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...
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...
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