Sales Management For Dummies. Bellah Butch

because nobody wants to follow a leader who is constantly regurgitating, “Let me tell you how I used to do it.”

      Your first order of business is to earn your team’s respect through your actions – not your words. When you approach the job focusing on how you can help them, not how they can help you, your entire mindset shifts. You use different words, and you have a sincere desire to serve.

      

Your job is to make your salespeople successful. As you take on the role of the leader, manager, and trainer, step back and let them know that you’re viewing their process and practices from a slightly different angle. You get to see what they’re doing through a new lens.

      

I can promise you I managed salespeople who were much smarter, more talented, and better salespeople than I was. Nobody ever said the best salesperson is the next sales manager. It doesn’t work like that. There’s no correlation between being a great salesperson and being a great sales manager. The skills that make a great salesperson have nothing to do with being a great manager. Some of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever seen have been when the best salesperson was put in charge of a sales team. Great salespeople can be great at sales, but terrible at managing. To be a great sales manager, you need to be a strong manager first. That’s the skill you use more than any other.

      Think of your new job this way: You have a racehorse capable of winning the Kentucky Derby but the current trainer just isn’t able to get the best out of that horse. So, the owner turns the training over to you. Same horse. Different trainer.

      If you know anything about sports or horse racing, you know a small change can have a big impact on a horse just the same as a team responds differently to a new coach or manager.

      

As sales manager, you’re not there to upset the apple cart and start over completely; you’re simply there to take what you have and make it the best it can be while adding new talent to the roster.

      Your best strategy is to simply find out how you can help each person.

Past experience can lead to future success

      The “this is how I did it” style of management gets old very quickly with a seasoned sales team. They aren’t interested in what you did; they want to know what you can do for them.

      I’m going to hazard a guess that when you first became a salesperson you devoured training materials, read a lot of books, and really studied your craft. You put in the time to be good at what you did and the results were there.

      The same holds true for sales management. You’re not expected to be a superstar from day one. Everyone in the organization understands (or should understand) that you have a nice little learning curve ahead of you as you navigate not only your own department but how it interacts with other departments.

      The experience you gained as a salesperson dealing with different personalities, being committed to learning and growing, and having a burning desire deep within you to be the best you can be are the exact same traits that can make you a great sales manager.

      

You’ve displayed the characteristics of a sales manager already or you wouldn’t have the job. The single biggest thing you can do is to give yourself time to learn – you’re starting over again, and Rome wasn’t built in a day.

      Assessing Your Current Team

      One of the first orders of business after a new sales manager gets settled in is to take an accurate, honest look at the current sales team to see who you’re working with.

      I refer to the salespeople like a professor would a classroom full of college students. You want to know who are your A students. You need to figure out how to continue to keep their fires lit and challenge them to grow and progress from where they are now. Nobody on your team is as good as they can be, trust me.

      You need to identify your B students and find out how you can move them into the group with the A’s. You need to identify your C students because you’ll spend some time with them to determine if they have a future with you or not.

      

Most importantly, you need to get to know the D and F students. They’re the ones who run you ragged. These are the people who constantly complain and fret over every little thing and blame their lack of sales on the government, global warming, and anything else they can come up with. These are the ones who can drag you down and take your focus away from the salespeople who really need your attention. Don’t let them.

Grading on a curve

      One of the interesting parts of your first few months as a new sales manager is assessing your team. Although looking at their sales numbers is good, as the sales manager you now have access to data you never had before – namely, the gross profit each salesperson generates and their accounts receivable.

      

A great salesperson doesn’t just do a lot of volume, he generates profit and collects his receivables.

      So that explains it

      Not long after I started my first position as Vice President of Sales, I had a division sales manager who had let a customer build up tens of thousands of dollars in accounts receivable. This was a customer I was a bit leery of in the first place, so I didn’t have a real warm fuzzy feeling when he got behind on his payments.

      I called the salesperson one day and read him the riot act, “You’ve got to get out there and get the money. No excuses. I don’t care what you have to do, GET THE MONEY!”

      I was steaming hot because this was about to blow up in his face and mine, too. I was not only trying to protect the two of us but keep the company from losing a ton of money in the process.

      He said, “Butch, calm down. This is why I’m selling them so cheap. That way when they beat us out of the money we aren’t losing as much!”

      Yes, he was kidding, it broke the tension, and we both laughed. And, yes we eventually got the money – but it just goes to show how some salespeople rationalize away anything.

      Now that you have the ability to see all the numbers, you can determine who is actually producing for your company. Just because someone is on the top of the board every week with the most sales dollars doesn’t make him your top salesperson. If his gross profit is low and receivables are high, he could very likely be costing you money.

      Those are things you don’t see as just another salesperson. But, in your new position you need to take in all the facts and make your own judgment about how your team is assembled and who your top producers really are.

Finding out where you need help

      In analyzing and grading your current team, you will be called upon to make some decisions about individual salespeople and where their strengths and weaknesses lie.

      Even though you’ve probably worked with these people before, I doubt you’ve really stood back to see what part of the sales process they excel at and where they struggle. But, now, it’s time you do.

      

The only way to discover your sales team’s strengths and weaknesses is to watch them in action. Salespeople are seldom accurate judges of their own talent levels in any area of the process. Even though everyone wants to be a great closer or be able to answer every objection, if they aren’t spending an appropriate amount of time prospecting, they’re going to be staring at their desk all day. No prospecting equals no prospects and no prospects equals no sales.

      Two things you can do immediately to give you better insight into individual team members are

      ✔ Work with them: Jump in right alongside as they wait on customers, make their calls, or run their sales route. Note this is called working with them and not for them. You won’t learn anything about them or how they operate if you