The Accidental Sales Manager

How to Take Control and Lead Your Sales Team to Record Profits

Chris Lytle

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118063934
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Ventes

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.

CHAPTER 1
Gnawing 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:

When you don’t see success in the field, you are very quick to jump in and get your hands dirty—to the point where you’re doing the lower level tasks that you’ve hired other folks to complete. You want to bypass the rep and call the customer yourself to find out where in the process the sale is. You’ve got a $2.5 million opportunity and it’s sitting there staring at you while your sales guy is telling you that it’s moving along. You want to call the customer and find out precisely, “Where is this project?” At Level 3, you’re really coaching your team to understand that this project is not moving. Unless you resurrect it, it has flat lined—and you might as well move on to something else because you’ve exhausted every bit of life that’s left in it.

Use The Sales Mangement Trap to see exactly where you’re spending your sales management time and effort. When you are operating in Stage 1, you are a salesperson. When you are operating in Stage 2, you are managing—and while these tasks may be important, they don’t help you grow as a manager. You’ve been putting out fires and handling complaints for years. Running a sales meeting to discuss pipeline progress and next month’s special program is not the same as running one that’s designed to develop your team’s sales skills. Preparing budgets is a necessary evil, while coaching people is the surest way to make these budgets.

Even executives can get mired in minutiae: According to Matrix Fitness’ Kent Stevens, Senior VP of Marketing:

This is such a fast game. Every day goes by so quickly. I am not spending enough time sitting in a quiet room to gather my thoughts about the big picture, asking myself what’s going on, and really working on strategy. A lot of the job is reactive. I need to delegate the minutiae and spend more time leading the strategy on how we are going to continue growing this. I can get a call from a territory manager about a pricing issue or field a customer complaint about a shipping issue or incomplete order. Bigger issue items to me are things like dissecting our in...