Introducing The Stop > Start Series: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Conventional Sales Management “Wisdom”
If you’re like most salespeople, you were promoted to sales manager almost overnight, with no training or support and oftentimes no experience at all in management. This can lead to feelings of overwhelm, frustration, and even despair as you navigate a new role and sometimes even a new team. Being a superstar salesperson doesn’t necessarily mean you will excel in management as well. That’s where we come in.
With decades of sales management experience as well as experience working with hundreds of salespeople, we understand the challenges and can share real advice and tools to help you succeed. We’re not here to give you quick tips and tricks, as we’ve found most conventional sales management “wisdom” just doesn’t work.
Over the course of the next few months, we’ll share a weekly topic relevant to sales managers at all levels - newbies and seasoned professionals alike - that will help you rethink the traditional “truths” to make you the most effective and confident sales manager leading a productive and profitable team. Join us for the journey, with a video post from our CEO Scott Roy setting up each week’s topic, this quick summary on LinkedIn, and the full chapter available on our website. Feel free to check in weekly for our updates, and take a deeper dive into the chapters that resonate with you, and share what you think will be helpful with friends and colleagues.
That’s why we developed this series. We don’t claim have all the answers, but we do have a reliable way of approaching sales management that you can learn so you can find effective answers to the problems you face while avoiding the pitfalls that come with acting “the way managers should.”
Transforming sales results is not necessarily logical or linear. Instead, it is a complex mix of three major components that, together, produce sales results, as expressed in this equation:
R = A + C + E
Results = Attitude + Competence + Execution™
In other words, transforming sales Results requires constant awareness of the three key variables that produce them. If you want to change sales performance, you need to focus on all three simultaneously:
Managing Attitude, moment-by-moment, maintaining a mindset of possibility and being alert to the level of confidence, belief and expectancy.
Strengthening sales and management Competence, which is the difference between being just good enough versus the pursuit of becoming great.
Mastering the ability to Execute flawlessly, by doing the right things at the right time with the right people, of staying on track versus just staying busy.
To transform sales, you must be mindful of how each of these factors play a part at all times in driving the Results you produce. It’s very helpful to study and understand the distinctions of each variable, but important to treat them as completely interconnected and interdependent.
We’ve trained and coached thousands of salespeople for decades, both in our own organizations, as well as for our clients in many countries around the world. We work both in the Western commercial sector and the Global South, across many cultures. We train people on the complex B2B sale, all the way to the most basic B2C transactional sale one can imagine.
What we have discovered is that the RACE™ Framework - concentrating on Attitude, Competence, and Execution to transform sales performance - works in every setting.
In addition – and this is fundamental to transformative learning – you must bite the bullet and commit yourself to stop doing what you have been doing before you can generate the creativity and the drive to discover and master new behavior. Therefore, each subject we explore will address something to stop so that you can get off the hamster-wheel for good and do something that can genuinely change things for you and your team.
Each topic we present will follow this pattern:
First, we will describe a common misperception in sales management that often leads people down a dead end of limited performance.
Then, we’ll share our insights, which cut against the grain of conventional sales management “wisdom,” to reveal a different perspective.
Finally, we will provide a transformational alternative to help you find your way of doing what will work. You will notice a lot of one-to-one meetings in our suggestions. That's because they work. Find the time. You won’t regret it.
To stop doing something familiar to you may be difficult and may even make you anxious, but we encourage you to trust the process, be bold, and see how a new way of thinking opens up more possibilities for you to excel at sales management.
Finally, we would like to hear what you think about these strategies and your experiences using them. Follow us along the journey on our LinkedIn page or email us at info@wrpartnership.com.