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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.
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.
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