Phases of the Selling Process
CHAPTER 6: What Happens in Your Meeting in Vegas Stays in the Meeting Room
Figure 6.1 The “Hard Way” to Double Your Sales
Figure 6.2 The “Easy Way” to Double Your Sales
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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e1
THE ACCIDENTAL SALES MANAGER
HOW TO TAKE CONTROL and LEAD YOUR SALES TEAM to RECORD PROFITS
CHRIS LYTLE
Copyright © 2011 by Chris Lytle. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
For general information on our other products and services or for technical support, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at (800) 762-2974, outside the United States at (317) 572-3993 or fax (317) 572-4002.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Lytle, Chris
The accidental sales manager : how to take control and lead your sales team to record profits / Chris Lytle.
p. cm.
Includes Index.
ISBN 978-0-470-94164-5 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-06391-0 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-06392-7 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-06393-4 (ebk)
1. Sales executives. 2. Sales force management. 3. Success in business. I. Title.
HF5439.5.L98 2011
658.8′102—dc
222010053519
To Sarah McCann/Zola Gorgon
My two favorite characters in the world
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For every sales manager, VP of sales, and CEO who agreed to talk to me for this book, I am forever grateful. Your stories and willingness to share your best practices make this a much better book than it would have been had I “gone it alone.”
To everyone who has become a customer and a friend over the past three decades, I appreciate the trust you’ve shown in our products and programs. Whether you’ve purchased a book or audio product or flown me half way around the world to speak to your sales organization, it means a lot.
Thanks to Cliff Albert, Gary Buchanan, Tom Clevidence, Michael Draman, Phil Fisher, Ed Fratz, Ken Greenwood, Jay Leonardi, Jim Lobaito, Trey Morris, Dan Manella, Gary Miles, Tim McMahon, Sarah McCann, Garfield Ogilvie, Mark Peterson, Jeff Sleete, David Snodgrass, Kent Stevens, Richard Williams, Lowell Yoder, and Rod “Zeke” Zimmerman. I asked you a few questions, shut up and recorded your answers, transcribed them and all of a sudden half the book was written.
To the team at Wiley: I owe a big thank you to Dan Ambrosio for picking up the phone and asking me if I didn’t want to write another book. Ashley Allison has been a patient and very fast editor, and Deborah Schindlar has kept the composition process going ahead of schedule despite my sometimes erratic writing patterns. Thanks for staying on top of things and challenging me to do the same.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Lytle, the best-selling author of The Accidental Salesperson, had a lucrative but increasingly frustrating career as a professional speaker. He had an obsession with finding a better way to drive real behavior change.
He understood that adults learn by doing, not by hearing about how someone else did it. He was frustrated with the start-and-stop nature of training seminars and the limited results that an occasional learning event creates.
Unfortunately, that’s what his customers thought they wanted.
Undeterred, he set out to reinvent the way he delivered his own training programs. Identifying his biggest competitor as the do-it-yourselfer, he decided to partner with sales managers who train their own people.
His website Fuel contains knowledge bites (digestible sales ideas) that can be consumed in five minutes or less and discussed for 25 more minutes in a meeting. Lytle coined the phrase “The Honors Class in Selling Instant Sales Meeting.” Sales managers use his content to spark lively conversations about sales issues.
Along the way, he discovered how to add the missing ingredient—accountability—to the mix. Teaching managers how to add accountability to their training translated into immediate, bottom-line impact for tens of thousands of salespeople at every level of their careers.
Lytle is the president and product developer of Sparque, Inc. the Chicago-based company he runs with his partner/wife Sarah McCann. He still speaks on sales and sales management topics to a select group of clients. Increasingly, he delivers his content on his website and through short Webinars.
You may have had a gut feeling there is a better way to develop the people who develop your profits. Trust your gut.
You can get a free trial of Fuel by going to www.sparquefuel.com. Sales managers who want to see the full capabilities can request a “private tour” with Lytle. You can do that by e-mailing him at [email protected] or calling 1-800-255-9853.
INTRODUCTION: Congratulations on Your “Promotion”
If you like to solve complicated puzzles, a career in sales management will keep you perpetually challenged. If you’ve just become a new sales manager, you’re probably excited, a little nervous, and pretty curious about what to expect. Fortunately for you, this book will slash several years off of your learning curve. If, on the other hand, you’ve been at this sales management thing for a while, the information here will refocus and reenergize you.
This book will introduce you to some very successful sales managers who have made plenty of mistakes and chosen to share their experiences with you.
Being a sales manager in a time of continuous innovation and destabilizing change is challenging enough, and can even be quite overwhelming for many. But for those professionals who get their kicks from solving problems and furthering the skills and fostering the success of other people, sales management is a gratifying and rewarding job.
I don’t know your story, but I clearly remember how—and when—I got my first sales management job. I was just 18 months into my current sales job, minding my own business and selling up a storm, when I got called into the general manager’s office one day. Upon my arrival, two of the owners were sitting there.
“We’re making you the sales manager,” one of them said to me.
I was too young, startled, and flattered to refuse.
I had gotten into sales accidentally three years earlier. Now, I was being promoted. They weren’t grooming me to move into management; as of the next Monday, I was The Accidental Sales Manager.
Don’t worry; despite this fairly personal introduction, this is not an autobiography. Though I will share a variety of the sales management lessons I’ve encountered throughout my career—many of which I learned the hard way—my experiences and advice aren’t the only ones you’ll find here. To add depth and perspective, I have interviewed CEOs, VPs of sales, field sales managers, and one college professor. These successful leaders share know-how gained over many years of leading sales forces and meeting quotas. The conversations I’ve had with these remarkable people, who took the time to share both their joys and frustrations, reminded me of the tremendous responsibilities they agree to shoulder when they accept any kind of promotion. I made it a point to ask every single one of them two questions:
What do you wish you had known about sales management before you took on the job?
What did you have to learn about sales management the hard way?
You will benefit from their diverse perspectives. Selling is a shared experience that salespeople have all by themselves. Think about that. Your salespeople most likely believe that no one else is enduring the same price resistance, rejection, self-doubt, and fear of failure as they are. They don’t realize that most other salespeople are calling on tough customers and having the same experiences all by themselves. Sure, they can discuss these issues over a drink with peers. But many salespeople today work a territory from their home office, and therefore have less interaction than ever with colleagues and people who can empathize with their situations. This feeling of isolation can become a significant problem. Getting a national sales team together for a quarterly sales meeting to share their experiences may be seen as an expensive luxury in today’s economy. Indeed, increasingly sales meetings are done via conference call or Webinar. However you do it, getting salespeople to share their experiences and thereby inspire one another takes the pressure off you to train and motivate them. I offer you a pre-planned annual meeting in Chapter 6 that I have used with my clients to get the salespeople talking and make them the stars of the annual meeting.
Now let’s get back to you and your job: Sales management is a shared experience you are having all by yourself—and that’s exactly where this book comes into play. Your boss can promote you, but he’s not always able to tell you how to become a successful sales manager. If you are part of a large company, you may be able to get some mentoring from a successful sales manager. But too many new sales managers find themselves on their own. And your track record of sales success, while admirable, will not translate into sales management success. Even if you were a veteran salesperson, you are a novice the second you become a sales manager. Maybe you’ve noticed this; I call it…
The Forgotten Rookie Syndrome
The new sales manager is almost always the forgotten rookie—forgotten because the person who promoted you considers you to be an experienced hand. And of course, you were an experienced hand—in sales. Now, however, you’re an inexperienced sales manager.
Why does this forgotten rookie syndrome exist—and persist? Well, your boss has a tendency to promote you and then quit worrying about you. There’s a new sales manager in town, so that position is filled and so you’re promptly forgotten.
Unfortunately, most new sales managers don’t know what they don’t know. Why? Here’s a “short list” of the various sales management issues and responsibilities you will encounter as the sales manager:
Indentifying successful sales traits and behaviors so you can hire winners
Establishing your new operating rhythm
Setting standards of performance
Identifying what’s expected of you from your boss
Making your expectations clear to the sales team
Discovering the difference between leadership versus management
Creating or maintaining a high performance culture
Setting objectives
Establishing/identifying leading indicators of success
Interviewing
Reference checking
Coaching
Counseling
Disciplining
Firing
Motivating
Demanding call reports
Actually getting call reports on time if at all
Reading call reports
Managing expenses
Compensating employees
Training
Giving recognition and praise
Helping team members set goals
Making projections
Reporting up
Disciplining
Transitioning
Balancing communication and personality styles
Running effective meetings
Delegating
Routing
Motivating
Discussing pay as it relates to motivation
Figuring out team dynamics
Holding people accountable
Forecasting
Managing channels, partners, and alliances
Managing growth and expectations
Dealing with distance
Reviewing wins and losses
Managing people and processes
Understanding and learning new technology
Developing product, competitor, and customer knowledge
Giving recognition in various ways:
Having employees in on matters and events
Giving them challenging work
Granting freedom and authority
Reviewing performance
Planning and executing course corrections
Determining resource requirements and availability
Evaluating strengths and weaknesses of team members, exploiting strengths, and shoring up weaknesses
Getting buy in
Conducting ride-alongs
Holding office coaching sessions
Dealing with difficult times
Defining what
good
looks like
Leading people through change
Dealing with competitive pressure and pricing
Determining market potential
Managing relationships with accounts
Dealing with the
prima donna
sales rep
Developing a leadership style
Teaching old dogs new tricks
Creating a vision of a better future
Getting to know your team
I’m guessing you’re not up to speed on each and every one of these topics. Am I right?
According to David Snodgrass, director of sales for Windstream, a telephone and data firm, “That’s right on target.” Snodgrass admits, “We really don’t do a good job of training sales managers.” It’s an unfortunate but widespread phenomenon: The bulk of small and midsized companies don’t have good sales manager training. Most end up saying something like the following to new sales managers: “Go read this book” or “Find out what classes the local university offers.” Or, they send these newbies to a traveling seminar when one passes through the area. But this approach leaves a big gap, and a lot of room for things to fall through the cracks.
You feel forgotten and alone, because in most cases you are.
How’s that for a reality check?
Here’s your next one: Your new title is a misnomer. You aren’t really managing sales: You are managing the people who make the sales, or at least the ones who take the orders.
You manage a lot of things, but sales isn’t one of them. It might be easier to think in terms of managing the things that lead to sales—things like the number of first meetings your team gets, their ability to manage long sales cycles, and their aptitude for assessing customer problems and proposing customized solutions.
Or it might help to think of it this way: You can’t really manage a fish, either. I learned that from my close buddy, Larry Claggett. We have known each other since elementary school; Larry was of the trout specialist for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources until he retired at the end of 2010.
I used to find it funny when I called him at work to set up a tee time for golf, and he answered his phone, “Fish Management, Larry speaking.”
“How do you manage a fish?” I would joke.
But fish management is not a joke to Larry. Here’s how he described what he does when I asked him for this book:
“Officially, I’m a cold water fisheries ecologist,” Larry told me. I knew that once he mentioned ecology that we were going to be getting into a discussion of systems.
“So, what’s on your radar?”
“I look at what’s happening on the landscape, and how it affects trout and their habitat. We can’t directly manage farm runoff, but we can participate with groups that do and lobby for changes. While our true authority starts at the stream bank or the lake shore, other events impact what’s coming into the waters. To that end, we’ve shifted our focus to the watershed or large-scale landscape management, rather than just concentrating on what’s in an individual stream or lake.
“The major efforts we make for trout are to bring about habitat changes that support the environment in which the fish live. It’s more effective to manage the habitat than it is to deal with individual fish or species. Because fish can take care of themselves if we take care and protect the habitat.”
In other words: Larry and his team manage the systems that affect the fish, and the fish take care of themselves.
And believe it or not—you are doing the same thing. You are managing the environment, culture, informal and formal systems, people, and processes of sales. Your efforts will have the same effect: The sales will take care of themselves when you take care of the salespeople and exhibit the right kind of leadership skills.
You’re the sales manager, but you don’t manage sales. Another way to look at it is this: You must coach the players to do what it takes to win instead of trying to coach the score.
Cliff Albert is Berry Plastics’ Director of Sales for the Institutional Division. I asked him the same question I asked Larry. “What’s on your radar?”
His response confirmed that sales management is really about being aware of all the little things that go into getting the order. In fact, Albert says, “Sales are a lagging indicator. If something is on the books, it has already happened and I can’t influence it.” Nonetheless, Albert looks at the numbers every day. “The first thing in the morning, I look at all year-to-date figures,” he shares. “I look at dollars and I look at units. I look at it from a top line perspective. What are the business units doing? I look at it from a regional perspective. What are the sales guys’ regions doing?
“Then I look at what our top five Strategic Accounts customers are doing. What are my top 10 gainers doing? What are my top 10 losers doing? That’s my first snapshot. What I’m looking at is the overall. Where are we to budget? Where are we budgetwise to the year? Okay, we’re here. We’re a million dollars off budget. We have four months to make up a million bucks. How do we do that?”
Albert goes on to discuss the proactive stuff.
“I move on to the opportunities. I get into the CRM system and look at the selling stage to see what opportunities exist during the negotiation stage—because that’s the last stage before you start celebrating the win. If you’ve sent pricing out, there’s a greater opportunity there. So I sort my CRM to stages to see where we are and what we can do today to move these things through the pipeline. Then I can start making calls. And I can be a pain in the ass sometimes. I ask the people in the field, ‘Hey what are these prospects thinking—and doing?’”
Cliff Albert continuously instructs his staff to “Respect the expiration date.” In fact, it’s almost a mantra for him: “[Putting] an expiration date on a proposal gives you license to call the customer every day for 30 days and ask what is going on. On day 29, you [let them know that] this proposal is expiring, and ask if they’re going to make a decision. Opportunities are the leading indicator because closing those opportunities is what drives the sales report going forward.
“The third piece for me is how I help my team keep the process moving and make sure they are focusing on the right opportunities and next steps. Otherwise, they can be spinning like a hamster on a wheel. Are they focusing on the business and moving it forward? My time is best spent coaching them through the process.
“So, I’ll call the guys and I’ll ask for an overview of their territories. I want to know what’s happening. You don’t have to tell me you talked to Bob and he said this and we’re having lunch next week. I don’t care. You have to be able to give me a macro view of your region—top line, bottom line. Because if you’re articulating all this detail, you’re missing a lot of other touch points. You may be telling me about a $10,000 opportunity when a $1 million opportunity just went to a competitor.
I focus on pending and hot deals; I want my team to focus on these and know they will be asked about them. At the end of the week, we get on the phone together to share best practices and to try to understand what’s happening within the regions.”
Even though Albert knows the score, he doesn’t manage it, and neither can you. You manage the people and coach them on the activities that put up the sales.
Albert manages a sales force and distributor network that is spread out all over the country. Although you may have a completely different kind of sales management job, his perspective is worth considering. Regardless of your particular situation, you can learn from his tactics and viewpoint. Sales are the lagging indicator; getting salespeople to do things that move sales forward is proactive sales management.
This book will help you develop a sales management philosophy, a set of beliefs about your job and the people you manage. It will also provide you with new skills and tools to bring to the job and help you implement your philosophy. You’ll find forms, models, illustrations, and sales meeting exercises throughout. These are immediately applicable ideas that help you put this book into action. All of these tools (and more) are available in PDF format and downloadable at my web site: www.sparque.biz/AccidentalSM.
My ultimate goal is to challenge your thinking and introduce you to a wealth of new ideas to put into action. So, with that in mind, let’s get started.
I often remark at the beginning of one of my live presentations, “I hope you like what I have to say, but it’s okay if you don’t. I’m a seminar leader not a stand up comedian. (I thought about being a stand up comedian, but I didn’t want to work nights.) I’m here for your improvement, not for your enjoyment.”
You don’t know how good a seminar on sales management or a book on sales management is until you put some of the ideas into action.
To know and not to DO is not to know.
So I hope you like the book, but I also want to make you uncomfortable enough to examine your approach to the job and make some changes and refinements in what you’re doing.
CHAPTER 1Gnawing Your Way Out of the Sales Management Trap
A paradox is a statement that is seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense yet is true. In 13 Fatal Errors Managers Make and How to Avoid Them, Steven W. Brown describes the paradox of management: “You get paid for doing less of what you got promoted for doing more of.” Top-producing salespeople who become sales managers often find themselves doing two jobs, their old one and their new one. The boss announces your promotion by saying something like this:
“Congratulations, you’re the new sales manager. Of course, we want you to maintain your accounts until you’ve developed a couple of people to take them over.”
That’s how the sales management trap is sprung. You got promoted for being a good salesperson. But now you you get paid for doing less of what you got promoted for doing more of. It is next to impossible to find the time to develop salespeople to replace the irreplaceable you while you are still doing the job from which you were just promoted. And even if you manage to avoid doing your (prior) full-time sales job, you can quickly get trapped in the minutiae of sales management. These Stage 2 sales management tasks rob you of focus and time; they keep you busy, and send you home tired.
You walk in the front door and the person you love greets you affectionately.
“Hi, honey, how was your day?”
“Busy.”
“Oh, so you got a lot done?”
“No, I didn’t get anything done. I put out one fire after another.”
Sound familiar?
Let’s look at why this happens in case after case. There are four phases of learning any skill (bear with me, even if you’ve seen this model before). Let’s look at how you learned to sell, for example. You started way back as a Phase 1—Unconscious Incompetent individual. At this phase, you don’t know that you don’t know. You’re new to the job of sales. You can’t imagine that it could be that hard. You’re ready to go out and start making calls. It’s great to be employed and starting a new career. Then, you run smack dab into Phase 2.
Phase 2—Conscious Incompetence. You know you don’t know. Salespeople in this phase are hit with the complexity of the sales job. You are starting to hear objections and field complaints from customers, and are becoming aware that you don’t know enough to succeed. The competition is fierce, and the customers are tough. How do you build relationships with people who won’t take your calls? How can you sell your product without heavy discounting? You begin to wonder if you should join the military; it’s got to be easier than this. Not every salesperson makes it through Phase 2, but those who do enter Phase 3, which is a very nice place to hang out.
Phase 3—Conscious Competence. This is the point in your sales career when you know that you know what you’re doing. After a few years and hundreds of meetings, you are fully aware of what to expect. You’re experienced, glib, and confident. You have a repeatable sales process that you have honed over the years. You have customers who buy from you more or less habitually, and you have been around long enough to have developed a network. They return your calls and refer you to their peers. Your career is on track, which leads you into the last phase.
Phase 4—Unconscious Competence. In this phase, you actually forget you know and just do it. You’re operating on autopilot. You don’t have to think about everything. The job is familiar and as natural to you as breathing. You are selling up a storm, just like I was. And the people in the corner offices have you on their radar for a promotion.
And that, my friend, is just about the time that your boss brings you the good news. You’ve been promoted!
If you accept that promotion, you will be a Phase 1 Sales Manager. You have now gone from a Phase 4 salesperson to a new manager who once again doesn’t know how much he doesn’t know. That’s because you can’t start a new job that requires a completely different skill set from the job you have been doing so well without going back through the phases of learning that will guide you through the new facets of sales management.
Here’s the real rub. As the new sales manager, you have forgotten what you know about selling. You are skipping steps that a brand new person cannot skip. You take shortcuts because you can. But you may be managing salespeople who don’t know they don’t know. This is why developing salespeople can be so frustrating. Doesn’t it sound fun?
Certainly not. In fact, it’s not fun at all. But it is, of course, necessary. And that is why I am going to guide you through this process—and show you how to succeed at sales management more quickly than you would have if you weren’t reading this book.
That’s all; but that’s plenty.
Jeff Sleete is the vice president of marketing for Sinclair Broadcasting. He describes the patience it takes to manage new people: “You can’t get frustrated with people who don’t know. You can never let that [get] old to you. They are going to have [the] same problems that the last person had, but you can’t let that get old. They are going to fall down and make mistakes. You can’t be irritated with them unless you want to crush their egos.”
You don’t want to crush egos or make people afraid to raise their hands and ask for help. So, acknowledge the fact that you will have to guide and coach new salespeople through all four phases of their development. Your key objective as a sales manager is to get sales results through others. It involves planning, staffing, training, leading, directing, and disciplining your salespeople. It means holding them accountable to achieve the results your company needs. As their boss, you have the most immediate and profound impact on their success and failure. But many sales managers have trouble finding enough time to do that developmental people stuff. They get trapped in the minutiae of their jobs. And trust me—there is plenty of minutiae.
This is why I’ve created the Sales Management Trap—a useful model you can use to isolate the tasks and duties that are mission critical from those that are not. (See Figure 1.1.) I call it a trap because new sales managers often get stuck in an endless cycle of Stage 1 and Stage 2 activities. These tasks eat up so much of their days that the sales manager doesn’t spend enough time in Stage 3 tasks. For that reason, much of this book will focus on Stage 3 tasks—because the people side of the business is where the fun and freedom come in. Once you have a team of people who can sell (almost) as well as you could, you will end up hitting your numbers and spend more time celebrating success than putting out fires.
Figure 1.1 The Sales Management Trap
This book will move you from captivity to freedom.
Don’t get me wrong, dealing with Stage 1 and 2 tasks are neither inherently bad nor inherently good. And sometimes they are urgent and necessary. However, when sales managers don’t spend adequate time doing Stage 3 tasks, they don’t multiply themselves and achieve results through others to the extent that they could.
Berry Plastic’s Cliff Albert took one look at The Sales Management Trap and made the following comment:
