Stop Behaving Like a Manager
Gary is CEO of a billion dollar company in the US. He’s wildly busy, but two days every month, for over 20 years, he has spent time in the field, making sales calls with his salespeople.
These aren’t drive-by visits; he will spend enough time with each staffer so that he gets to know the individuals personally. He knows about their families and their interests. To Gary, a person is a person, not just a sales rep.
Consequently, his staff loves him because he values each rep as an individual, and the company is one of the fastest growing in the country.
[Note: If you know a new sales manager, do them a big favor and share this session with them. If you are a new sales manager, please read on.]
You’ve been successful as a sales rep and now you’ve been rewarded with a promotion to sales manager. The only problem is no one has trained you for the job.
This is a common scenario. Most salespeople get promoted quickly without any thought about whether they even know how to be a manager.
If you were a team member on Friday and became their manager on Monday, it’s important that you think first about how you want to behave before you do something that derails your opportunity.
It helps to start with humility. Just admit that you don’t necessarily know what to do for your new team. With that admission, you can start to avoid the mistakes made by managers who start doing what they think a manager should be doing.
Generally, there are several traps that new managers can fall into:
Some let the promotion go to their head. They go ‘over the top’ with their new authority. Now that they are the boss, they become “bossy,” enamored with wielding their new power.
Others go out of their way to curry favor by being ‘one of the boys.’ They go overboard to prove they haven’t changed. They downplay their new authority, so the team continues to like them.
Some will jump in and want to take charge, changing everything they hated about the previous regime. Eager to prove themselves, they move too quickly and unsettle the team.
Still others become distant and aloof, consumed with self-importance and busy-ness. They withdraw suddenly from previous relationships and reorient themselves away from the field. They begin managing from the throne.
Occasionally, some new managers take the job out of a sense of duty. They are told that “no one else is available,’ and they drag themselves to the task, wishing they were still free and on their own.
And, we see many sales managers - even those with years of experience - making two fundamental mistakes:
They manage their team as a group, instead of a collection of unique individuals. They treat everyone the same, in spite of the fact that everyone is completely different.
They manage others the way that they liked to be managed. Adhering to the Golden Rule might seem like a good strategy for sales managers, but it’s blind to the fact that each member of their team has their own unique way of working, developing their skills, and motivating themselves to succeed.
Companies make it easy for new managers to make these mistakes, because they rarely train them for their new responsibilities. They promote managers with the faulty assumption that since they were good salespeople, they will be good managers.
Instead of being trained, new managers are told to “go make sales happen.” They leap into action like they did when they were selling, moving deals forward by doing it themselves. They cross over boundaries and step on their team’s toes to close sales. At best, they get a few deals to close, but they disempower their team. At worst, the team resents being dominated.
So, what should you start doing instead?
First, realize that your team are your primary customers and your job is to work through them so you can nail the company targets. Your job is to serve your customers so that they can serve their customers.
Once you’ve taken this mindset to heart, then see what happens as you take these steps:
Discover what your manager is expecting of you. Ask to define your role and the deliverables in detail. Know what good looks like from their perspective.
Write out what you want from your new role, what you expect to do to get it, and what you’ll need from your team. As a manager:
How do you want to be?
What do you want to do?
How do you want to feel?
Now find out what your team wants and needs from you. Spend at least an hour with each person and listen for 80% or more of the time.
Learn about your salespeople personally while keeping your relationship with them appropriately professional.
A suggestion: keep notes in your logbook or tablet on each member of your team. List everything you know about them – hobbies, interests, children, plans, and dreams. See the difference this makes day-in and day-out.
Showing interest in the people on your team, treating them as individuals with different motivations, and being open to what they say are the best actions you can take to form the kind of trusted relationship required to build a high performing team with you as the captain.
Stop Reading Email
We asked one of the managers we coached to count his emails. He had more than 6,000 emails in his inbox, more than half of them unread. We asked him how he felt each time he opened his inbox. He said, ‘Completely hopeless.’ We worked with him on a system that would allow him to empty his email, keep it empty and attend to it in a timely way.
It took him about three months but, during a coaching session, he said he was down to 11 emails. I said, ‘You’re so close! How come it’s not zero? ‘ He said, ‘I’ll call you back.’
In 20 minutes, he’d done it. A week later he emailed me, ‘It’s still at zero! My god, what a difference this makes!’
Let’s start by acknowledging the value of technological innovation and what it has meant for sales.
We’re both old enough to remember life before smartphones, even before personal computers. The connectivity, the access to information, the ability to produce quality material quickly and easily that we have today is simply amazing!
Yet, these advances have brought a new set of problems. One of the first things most people do when they wake up in the morning is reach for their phone. At work, all day long, they continuously monitor email, texts, voicemail, trying to catch up with everything that’s happening.
They do this because life in a 24/7 world - especially for those of us in a global business - seems to demand this sort of attention. And, if we don’t stick with it, it piles up and things get worse before they get better.
Managing the information flow isn’t easy. You have to figure out where to put it all. Usually, you turn into a librarian, managing an ever-expanding list of folders. Or, you leave messages in your Inbox, forcing yourself to look at a single piece of email multiple times before you can let it go.
Soon, your ‘to-do’ list is being kept in multiple locations, hours are racing by, the end of the day arrives, and you wonder where the time went. And there are still dozens of unread emails in your inbox. Add those to the unread emails that were there at the start of the day, and you realize that technology is running your life.
The problem isn’t email or instant messaging, or texting, or voicemail. All of these are incredible tools that you can use to terrific advantage. The problem is letting anything but your own considered judgment decide where your focus is going to be for the next hour of your life. Every time your personal device lights up, vibrates, rings or otherwise grabs your attention, and you respond, you are letting it decide your priority at that moment.
And that is a significant problem both personally and professionally.
The problem with email (and instant messaging, texts, voicemail, etc.) is that it tempts you into activity that lacks proper aim. By aim, we refer to the conscious planning of exactly what you are going to do next so you can exceed your sales targets in the shortest amount of time.
The chances of a given email, text, message, or voicemail being exactly the right thing to do next is infinitesimally small! And yet, when that chime sounds, that’s where we are tempted to go, and most often that’s exactly what we do.
It’s a classic case of mistaking activity for productivity. And it is a real problem, especially for salespeople and sales managers who need to be strategic, thoughtful, and intuitive in everything they do.
We perform at our best when we reside in a state of mind that we call ‘above-the-line.’ Athletes call it the ‘slot’ or the ‘zone.’ Classically it’s been called ‘flow’ or ‘mind like water.’ In this state, we think deeply and quickly, we stay focused and on purpose, and we do exactly what we’ve chosen to do to hit our targets instead of reacting to whatever has just grabbed our attention.
We don’t work well when we’re constantly interrupted. Sales managers especially don’t work well that way - neither do salespeople. They lose that clarity of focus that keeps deals moving along. They drift from one activity to another, the hours race by, and the things that needed to have been done to execute a sales strategy just don’t happen with the precision and the drive that’s required.
High sales performance requires being in charge of yourself, moment by moment. You have a natural ability and genuine brilliance, but this capacity needs breathing room in which to operate. Jumping from one notification to another dulls your performance by substituting reactivity for discipline and busy-ness for effective action.
The problem isn’t your technology. It’s your reactivity and unconscious attachment to it. If you’d like to experiment with a simple activity that creates room for you to have your technology instead of your technology having you, try this for a week and see what happens:
Begin your workday with a period of uninterrupted quiet time. Remove all distractions and take some deep breaths.
Plan your day, scheduling the important things to get done, canceling things that aren’t as important, leaving enough time to handle the emergencies that may arise.
Now look at your email and messages. Process them efficiently,* and then silence your phone, email, and instant messaging for a defined period of time that you choose, such as two or three hours.
Go do exactly what you've chosen to do as your top priority activity, free from technological interruption.
It doesn’t matter how long you keep your technology turned off. What matters is doing it and watching how you react. It may be a relief, or it may be rather nerve-wracking. You may even not be able to stand it.
Try it and see. After a while, you’ll learn how long you can go without checking your technology again. Most of us are not brain surgeons who need to be on call and available at a moment’s notice, but it depends on your role, the current state of play, etc. You’ll figure it out.
Start being in charge of your technology and see what happens to your quality of focus, the depth of your thinking, and the progress towards your targets. You may just surprise yourself.
* If you want help learning how to do this well, we unreservedly recommend David Allen’s Getting Things Done.
Stop Chasing Numbers at the End of the Quarter
We were in New York training the sales managers of a massive global company. We were discussing account planning and pipeline management. The ideas were flowing until Sarah looked at her calendar, sighed deeply, and said, ‘Well, we won’t be focused on the account development much longer.’
When we asked why, she said, ‘Well, in two weeks time we’ll be looking at the end of the quarter. It’s all short-term thinking from that point forward.’ To a person, all her colleagues agreed.
‘Do your senior managers agree with that approach,’ we asked?
‘Oh, I think so,’ she said with a laugh. With one voice, the entire group repeated their boss’s frustrated message from the previous year: ‘Just sell the s*** off the back of the truck!’
The end of the quarter is approaching, and you know the drill. The focus on account development and strategic planning is about to give way to an obsessive focus on ‘making the numbers.’ If it’s the end of the fiscal year, it’s even worse.
The thoughtful development of a pipeline which was going to sustain your business not just this quarter but next, not just this year but next, is about to be jettisoned in favor of two overriding questions: when will it close and for how much?
You and your salespeople are under pressure to bring deals to completion, and everyone starts selling badly.
They shave margins and abandon new business for the sure repeat.
They close deals the company can’t install, deliver, or service.
They make promises they can’t keep.
They ignore progressing deals that won’t close in the current quarter.
They cannibalize the pipeline, leaving money on the table and weakening next quarter’s prospects.
The feeding frenzy is on, and your people are picking up pennies on the ground when all around them dollar bills are fluttering in the wind.
This foolish pursuit is fueled by exhaustion and pressure - holidays are cancelled, people work insane hours, anxiety fills most conversations - and it’s perpetuated by the drop in sales at the start of the next quarter as everyone recovers from the effort and falls behind target once again.
This sort of behavior becomes institutionalized as the status quo in most businesses. Driven into survival mode by financial fears, executives fall into short-term thinking, and sales managers follow in their wake.
Somebody’s got to wake up and do something different. How about you being that person?
We’re not suggesting that you commit career suicide, but we are suggesting that you lead a quiet, effective revolution - for the sake of your company, your team, and your own sanity.
Here’s one way to go about it: start focusing your team on inputs as well as the outputs.
Let’s be clear. The problem is not the outputs themselves: the targets, the metrics, the quarterly accounting. The problem is getting manic about them - becoming so obsessed with the outputs that you do stupid things that will hurt you both now and later.
Inputs drive outputs, not the other way around. And it’s the wise sales manager that keeps his head at the end of the quarter and leads his team to keep doing the things that will pay off, later if not sooner.
However, for this to work, you’ve got to hold your nerve and commit to the right activities. Most companies don’t give this enough thought. Get hold of this, and you can move yourself and your team forward in a remarkable way.
Use the RACE formula to identify the inputs most important to your team’s sales success:
Typical attitude inputs:
how well people stay in a state of possibility
how quickly they recover from disappointment
how easily they learn new behavior
how deeply they commit to targets
how dedicated they remain to raising their customer’s decision intelligence (DQ)
how many options for action they envision in the face of obstacles
Typical competence inputs:
how familiar they are with the exact steps their customer must take to buy intelligently
how skillfully they listen to customers in order to discover their true needs
how well they utilise a customer’s objections to move them to a decision
how masterful they are at waiting for the right moment to share solutions
how focused they remain on raising their customer’s DQ
Typical execution inputs:
how well do they use the CRM to plan their selling activity instead of reporting on it
how forceful are they in refusing to do things that waste their selling time, especially if you are requiring them
how well do they aim themselves each week
how boldly they lead their customer through these steps
how consistently do they keep deals moving along by finding key next steps to take
Once you’ve got yourself focused on inputs, take you team through a conversation like this one, and start the process of returning sanity to the end of the quarter.
Ask your team to describe what life is like at the end of each quarter. Get out all the details.
Share your commitment to end the ineffective short-term thinking and ask for their commitment as well.
Share your thinking about inputs and suggest that refusing to sacrifice inputs for outputs is a way to restore sanity and generate sales success.
Commit to a personal conversation with each team member in which you will agree 3-5 key inputs that will give the best chance of transforming their sales performance.
Keep those appointments, and, at the end of each one, schedule the next conversation to evaluate both their inputs and their outputs.
This will not be a quick win, but it is a battle worth fighting. Imagine if you could move from quarter to quarter, hitting your targets gracefully, without sacrificing long-term gain and exhausting your people.
Not only will your sales performance move steadily up, you’ll soon have every capable salesperson in the organization wanting to work for you.
Stop Updating the CRM
We were coaching the staff of a large call center for a company offering voice and data packages to clients who then sold them on to their own customers.
These reps were supposed to be taking orders all week long. But in fact, they did zero selling on Friday. This was known as ‘CRM day’. They had to catch up and input all their data from the four days just passed. The requirements of the CRM were so intensive that the sales force invested over 20% of their work week in data entry!
Management is excited. The new sales CRM has been installed and it’s time to launch. It has been touted as the great panacea for improving sales. Now, is it expected, the pipeline will flow, deal information will be available, forecasts will be a snap, targets will be hit, and the bottom-line will be a cup overflowing.
Right. What actually happens is something quite different.
Account managers spend three days in intensive CRM training. No provision is made for reduction of sales expectations. Now, they are farther behind their targets.
The training is presented as mandatory, with attendance and follow-up test scores entered into their personnel files. Now, they’re not only behind on their sales targets, they are thoroughly p***** off!
The new CRM system is loaded with fields to be completed, because other departments – purchasing, finance, supply chain, HR, marketing, and products – are all mandated to use its information. This requires on average five more hours per week of data entry than the previous system. Now, salespeople are…you get the picture.
We’ve rarely met salespeople who love their CRM. It’s a shame, because, when it is designed well and used wisely, a CRM is a tool that salespeople can use to save time, avoid repetitive meetings, secure internal resources, drive their pipeline, and increase their earnings.
Unfortunately, most CRMs are neither designed well nor used wisely.
They are designed to serve the information needs of senior management, not the planning needs of the sales force.
They require data-entry from the one group of people in the company who most hate doing it – the sales force.
The ‘sales process’ baked into the CRM often fails utterly to match reality, and the information salespeople enter is then used as a stick to beat them with. Not surprisingly, salespeople start gaming the system to avoid the pain.
The CRM data are accessed by other departments who put additional pressure on the sales force to gather more data that seems senseless to salespeople and with which they continue to be flogged (until morale improves, of course).
Here's the bottom line: salespeople will do just about anything that really helps them to sell more and make more money. They detest and resist doing things that prevent this from happening.
In the good old days, salespeople owned their performance and their daily statistics. They kept their stats because the stats helped them succeed. Their managers helped them use those stats to develop their skills and make more money. That simple logic worked:
Plan your inputs to create outputs.
Track your inputs so you know what happened.
Use your tracking to improve your selling.
When CRM designers and the senior managers who are depending on accurate data recognize these simple facts, then CRMs fulfill their promise of being engines for success.
CRMs are designed around the selling methodology a company has designed for its business.
Salespeople use the CRM to plan their selling activity instead of merely reporting on it.
Data is current and accurate because salespeople have entered the data ahead of their actions.
Managers know what their salespeople are going to do, what they have done, and they stop bombarding them with requests for updates, reviews, and all the other workarounds and crap that happens when CRM information isn’t accurate and trusted.
Here's a dialogue we had with the CFO of one of our global clients.
‘We just aren’t getting accurate forecasting information from our salespeople,’ he said.
‘How are you receiving the inaccurate information?’ we asked.
‘It’s simple,’ he said, ‘In our CRM we ask them to estimate how far along they are in the selling process. We give them a range to choose from – 10 to 80% - but they’re just not taking it seriously.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because they never pick a percentage over 30%! Things stay at 25-30% for weeks or months, and then the deal suddenly closes or drops away.’
‘What happens when they pick a number higher than 30%?’
‘Well, ‘the CFO replied., “Finance contacts the salesperson and asks for a detailed financial forecast of the deal’s revenue for the next several quarters.’
‘I think you’ve just solved the mystery.’
Given that your chances of quickly changing your company's CRM system are somewhere between nil and zero, we suggest taking the following steps with your sales team.
Accept the inconvenient truth that, until your people want to enter this data instead of having to enter it, you are engaged in an uphill battle.
Speak one-to-one with your people. Find out if there is anything in the CRM that can help them plan their selling activity so they can be more successful. Stay smart. Do not suggest that they ignore the rest of it! Just find out what really works for them.
This is the tricky part. Compile everything you’ve learned from all your people, develop a strategy that helps your people use the parts of the CRM that really help them sell and avoid as much of the rest of it as they can.
Clear your strategy with your manager! Make sure they have your back, and then enroll your team into using the CRM for their own benefit and gradually change things for the better.
Obviously, this requires some real finesse on your part. Go ahead. Do it well. See where it leads.
Stop Believing the Close Date
During a training session with us, James was complaining about how much time he has to spend in preparing projections for the finance department on very early stage deals. ‘It always happens when I just start working on a sale. Finance asks for an estimate of its size and a forecast. Early on, I have no idea how big the sale will be!’
During a break in the training, James happened to ride the elevator with the finance manager who said, ‘I hear you’re working on a deal. I’d like to have a revenue forecast by 5 p.m. today.’ James explained, ‘I’m just working on the problem with them and only meeting with them for second time. I have no idea when it will close, let alone the forecast. I’ll let you know when we get farther along.’
The finance staffer looked at him and said nothing. Soon, however, James got an email from her saying, ‘Thanks for the conversation. I’ll expect that revenue forecast by 5 p.m.!’
We know you spend a great deal of time with your salespeople on two matters: the value of their deals in the pipeline and when they are going to close. Interestingly, we find many companies that become manic around these two pieces of information. The larger the company, the more the likelihood is that you’re drowning in management information (MI) that is supposed to help you nail down these two measures.
Unless you’re a very small firm, you should be relying on a customer relationship manager (CRM) to help manage your data. If it is kept up to date, it will contain accurate information that can be sorted into reports that will provide the company with the information it needs see what’s ahead.
But that’s a big ‘if’. CRMs are notoriously out of date, contain inaccurate information, and largely cannot produce reports that can be trusted. It’s because most salespeople don’t keep their record up to date or they simply make stuff up and put it in the system to keep their manager off their back.
As a result, you constantly ask your team for updates, reports, forecasts, and other workarounds because you don’t trust the data in the CRM. This cuts into your salespeople’s time for selling more business, which then puts further stress on hitting the target.
Then you push hard at the end of the target period to close deals out. Some do and some don’t, and then you’re left with lots of stories and reasons for the slippage. You’re beginning to think that you are engaged in a very big game of ‘let’s not really tell the truth.’
But the real truth is that a frenzied focus on deal amount and close date invites a lot of story-telling. Everybody involved makes up stuff about these two pieces of information:
Customers don’t always tell you the truth – about the size, timeframe, and likelihood of a deal happening.
Salespeople tend to be optimistic and like to report numbers that will please their boss.
Sales managers pass on the good news to their boss.
Finance tends to treat early-stage numbers as if they were hard fact when, in fact, they are mostly a guess.
Of course, you know better than to rely on an early deal amount and the close date. You know it’s just a guess. But if you’re being pressured by your manager to ‘get a number and a date and commit to it,’ you’re stuck in a losing game where the numbers come in on time and as projected only rarely.
What should you do?
It usually takes a significant chunk of time and some very skilled interventions for a company to change the interplay of salespeople, management, and the CRM so that forecasting is accurate. However, when a company takes it on and succeeds in doing it, the results are dramatic and profitable. Several things need to be addressed.
First, you need to identify the logical steps that customers need to go through so they make an intelligent buying decision. Beginning with a dive into the problem they want to solve and steadily progressing toward a solution that will work, each step increases the customer’s confidence and trust in you as the supplier. We call this process DQ Sales® because it focuses on building the customer’s decision intelligence.
Second, you need to train your salespeople how to sell in a manner that matches the customer buying journey noted above. The benefit to your salespeople is that they will have a clearly defined path to follow. Set up your CRM with the same logical steps of a customer-centric selling journey as identified above.
Third, sales managers need to train their salespeople to use the CRM as a proactive selling tool that will help them make more money, not try to oblige them to ‘update the CRM’ for management. Using it this way actually increases the accuracy of sale size and closure date because it is current and provides management with more reliable data. This is the best way to support your sales team to sell better, while also providing management with accurate forecasting information.
Fourth, this change must be synchronized from the top to the bottom of the organization, because senior management ultimately drives the reporting use of the CRM and regulates the pressure on deal size and close date.
If a company can successfully make this happen, some very good things begin to happen:
The CRM will be filled with accurate data that can be used reliably.
This data, informed by historical precedent, can do about 95% of the forecasting work! You get a more accurate picture of close date and deal size, based on what’s happened in the past, rather than relying on your salespeople’s best guess.
You can quit requiring your salespeople to do what they’re not good at, like forecasting and filling out forms, and instead, spend more time talking to customers.
Your system will help identify where people would benefit from greater training and sharpening of their skills.
If you think you are ready to take this on, start by experimenting with the following steps first. It will get you going, stir the pot a bit, and see if there’s an appetite for change in your company.
Meet with your team and, together, layout in detail the steps the customer needs to take to build their decision intelligence and end up buying your solution. The number of steps will rely on the complexity of the sale. You can include your prospecting steps in the beginning of the process if you choose.
Arrange the steps in a logical order, focusing first on fully understanding the problem and its cost, and then on the right solution and its ROI.
Have each salesperson assess where their customers are in comparison to the steps. Have them notice which steps have been skipped over or skated through.
Then have your salespeople figure out the next step with each customer, to complete each step along this path.
Refer to our books if you want more detailed information: Decision Intelligence Selling and Sell Well, Do Good.