Two weeks ago I wrote a post called What Is The Primary Role Of A Sales Manager?. In that post I basically asserted the primary role of a sales manager is to facillitate an enviroment where people can be productive, but in retrospect I missed one key point. In addition to facillitating the proper environment free of distraction you also need to properly motivate your staff. I’m not going to rehash the different ways sales people can be motivated because Skip Anderson did such a great job in his post “Dear Sales Manager: Please Motivate Me” (honestly it’s the post I had planned to write… I guess it pays to be earlier in the rotation!). What I will do instead is add to both my previous post and build off of Skips a bit for you.

So we are now moving towards a drama free environment that is free of distraction, and we now recognize the different types of motivation, but how do we use this knowledge to motivate our staff? It starts by getting to know them in their one on one meetings, asking good questions, and listening.

I try to do a one on one with every member of my staff every week and we cover 3 topics: A brief discussion of their funnel and conversions plus whatever else I feel is important that week, next we talk about what they want help with, and the final 10 minutes is to talk about whatever we want and can cover anything from family to football. These discussions are important, and no one part is more important than any other… it is the trust and relationship you build in this process that are going to make it easier to have the difficult discussions later on… Finally the information you learn about your staff through this process will be invaluable to you later on when you are trying to motivate your staff.

To close out this topic I’ll share with you some insight I gained from one of my own managers back when I was a new salesperson.

My wife and I were planning on having a baby, but it was very important to both of us for her to be a stay at home mom (meaning I needed to earn a lot more money). However, my primary motivation was recognition and ego. I was winning regional contests regularly and was far and ahead the leading person in my location so both of these needs were being fulfilled completely… However, my manager recognized that there was untapped potential in me and that I was easily capable of producing even more than I currently was. I just wasn’t… and she couldn’t figure out why. I was basically complacent in my current position because I was kicking everyone’s @$$ around me, making great money and having a good time. No amount of feeding the ego, or giving praise and recognition helped, but there was something we were both missing. While it was clear I did not place my own salary as a determining factor of my self worth there was a untapped source of motivation. I wanted my wife to be a stay at home mom and for that I needed to earn a bit more than I was for us to be comfortable. To cut to the chase, once my manager pointed this fact out to me I was off to the races… I set new records, increased my salary and got 2 promotions all in about 18 months.

I tell this story because it’s important to recognize that many sales people only know part of the story about what motivates them, and while money still wasn’t my motivation it was the only thing that could feed what was… My family.

If my manager had not had years of quality one on one time with me we would have never came to that conclusion and we would probably both still be where we were then happy and complacent. Remember motivation is not something we do only for the team… The biggest bang for your buck comes from individual interactions that can only be achieved by regular, honest, one one interaction.

Takeaways: Think about your team and reflect on what motivates each of them as individuals. Now think about your team as a whole what motivates the group? Are you having weekly one on ones? Why not? What are the potential benefits of spending this one on one time with each of them? Do you have people that could produce more but are not? What could you do differently for that individual that would help them move forward?

For some more great information on this topic check out these two podcast episodes:

Steve Farber: Greater Than Yourself and Will Fultz: Rewarding Top Producers

Have a great rest of the week and happy selling everyone!

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The answer to this question may seem quite simple: Drive revenue! but the reality is we carry a heavy burden. We have to plan training, observe our teams in action, coach, mentor, attend meetings, run reports, do projections and forecasts, many of us even take on marketing and PR roles in smaller companies, and even with all of this most of us could add on 10 more things under “other duties as assigned” that have little to nothing to do with being a sales manager.

My opinion though if you want to be successful is you only have one real job, and that is to facilitate an environment that maximizes sales productivity. To do that you have to look at things a little differently. I view my primary role as making sure 14 families get fed. I worry very little about my own goals because I am aware that if 80% of my team can hit plan I will have grossly exceeded my own plan. With that in mind, my entire focus is on the team and making sure everyone on it is in the best possible position to be productive, and removing anything that hinders that.

It sounds simple, but you have to take this to extremes, what if the thing that is hindering 13 people from producing at peak performance is your current very needy, drama filled top producer? In my opinion, you eliminate them. Life as both a sales manager and a member of a team is a lot better when there are no primadonnas that feel they are above the rules and are making others lives miserable in the process. Most people have enough stress at work just performing their own sales duties and do not need the extra stress of another’s personal burdens as well. When I talk about the primadonnas, I am not referring to someone who is simply going through a rough patch, this I can help them work through. A primadonna refers to someone who is a constant problem and drain on my team. This is the type of person who comes in each day with a “woe is me” or “I am the center of the universe” attitude and feels that everyone else should share in their misery or bow down to them.

My goal as a sales manager is to eliminate drama, coach, mentor and lead… everything else I do is secondary to that. Every member of my team knows that they are the most important thing in my day and that I would rather be helping them than anything else I do. Because I take this approach towards them and will do anything for them, they will walk through fire for me. Developing this relationship is not easy, it takes time to build trust and send a clear message that this is not the flavor of the week, but the long term benefits are HUGE.

Finally, this does not mean you stop forecasting and doing the other things you do, it is about shifting priorities not responsibilities.

To implement: What is your relationship like with your current team? How do you spend your day? What can you eliminate from your sales environment or process that will improve productivity for everyone? What can you do now to make sure every member of your team understands they THEIR success is the most important thing to you? Do you have a regularly scheduled one on one coaching session with every team member every week? If not why? Reflect review and implement!

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As Colin Wilson highlighted in his recent post on this site, the primary role of a sales manager is to ensure that his team “hits their number” – that they’re performing.

An effective sales manager will use many skills in order to achieve this objective – and will vary their use according to the needs of the salesperson being managed. An experienced and motivated salesperson may primarily need support and admin tasks taken off their hands. An old hand who has lost motivation may need re-energising. A new recruit may need initial training and coaching. Part of the skill of the sales manager is to understand what help each member of their team needs in order to achieve their goal. And sometimes it may be just to “hold their feet to the fire” then to get out of their way.

One area, however, that is almost always important is that of coaching.

It’s unheard of that a sales team is comprised entirely of superstars all operating at the peak of their capabilities. In almost all situations, most members of the sales team will have development needs: areas where they can improve their performance (sometimes significantly). Sometimes these needs can be met by training. But most often, the gaps are very specific – and frequently the salespeople are not aware of them themselves. It takes the skill of the sales manager to identify what the improvement need is, and how it can best be made – through awareness, training, experience, coaching, motivation, etc.

Just as in sports, a good coach can make the world of difference to the performance of a team. And good sales coaches share the same characteristics as good sports coaches:

They may not necessarily have performed at the very highest levels themselves – but they know exactly what excellent performance looks like. They are able to accurately assess where the team member stands against that benchmark; and they know what steps it will take to get them to deliver an excellent performance. They won’t overwhelm them by trying to change too much at once – but they will work on the fundamentals first, then on the next level, then on the next level – until performance reaches its highest possible level for that person.

In my time working in a variety of industries from pharmaceuticals to consumer goods to heavy industry I’ve seen both good coaching and bad. But in the area where I’ve spent the last few years – professional services – good sales coaching is almost unheard of.

In professional services, it is almost always the senior professionals who do the selling. Clients are buying an intangible product – and so they want to meet and discuss with the person who will actually be doing (or leading) the work as the primary part of the sales process. However, selling very rarely comes naturally to professionals (lawyers, accountants, consultants, achitects surveyors, etc.) and sales coaching is even more alien.

It takes all the courage a professional can muster to give feedback and coaching to another professional on the hard, technical aspects of their work – let alone the subjective area of interpersonal and selling skills .

Most senior professionals “fail” the basic tests of being a coach:

• They themselves are not experts at selling – they don’t know “what good looks like” enough to be able to pass on that vision to younger professionals.
• They lack the framework and understanding of different stages of skills in sales to be able to accurately assess the current capabilities and progress of their teams.
• They don’t have a strong repertoire of interventions they can use to improve the capabilities of their teams. Usually they have a “one size fits all” mentality – they improve skills by training, or on the job coaching, or mentoring, etc. If their preferred method doesn’t meet the needs of the “trainee” – the learning simply won’t occur.

In order to develop expert performance in a skill, you must perform it many, many times – and get feedback from existing experts to allow course corrections to be made and learnings to be derived. Unfortunately, many professional firms have an unwritten “sink or swim” policy. Those who display a natural aptitude for sales will be given opportunities to perform their skills in real world situations. Those who don’t, don’t get this opportunity. As a result, Most professionals end up being “filtered out” of a business development mindset and strategies.

But no one is in a better position to offer coaching to junior professionals than their seniors. No one else has been in similar situations they can share, no one else witnesses some of their key presentations & pitches to top clients.

Senior professionals need to take this coaching role seriously to maintain the competitiveness of their teams and companies. They must overcome their own discomfort over their lack of knowledge to build a clear picture of “what good looks like” in the practices they manage. They must overcome their dislike of potentially uncomfortable situations and deliver timely and appropriate feedback to the teams. And finally, they need to understand not only what’s needed for their team’s roles: but also what is needed to continuously improve their sales management capabilities.

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