Are your sales managers PROACTIVE, naive or reactive?

TOP Sales Managers : The PROACTIVE Stage

TOP Sales Managers are great to work for. They are masters at leading from the back, they ask great questions,  they empower their people and they make them successful year over year, They move market share because they grow their business and they they grow their company above market growth, they grow their reps individually and collectively and they grow their team.

From a production perspective, if we agree that at the sales level the difference between an A player and a B player is 1 to 2, what do you think it is between an A sales manager (a proactive one) and a B sales manager (a reactive one) ? at least 1 to 5 – some studies even say 1 to 10 over a period of 3 to 5 years… Now what makes them so good is not that they are perfect, Top sales managers make mistakes too – who doesn’t- but they correct them fast because they have a very efficient early warning system in place. They know how to watch that system and they know how to influence it weekly, daily. I call it the 1+1+1=4 !® system.

 This system is like a 3-legged stool : one leg is their habits another leg is the unique skills they possess and the last leg is their weekly dashboard. TOP Sales manager I have seen follow the right habits, they inspect the right metrics  and they master a unique skill called the « value added inspection » skill.

Their problem if I may say is that there are not enough of TOP sales managers, and they are bound to disappear…because they will eventually get promoted, to Area Managers, VP of Sales you name it. And then what happens? Well, unless they know what it is  that they were doing that made them different, they can’t coach it very effectively. When I was a sales productivity manager in Europe, I trained some of our sales managers in our Federal divison in Washington DC on Sales management best practices which I had learned myself from TOP American sales managers ! – How could that be ?– well the reality is that the best sales cultures sometimes get diluted as successful companies grow and if you are not conciously competent of what you are doing right, you can not coach it downwards and you can not teach it.
Not to mention that if you have a big ego and don’t control it - and in sales that happens sometimes right ?-, you may run the risk of thinking that your success is normal because you are just TOO GOOD. You may start to think that you are the greatest sales manager there is on the planet – the Greatest. ...and that can become a limiting factor to your career.

Some of my TOP clients also ask me to help their top sales managers become more conciously competent so that their best practices become more self sustainable over time through their organization. By the way, that is also the only possibility that you can improve as a TOP sales manager once you understand which of your habits have what impact on your results. I am an Engineer remember?. Well sales management is also made of very simple processes that you can define, measure and improve. And improving a top sales manager by 1% is sometimes worth to a company as much as saving a failing naive sales manager or even improving a reactive sales manager by 50%…If you are good, then 1+1+1=4 !® will make you GREAT once you understand all of the ingredients, how to apply them to your business the right way and how to cook that recipe right with your team.  Then you are able to scale faster and clone yourself more easily by moving up to the next level with solid foundations underneath.

The NAIVE Sales Manager, the REACTIVE Sales Manager and the PROACTIVE Sales Manager

Philippe Le Baron • There are 3 kinds of front line sales managers : The NAIVE kind, the REACTIVE kind and the PROACTIVE kind

Over the last 15 years working with many different sales managers from diffferent cultures and in many different B2B industries I was able to work with some of the best leaders in sales management on the planet especially in my last company at EMC. I call these TOP sales managers the PROACTIVE sales managers, they are the front line sales managers who drive growth, who move market share, who develop TOP sales teams. I was able to reverse engineer their best practices and I created a Recipe that I call 1+1+1=4 !® which I made them aware of too, because they knew they were good but they didn’t know why…and because I am an engineer I see life through processes. So I watched them, I understood them and I created the execution processes which I call the 1+1+1=4 processes.

You can’t get better if you don’t know what it is that you do that really has an impact right...so I helped them become more conciously competent so they could improve no matter how good they already were, and I defined for them what I call the sales manager productivity metrics.

I have also seen normal/average sales managers at work - also at EMC by the way - and I also understood what it was that they were NOT doing that made them struggle and WHY. I call these sales managers the REACTIVE sales managers. This is still the vast majority of the sales management crowd today, it is such a tough job that being able to survive is usually already good enough, especially in a tough economy like today. The reactive sales managers work like dogs but they can not grow their business significantly above the market growth. I help REACTIVE sales manager understand how the right processes bring to them the 3 keys to growth thanks to Key 1. The right habits, 2. the right dashboard and 3. the right skills that they now need to apply to new clients called their reps.

Now, If you have worked with sales managers long enough you know that among all people you can’t tell any sales manager anything especially in the reactive stage they are too busy and too often in firefighting mode or even sometimes in survival mode, but you can help them think differently so they start behaving differently: that is what I call the « whispering » effect.

Finally I have witnessed and helped many RISING sales managers who were being promoted from top sales performer to first level sales manager and I also understood why the transition for them was so hard to make. It had little to do by the way with their skills, but a lot more with their habits. Great sales managers have in common many of the same skills than sales people have, because if they don’t they can’t survive long. If you don’t believe me just put a TOP Manager with excellent management skills but NOT coming from sales, in charge of a couple of hungry sales people and see what happens… I remember a great sales manager form Siemens who was used to managing a couple of hundred consultants and project managers- he indeed was an excellent manager and he indeed failed within 6 months trying to manage just 6 sales reps…because he underestimated the challenge and because he lacked some basic selling skills– he got killed like many others in the NAIVE stage-

Sales Management has unique challenges because sales people are unique people to manage and you can't wing it long as a sales manage : you need a system, you need a process. to lead your team successfully, whether your sales managers are in the NAIVE stage, in the REACTIVE stage or in the PROACTIVE stage.

More to come if you are ready to do a deep dive into each of these 3 stages in the life of a front line sales manager.

Now another way of looking at it is there are 3 kinds of sales managers :
The managers who want things happen, the managers who make things happen, and the managers who wonder what happened...

Value Added Inspection - YOUR Difference as an Effective Sales Manager

Doing the thing right: Value added inspection skills.

Value added inspection is the "ART" part of Effective Sales Managers : It starts by setting expectations, and then by inspecting what you expect. We will focus here on the inspection part, and mostly on the « value added » part of these inspections.

The value added inspection, whether it is performed during the forecast process, during a one2one process, or during a deal review process, relies on one very simple tool :  your questions.

The same way you want your reps to ask better questions from your customers, you need to ask great question from your reps. You need to find the "holes in their cheese", and then you need to help them fill these holes thanks to your own value add.

The choice of your questions will mainly depend on what you are trying to achieve and who you are trying to influence.

A struggling Sales Manager  will handle business in a way that  is unpredictable, and is reflected, in the long term, by consistent  inaccurate forecast (too optimistic or too pessimistic, either way reflects poor control of the business). Because he does not ask the right questions.

A better Sales manager  will handle business in a better way so as to provide a more accurate forecast, but consistently below goal, which reflects good “drill down” skills, and good scrubbing of his Reps’s own forecast, but also can reflect  little influence on his people by coaching them into filling the gap with the revenue goal. He asks better questions, but provides little help and leaves his reps alone with their cheese full of holes.

An Effective Sales Manager does both by identifying gaps between forecast & goal, and then by getting her people to act at filling this gap and eventually making things happen to make/beat goal. She does it thanks to her value added inspection skills.

Value added Inspection skills are   a unique tool & technique, for a Sales Manager to get control of his business and of his people. This is a skill, when applied to the right processes, that can make the sales manager/sales rep relationship a WIN/WIN situation for them and for their district .

A good use of this technique can lead to empowerment of your people, and then to district success at beating goal. 

This is therefore a very important skill  and technique that every Sales Manager learns usually from his manager (by being inspected this way, you get to inspect the same way, it becomes part of the family ties…). You can be better prepared for your 121 with your  reps, by asking better questions, by driving consistent behavior change from your team.

A value added inspection question cannot easily be defined, but here are a few tips when you prepare those questions :

it is often an open question (What, when, where, who, etc…)

it is a question that is meant first and foremost at provoking reflexion by the recipient ( the deeper the reflexion, the better)

it is a question that is uncomfortable to answer and often can not be answered quickly 

it is a question which main goal is actually not to get an answer, but to transfer the question into the recipient’s head, for him to think, to change his way of looking at things, and to act upon it

It is a behavior changing tool, more than an “answer getting” tool

Examples : 

When did they last call you ?

Why would they buy from us ?

What would make them decide to buy now ?

...

So ...

what are your questions for your next meeting ?

and

...why these questions ?