The care and feeding of a new breed of sales manager
Like the "salesman," the traditional sales manager is dying, too. But a new breed is springing up in its place.
Gone – if not now, soon – is the sales manager whose time is dedicated to "administrivia": shuffling paper, auditing expense reports, writing fictional forecasts to show senior management just how well things are going in the field, enforcing sales quotas, and acting as the star closer.
For too many of those managers, mentoring salespeople ranks a distant priority, a when-I-can-get-to-it activity. Maybe that’s not all bad, since most companies promote the superstar salesperson to sales manager, hoping to create clones. That tactic is as disastrous as it is pervasive, because the qualities that make a superstar salesperson are typically incompatible with the role of a superstar sales manager.
So what does a sales manager at the level of Business Resource do?
Simply put: The manager’s job is to free the sales force to do its job.
Here are four responsibilities at the core of a sales manager’s job description at a forward-thinking company.
1. Take responsibility for mentoring and personal development. Do you have what it takes to mentor others? Too often, superstars promoted to sales manager don’t mentor or coach at all – they simply take over the sale. The consummate manager is able to draw out a salesperson’s own ability to develop and execute the sales strategy. A great manager is able to draw out the abilities of his or her entire sales force, and is able to ensure that they are all implementing the same process.
Moreover, sales managers must coach, not only on sales strategy, which can be done in the office and sometimes even with groups of salespeople, but on sales skills, too, which can be done only in the field with real customers.
What a disaster it can be to promote the superstar salesperson to manager. But I’ve also known many sales superstars who went on to become highly effective sales managers. When it’s time to promote to management, superstar status should neither pose an automatic barrier nor offer a free ride.
2. Develop and implement a system of accountability. We used to equate accountability in sales solely with numbers. The problem with that method is exemplified by a sales manager for a client of mine, a medical devices manufacturer. Kay told me she was going to promote one rep who was blowing the doors off the numbers. She also planned to put on notice another rep who was performing below quota. Having seen both at work, I was puzzled. I viewed the rep whom Kay was about to put on notice as more effective than the one designated for promotion.
A closer look at the territories and the sales approaches of the two salespeople showed a discrepancy. The quota-buster had inherited a gold mine of a territory made up of large, producing accounts that required scant selling ability. The under-performer’s territory was filled with promising, yet underdeveloped accounts.
The supposed overachiever operated as a textbook Vendor-level salesperson. He possessed all the flash of the salesman archetype, yet he called on comfortable, low-level contacts using a basic approach of "Just checking in to see if there’s anything going on."
The supposed underachiever was clearly a Business Resource in the making. While not showing the same "salesy" style of her Vendor colleague, this individual demonstrated exceptional organizational savvy, operated in seek mode without even having to think about it, and was in the process of gaining executive meetings at a few of her accounts. A model accountability system measures the skills and strategic thinking associated with selling at the Business Resource level. Because if you have those, the numbers will follow.
3. Reinforce a common sales methodology and sales message. The rules and language, steps, and milestones of the sales process should be common throughout the sales organization. Too often, a sales force suffers from anarchy. A common methodology helps salespeople learn from each other and ensures consistency in how they position their company and its value message. Customers are rarely able to make objective judgments about what we sell; instead, they make judgments on how we sell.
It’s management’s responsibility, not the sales force’s, to develop your company’s core positioning message and strategy for value creation. It’s the responsibility of the sales force to implement them.
4. Be a conduit for best practices. One of selling’s dirty little secrets is that salespeople on the same team are not naturally disposed to help one another. They’re driven more by gaining recognition than by receiving financial reward. When one cracks the code on selling a particular solution or acing a wily competitor, he’s likely to share, at most, only part of what worked. There’s no malice in this; usually it’s not even conscious. This is just the nature of salespeople.
They want to win, and that’s always just a little harder when their peers know all the tricks they know. A good sales manager can work closely with salespeople to extract and share best practices. One way is to hold regular best-practices meetings in which salespeople are required to contribute to the discussion in an environment that is both friendly and competitive, and gives salespeople the recognition they crave for making such contributions.
Hey! It’s easy!
What it takes to be a superstar sales manager is the willingness and the ability to spend every day attending to these tasks. They are the secret to successful sales management in the new era of selling.
Jerry Stapleton is president of Stapleton Resources, LLC, and author of From Vendor to Business Resource: Transforming the Sales Force for the New Era of Selling. For more than 10 years, he has been showing companies of all sizes, from start-ups to Fortune 500, how to sell to large accounts. E-mail: jstapleton@stapletonresources.com; Web site: www.stapletonresources.com
Sept. 27, 2002 Small Business Times, Milwaukee
