The Sales Manager's Guide to Greatness

Ten Essential Strategies for Leading Your Team to the Top

Kevin F. Davis

• Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781626343887
• eBook ISBN: 9781626343894
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

2018 Axiom Business Book Award Winner, Silver Medal Straightforward advice for taking your sales team to the next level!
? If your sales team isn't producing the results expected, the pressure is on you to fix the situation fast. One option is to replace salespeople. A better option is for you to optimize your performance as a sales leader. In The Sales Manager's Guide to Greatness, sales management consultant Kevin F. Davis offers 10 proven and distinctly practical strategies, skills, and tools for overcoming the most challenging obstacles sales managers face and moving your team ahead of the pack. This book will help you:

• Learn the 6 sales rep instincts that can cripple your management effectiveness, and replace these instincts with a more powerful leadership mindset – true sales leadership begins with improving the leader within
• Stop getting bogged down by distractions, become more proactive, and find more time to coach, lead, and inspire your salespeople
• Get every salesperson on your team to be more accountable and driven to achieve breakthrough sales results
• Master the 7 keys to hiring great salespeople
• Create a more customer-driven sales team by blending the buyer's journey into your sales process
• Speed up the improvement of your team by mastering the 7 keys to achieving better coaching outcomes
• Excel at the most challenging coaching conversation you face – how to solve a sales performance problem that is caused by a rep's lousy attitude
• Attain higher win-rates by intervening as a coach at the most critical stages of a buying cycle, quickly identify opportunities at risk, and coach more deals to the close
• Discover why so many salespeople fail at sales forecasting and how to impress your company's upper management by submitting more accurate forecasts
• And much more…

You can apply the strategies outlined in this book immediately to take control of your time and priorities as a sales manager, become more strategic, deliver high-performance coaching that grows revenues, and ultimately drive your team to greatness.

Section 1

Self-Leadership

Overview

By coincidence, just as I was finishing this book, I reconnected with an old client via LinkedIn. It was a sales manager I’d first trained 20 years ago. In the course of our exchanged messages, he mentioned there was one thing I’d told him back then that had really stuck with him: the need for sales managers to take ownership of everything that happens on a team, good and bad. “I learned that if I have the mental attitude that a problem is ‘out there,’ then that’s the real problem,” he recalled. “I always have to think about what I can do to make a situation better.”

There was a double coincidence associated with this exchange because I’d just read a book called Extreme Ownership² about leadership in the Navy SEALs. The book was written by Leif Babin and Jocko Willink, two combat-proven US Navy SEAL officers who led the most highly decorated special operations unit of the Iraq War. (One of the soldiers on Babin and Willink’s team was Chris Kyle, author of The New York Times best-seller American Sniper, which was the inspiration for the movie of the same name.)

Given what I’d been teaching for the past two decades, it was natural that I’d see connections between sales management and how SEALs train and prepare their leaders, mold and develop teams, and lead in combat.

The authors point out that most leaders have a mindset that they are doing everything right. So when things go wrong, instead of looking at themselves, they blame others.

I’ve seen this a lot with sales managers. Suppose a team misses quota. The manager thinks they’re doing everything right, so their only option is to lay the blame on things that others are doing unsatisfactorily: sales reps have too many cold or unqualified leads; marketing isn’t asking the right questions; there’s not enough technical staff to support trials; the new product hasn’t been adequately tested. Whatever. These sales managers are thinking to themselves, “Well, I’m just going to do the best I can with what I have. A lot of these problems are out of my control.”

Unfortunately, this attitude bleeds over to the sales rep. They have a problem and what do they say? “A lot of these problems are out of my control.”

The exchange with my old acquaintance and the lessons from Extreme Ownership reminded me that the most important factor for success is the mentality of the sales manager leading a team. If that person thinks the problem is “out there,” sustained success and continued improvement will be very hard to come by. But if the sales manager has the mindset of a leader and is committed to doing everything possible to help their team achieve what matters most, then anything is possible.

The chapters in this section of the book are devoted to helping you understand what it means to be the leader of a sales team, not just its manager.

Chapter 1: Embrace a Leadership Mindset discusses how to identify sales instincts that may be holding you back as a manager and how to replace them with more powerful leadership mindsets. Whether trained or untrained, novice or experienced, all sales managers run the risk of falling back on old habits and acting more like a super-salesperson than a leader.

Chapter 2: Take Control of Your Time and Priorities addresses what is, without question, the single most common complaint I hear from sales managers: They “don’t have time” to coach. This chapter provides practical ideas for how sales managers can identify and focus on their priorities, including suggestions for how to act on the classic advice to separate the merely urgent from the truly important.

_________

2Leif Babin and Jocko Willink, Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEAALs Lead and Win (St. Martin’s Press, 2015).

Chapter 1

Embrace a Leadership Mindset

I have two lists of attributes to show you:

List 1

• Speaks clearly and fluently
• Shows confidence in their abilities and ideas
• Provides value on a sales call
• Understands the needs of customers

List 2

• Assigns accounts fairly and equitably
• Ensures that new personnel receive the training and support they need
• Works with reporting employees to create a plan for their development
• Deals effectively with employees who do not meet their commitments

What’s your impression of the difference between these lists? People usually tell me that List 1 sounds like the characteristics of a top sales performer while the items in List 2 are the things that good sales managers should be doing. Do you agree?

Here’s the twist: Both lists include items from the survey I mentioned in the Introduction (p. 1) of 1,500 business-to-business salespeople who were asked to rate their managers on 80 categories. List 1 contains the items that filled out the rest of the top 5 things that salespeople think their managers do really well. List 2 is the rest of the bottom 5 items, meaning the things these managers did very poorly. Notice the pattern? According to salespeople, sales managers have great selling skills and not so great management skills.

These results confirm an observation I made many years ago: Sales managers find it too easy to fall back into their comfort zone, doing what they are already good at—namely, selling—and have a hard time making the switch to managing a sales team.

Why does this occur? Almost every sales manager I know was, at one point in their career, a peak-performing sales professional, the top dog on the team. Their organization then recognized their contributions and promoted them into a sales management role—and everything changed. Everything except perhaps them.

This presents a problem. Why? Because managing and leading a sales team requires a completely different mindset from selling. Yet what sales managers have to rely on are the instincts and competencies they developed when they were selling. Those instincts are part of their DNA; they stick around regardless of how long a former sales rep has been in a manager’s role, whether 1 year, 10 years, or 20 years. With the dozens of decisions that sales managers face every day, they have no option but to go with what feels right in the moment, and for the most part what “feels right” will be informed by their sales instincts.

Overcoming these instincts is difficult for successful-reps-turned-managers. It simply doesn’t occur to them that they will need to change something that has made them successful. Noted leadership consultant Ram Charan and his colleagues discuss this concept in their book The Leadership Pipeline: “The highest-performing people, especially, are reluctant to change; they want to keep doing the activities that made them successful.”³ And thus we learn that Sun Tzu was right when he said, “Eventually your strengths will become a weakness.”

That’s why, beyond any specific techniques you learn, you need to re-frame your thinking around a leadership mindset. Your decisions can’t be based on what “feels right” from a salesperson’s perspective; they have to be driven by what’s good for your team. So challenge yourself with this question: Are the competencies that made me a top salesperson inhibiting my effectiveness as a sales team leader?

The answer is always yes. The odds are high that you are constantly fighting a subconscious war of instincts. (See sidebar, p. 18) Many times each day you are confronted by various issues and challenges. From what mindset—the salesperson or the sales team leader—are you making your daily decisions? Most of us just do what we instinctively feel is right.

Let’s examine several ways in which this struggle plays out every day. I’ll explain how some of the instincts possessed by great salespeople are the polar opposite of the mindset needed to become a more effective leader of a great sales team.

An example of instinct vs. leadership mindset struggles

When my son, Kyle, was seven years old, he signed up to play Little League baseball. His first year was difficult because he was unskilled. So I worked with him in the off-season to improve his throwing, hitting, and catching. In his second season, I volunteered to be assistant coach on his team. When the team met for the initial practices, I was sure that Kyle was at least the third-best player on the team. Yet when the team’s season began, the head coach had Kyle batting last in the line-up and playing out in right field. (In Little League, right field is where you place your weakest player—something I know because I played right field when I was Kyle’s age!)

Midway through the season, the head coach called and asked me to manage the team for the next game because he was sick. Naturally, I moved Kyle to second base and batted him leadoff. Were my instincts correct? Kyle struck out in every at bat and made five errors. I’ll never forget watching my son boot another ground ball while listening to the parents complain about the new second baseman.

This isn’t a story of Kyle’s skill (or lack thereof). Kyle’s performance that fateful day proved to me that, in my subconscious, I had been assessing Kyle from my instincts as a father rather than as a coach interested in having the whole team succeed. The same kind of struggle between what comes naturally and what is best for the team plagues sales managers every day.

War #1: Player vs. Observer

Every great salesperson I’ve known wanted to be in on the action, down on the field, making the plays. That strong drive is what made them great and brought them stellar results.

But sales managers are not put in the job to keep selling. They are put in the job so they can help others become the best salespeople they can be. Great sales managers see themselves as observers and coaches, not players.

Based on my own experience as a salesperson and manager and my observations (as a consultant) of sales managers over the past two decades, I can state unequivocally that this switch from player (sales rep) to observer (sales manager) is the hardest change all sales managers face. It takes a strong will to keep yourself from doing what you know you do better than everyone else on your team, and even the most experienced sales managers are prone to backslide to their sales instincts if they aren’t vigilant.

My first year in sales, many years ago, I was awkward—and a slow learner. (Remember, I was a right fielder!) But my first sales manager, Guy Campbell, must have seen some potential because he invested a lot of time in coaching me. When Guy joined me on a customer meeting, I noticed he had a habit of pulling out a coin and placing it in the palm of his han...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section 1: Self-Leadership
• Section 2: Elements of Excellence
• Section 3: Priority #1: Coach and Develop Your Team
• Section 4: Taking Action
• Index
• About Kevin F. Davis