Stop Giving Advice
David complained to us about his team. ‘All I do is tell them what to do. I’ve turned into the ‘answer man.’ When my advice doesn’t work, they blame me instead of themselves. It’s a complete waste of time,’ he said.
You’re the sales manager and you want to get sales to move! You ask about the deals in the pipeline and the storytelling begins. ‘Our prices are too high,’ ‘Our competitor has better products,’ ‘They keep putting me off,’ ‘I don’t know what else to do but wait…’ The air thickens with despair.
Eager to get things moving, you jump in and begin advising: ‘All right, here’s what you do…’
However, only one of two things can happen: your advice works and you become the man with the answers, or it doesn’t work and you become the one who gets blamed.
Either way, you lose.
If you’re the person with the answers that work, you lose because your team will keep coming to you to figure things out for them rather than do it themselves. They become timid and rely completely on you before they act because they fear making a mistake.
On the other hand, if your advice doesn’t work, you lose because the responsibility for the lost sale gets shifted to you.
And advice-giving is a terribly ineffective use of your time. You spend loads of time handing out advice and your team isn’t developing into people who can think for themselves.
Really, aren’t you a bit tired of people asking you what they should do? Don’t you want them to be more competent and independent? You managed to do it, why can’t they?
Think back to how you got good at selling. Did you keep counting on your sales manager to tell you what to do or did you become self-sufficient?
Great sales managers help people think deeply rather than doing their thinking for them.
You know the impact of this. People engage their brains, invent new ways forward, and then go execute what they thought of doing. Whether their ideas work or not, they are in charge of what they are doing.
Your job is to lead your people to find their answer to each challenge they face. After all, it’s their job, not yours. You can’t make them successful salespeople, but you can encourage them to be bold and be willing to make mistakes.
By daring to win they will fail, but they will also land plenty of sales. Either way, their confidence and skill will grow because they were the ones who made the call.
One caveat. When people lack competence, they need direct instruction - advice helps, at least in the beginning. As they become competent, they need less advice and more freedom to think for themselves.
There’s a simple way to find out what each of your people need from you at this point in their development. Spend time with them. Observe them in action and listen carefully to what they say and do. Get into the trenches with them and learn how you can add value. For each person:
List the attitude, skills and habits needed for him to succeed in his job.
Rate him on each item: E (excellent), G (good, but can improve), or N (needs development).
Before you share your opinions, ask him to make a similar list and rate his own abilities.
Meet one-to-one, compare ratings, and collaboratively create a development plan that he is enthusiastic about.
Start immediately and monitor progress.
Developing your people in this way requires time, patience, and a real commitment to building their competence. Do this so they can operate confidently, skillfully, and independently.
Stop Laying Down the Law
If you want to see a classic example of ‘laying down the law,’ Google ‘Alec Baldwin Glengarry Glenross,’ and indulge in a bit of guilty pleasure.
We talked with Michael, a manager who reported that his salespeople were very motivated, and that he always paid lots of attention to them.
Later, we met with three of his salespeople who said they were close to quitting! “Michael ties us up every Friday for three hours. He micromanages us and we can’t stand it.” In fact, Michael would call his staff in the evening, waking them up and getting them out of bed! He thought he was doing a great job - they thought he was a jerk.
Sales managers get frustrated - some more quickly than others. Most will get there eventually, because they care about performance and doing well.
Sales managers around the world tell us they are frustrated by underperformance:
Promising hires that turn out to be duds
Pipelines that trickle instead of flow
People lying through their teeth
Poor attitude and laziness on the team
Politics driving policy
Procedures not being followed
Prima donnas and sandbaggers…anyone who embraces the art of mediocrity
You get tired of being disappointed, tired of losing, tired of feeling used, and so you toughen up and lay down the law. You can become dictatorial, authoritarian, directive, demanding, and unsympathetic – all in an effort to tighten up a loose ship.
You’ve kicked butt, taken names, and whittled people down to size. Let’s admit it, it feels pretty darn good to cut loose.
If and when you do this, you will see some short-term results. People do change behavior when they feel scared, threatened, or intimidated.
However, they also feel resentful – really resentful - at being treated that way. And when people resent the way you’re behaving, they will always get even. They may appear to accept your behavior, but inside they will be plotting revenge. People will start slow-walking you. They will lie to you by padding sales reports, giving margin away, and filling the pipeline with garbage so they can avoid your wrath.
Then, they’ll start dodging you, keeping as low a profile as possible. They stop coming to you with their problems. They won’t tell you the truth anymore because you can’t be trusted to hear bad news without being reactive. You’ll be feared, but not respected.
And, because you’re not hearing bad news anymore, you will think everything’s working!
Worse yet, you’ll start finding yourself surrounded by other people who think being tough is the way managers have to be. This just reinforces your bullying behavior. You’ll become a legend – they’ll be talking about you and your buddies for a long time to come.
But eventually, after you’ve kept this up for a while the cracks begin to show. You come to realize you have less reliable data to run your team. Certain deals begin to slip and never cross the line. You miss targets. You lose a key man because he’s had enough of your new style. Team spirit fades to a distant memory. You incur more staff turnover. Your employee satisfaction scores tank and, when you look over your shoulder, HR is on your tail.
We think you’re smarter than this. You know where this is going. Unless you’re sociopathic, you don’t really enjoy being a jerk. Most sales managers we know actually feel badly after giving into bullying behavior. It works on their conscience, which is probably a good thing.
Guilt can eat you alive and, eventually, you will come to your senses and conclude that being a bully is not the answer - it’s not how you want to be. You know innately that people will respond better to a human than a tyrant.
But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. You’ve been willing to do the hard thing and stand up for a standard of work and an ethic of no compromise. That’s a very good thing.
It’s just that you will be that much more effective if you can uphold the standards without resorting to intimidation, posturing, and tough-ness.
So, how do you do this without flipping to the opposite side and ‘being understanding’ and living on hope that people will change.
First, stop laying down the law. Enough is enough. Then, start doing this:
Sit down with a person you’ve been particularly tough on (or whom you are about to be tough on).
Calmly, but directly and without apology, tell him exactly what he’s doing or not doing that frustrates you.
Then, discuss assumptions and conclusions: first yours, then his.
Tell him what you are assuming and concluding about his behavior – what you are thinking about him that is irritating and concerning you.
Then ask for his assumptions and conclusions – about his work and about you and your management.
Now you have some new information to work with. Use it to agree how both of you will behave in the future. Come up with a few concrete steps to put into action.
Set a date to review how well the agreement is working.
Get great at confronting ineffective and undesirable behavior before you reach the stage of exploding. This is a challenge worthy of your strength. Initially, you’ll likely feel more unsteady than comfortable. Without your tough posturing, you’re going to feel a bit unprotected. But you can handle it. If you stay the course, we think you will be pleased with your results.
Stop Hoping People Will Change
Darren had been transferred - demoted, really - and was back working the desk, instead of going out in the field. He was planning to ride it out for another five years; I sat down with him and listened to his disappointment. I wanted him to understand how his resentment was affecting his behavior. I said that he could ride his time out and wait for his pension, but I asked him what he really wanted.
He said, “I really want to get back to the field. I love sales,” By the time he finished talking, it became clear to him that he could get back to sales by really succeeding at his desk job. That would be easy for him after having been in the field for so long. He had to quit moaning and get back to work.
Once he clarified for himself what he really wanted, and why he wanted it, he was able to take action. Within two and half months, he was back in the field and succeeding.
Have you noticed that some people just don’t change?
You’re probably familiar with the joke, ‘How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb?’ ‘Only one, but the bulb has to want to change!’
Notice how members on your team seem to make the same mistakes repeatedly, usually in the same situations, with the same people, and in the same way?
Or they insist on doing things their way, long after you’ve turned blue in the face trying to get them to do it the way that upper management wants things to be done?
Sure, occasionally, they try to do something different – especially when you put the pressure on – but within a short period of time, they’re back doing the same old thing:
They spend more time in the office than in the field.
They don’t update the CRM.
They sandbag their sales results to game the system.
They keep giving away margin.
They string you along on the game-changing deal that’s going close soon.
Their pipeline is a mystery.
They keep missing their target.
You wind up having the same conversations with them about the same things, offering the same advice, and you can almost see it going in one ear and out the other.
The only thing that changes is your level of frustration - it keeps going up.
Finally, you escalate the pressure, eventually taking the most unproductive step ever devised to help people change: the performance plan (otherwise known as the getting-rid-of-somebody-by-the-book plan).
This move eats up precious time and energy. It rarely results in improved sales performance, and it hinders your ability to hit your targets.
What’s wrong here?
Their part is clear: they’re not changing! Look, it’s as simple as that, isn’t it? Strip away the stories, the excuses, the ‘trying harder,’ and what you’re left with is this: they’re still doing what they’ve always done.
What’s your part? It’s painfully simple. You are hoping they will change. You patiently accept their excuses and stories, and you tell yourself that this time will be different.
If you’re doing this, you are living proof of the accuracy of the classic definition of insanity: doing the same thing again and again, hoping for a different result.
Hope is a big deal. It’s the power you have in the face of all you can’t control. Certainly, COVID has taught us this!
However, living on hope is a different thing. It is what keeps you from grasping some simple truths about how people can change.
The reality is that people can and do change. After all, they spent their first five years on the planet doing nothing but changing. They did it quickly, efficiently, and without complaining or engaging in histrionics.
One thing that helped them change so quickly and so completely when they were young was that they wanted to. They really wanted to learn to walk, talk, run, dance, draw, sing, and explore everything they could get their little hands on.
However, when you consider adults, nobody really wants to change to do the things you need them to do. You can’t get them to change by coercing, forcing, threatening, or intimidating them, at least not to the quality or standard you want and certainly not consistently.
The trick is to accept the inconvenient fact that people have to want to change. This is an important reality that you must accept.
So how do you get people to want to change and want it strongly enough to make it happen?
Instead, learn how to require people to change without demanding that they do. That combination – your requirement for change and your lack of demand – creates the environment in which they can develop the self-generated, deep desire to do things differently.
It is truly the one managerial skill that changes everything. Mastering it will take your very best.
Try the following exercise with someone whose behavior or attitude needs to change. Control your own attitude, remember that she can change if she really wants to, and guide him through this conversation.
When you meet, give her the facts about what must change and stress that changing is a requirement for her to keep her job. Tell her you can’t make her change and ask if she really wants to make the effort.
Whatever she says next, ask for her thinking. Keep asking until she says clearly that, Yes, she wants to make the changes. (If she says no, this conversation ends and a different one starts.)
Then ask her why she wants to change. This is really important, and you want to help her keep exploring her reasons to change. Keep up this line of questioning – “…and you want that, because…? “
Now, ask her what she is going to do to make the changes happen. Offer any ideas you have, but be sure that she decides what she will do.
Write down her plan and make a date to meet and evaluate how the changes are going.
Getting good at helping people want to change is, for us, the holy grail of sales management. It will save you an enormous amount of time and money because you won’t have to continuously replace staff.
After a while, you may even start hearing your staff referring to you as ‘the best manager I ever had.’
Stop Spending Time With Your Poor Performers
We were working with a social enterprise that sold interesting solar products to the rural poor throughout the world. In one Latin American country, Roberto – the country manager who was also the sales manager – had a new sales force that, despite very real challenges, was doing pretty well.
One of his senior salespeople, Geraldo, had been with him four years since the company began operations. Geraldo’s sales performance had never been very good, but he was well liked and, over the years, had shared many an after-hours beer with the manager.
The problem was that Geraldo was requiring more and more of the manager’s time. Geraldo had complaints about the other salespeople, about the customers, about how hard it was for him to keep up with the younger salespeople. Whenever Roberto would sit down and talk directly with Geraldo about his lack of sales production, Geraldo would fill up the conversation with explanations, suggestions for company improvement, and reasons why he couldn’t pass on some of his accounts to more capable salespeople.
Roberto didn’t want to disappoint Geraldo, who was not only a direct report, but by now a friend as well. The turning point came during a coaching conversation, when Roberto undertook the exercise of adding up the hours per week he was spending on Roberto, hours that he was unable to spend developing his far more willing and talented sales staff.
Your job is to get sales results through your people. When you improve their performance, you improve your team’s results and hopefully hit your targets. And the reverse is true as well. If you fail to improve the performance of your team, you won’t be taking home that bonus, and neither will they.
How do you decide where to spend your time in order to improve the results of your sales force? If you’re like most sales managers, you run into the following considerations:
You don’t want to do anything that impacts the success of their top performers. You don’t want to offend them by suggesting that you accompany them into the field. You tend to leave them alone and hope for the best.
Your middle group of performers is more problematic. You see promise in them, you want to develop it, but, when you visit customers with them, you find yourself taking over the sales conversation. You don’t know if they’re holding back out of respect or fear, but you leave the customer visit without learning more about them and their capability. You’ve done all the work.
And, you are feeling pressure from all sides to attend to the lowest group of performers on your team. When they’re not avoiding you, they are repeatedly asking the same elementary questions and getting you to do their thinking for them. And, your manager is breathing down your neck to make a decision about whether or not to retain their services.
What often happens next is a mistake. You wind up spending the majority of your time with the lowest performing of your people. Yes, it seems necessary, but no, it's not a good idea.
Here's why. Let’s say you can improve anyone’s performance by 10% with some dedicated and skilled effort on your part. Calculate the difference between a 10% improvement in your top seller’s performance and that of your bottom sellers. You get the point.
Let’s be even more honest. What’s the difference in the ‘fun’ factor between working with the best performers you’ve got and with the worst? What is the quality of conversation like? The content?
Don’t you just get sick and tired of covering the same old thing, time after time, with people who appear either too dense or too unwilling to grab hold of themselves and simply make the changes they need to make to succeed?
Now, we’re not building a case here for ignoring the bottom group – more about this in a moment. But we are making a case for stopping an endless cycle of giving them the majority of your time. It’s unproductive, it’s not enjoyable, and, to be brutally honest, it’s just a way for you to look good without actually doing good.
All of us who have succeeded as sales managers know that conversations with the top people are interesting, challenging, and creative. Conversations with the bottom performers are boring, frustrating, and – here's the kicker – the more time you spend with them, the more they depend on you. They become cautious and you become infuriated.
An even more significant problem is that time invested in poor performers reduces the time you can spend with the middle tier of performers: the people who have the promise and the passion to improve and really become stars.
And, if you fail to spend time with your very top performers, they will either stagnate or feel neglected, and they will start gravitating to other managers or other companies where their hard work is noticed, appreciated, and publicly acknowledged.
Now, let’s try something different.
Of course you need to do something for each group of people: high, middle, and low performers. But you don’t have to spend the same amount of time doing it. What you need to figure out is how to approach each group and the individuals within it so that three things happen:
Your time is spent more with the top half of performers than the bottom half.
Your sales results improve, with the better performers increasing at a more rapid rate than the poorer performers.
Each of your people take responsibility for developing themselves, instead of counting on you to do it for them.
Here’s one way to move forward:
Draw three columns on a piece of paper.
In column one, rank your salespeople from top to bottom - you decide exactly how to rank them, but consider how much they sell and how they sell it.
In column two, calculate how much time you’ve spent training or coaching each person over the past 90 days.
In column three, rank how much you enjoyed that time you spent with each person.
Schedule time with your team over the next 30 days.
Spend ¾ of this time with the top half of your performers, one-on-one, with a special emphasis on the people just below your top performers. Raise them up!
Prioritize these meetings in your schedule and never cancel them.
Get creative, try things like:
Going into the field with people. Do not take over, watch them work, and debrief afterwards.
Utilize books, videos – anything that will get them thinking and engaging in activities that will stretch them.
Use group sessions for your lower-performing people to use your time effectively and to subtly send the message, ‘Rise above your peers and get some individual attention from me.’
In 30 days, evaluate, and apply what you’ve learned.
The hardest part of doing this is creating the time. A tip: you’ll never have enough time until you take it and schedule everything else around the development of your people.
We’re guessing you’re doing a lot of other things that don’t lead to the improvement of your team. Perhaps it's time to cut back on those things and do something that can earn you some money.
Stop Trying to Develop Your People
We were working with a company in Wales. It wasn’t a particularly well-managed company and people weren’t clear on what to do. There seemed to be no plans to develop the staff.
We spoke with the Chairman and asked him how he works with his staff to develop their abilities. He said, ‘I don’t spend any time developing them. I hire good people. We pay them a good wage, and we tell them the results that they’re supposed to produce. If they don’t produce, then we have a different conversation.’
Sacking people instead of developing them is a very expensive way to run a company. If you haven’t already done so, do a quick estimate on the amount of money it takes to get rid of someone and hire someone else. Don’t forget to include the value of time engaged in performance management, any legal negotiations, recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and training.
It's a lot cheaper to train your people than to replace them. And, nearly every manager we’ve ever met knows he has to do exactly this. It’s a rare manager who already has an all-star team. You’re probably not one of them. If you are, knock on wood, keep reading and commit yourself to doing all you can to make your all-star team even more productive.
If your team needs development, it's important to remember that you’re not here to rescue the fallen and lift up people who don’t have the ability or deep desire to make it. Neither are you here to babysit the heavy hitters and keep them sweet as long as they keep delivering. You’re here to develop a crack team that gets results.
Tending to your team’s development is arguably the most important thing you can do. A sales team that keeps learning its craft is a team that wins awards, quarter after quarter, year after year. It is a team that knows what it is doing, works together, and competes with purpose and without malice. New members end up fitting in well because the other team members stay close and not only watch what the new reps do but also show them how to work and how to succeed.
It's a job that's never done and dusted.
Your best sellers can lose their way, their edge, their passion and drive. Top salespeople are thoroughbreds, finely tuned, surprisingly vulnerable to slights from senior management, unfair compensation, record-keeping requirements from the pencil pushers, and the lack of a new challenge. Any of these things can prompt a search for greener pastures.
People in the lower tiers need help to step up or step out. You see the potential, you see the gaps in their skills and confidence, and you need to create conditions that will help them vault over the gaps and start playing big. You need to keep them challenged but not crushed by targets, to coach them to the next level of their ability, and to let go of those who just aren’t right for the job.
You know all this, but you’re busy. There are all those internal meetings that keep finding their way into your diary. Then there are the customer meetings and escalations that you’re handling because your reps just aren’t quite ready to shoulder the burden.
The result is that your good intentions for developing your team often fall by the wayside. You just don’t have the time to do the job right, so you compromise.
You don’t want to mess with success and slow down your top people, so you tend to let them do their thing, overlooking the team-inhibiting prima donna behavior and the occasional stretching of the boundaries.
You try pairing your average people with your more experienced people, but those reps aren’t being paid to train, and the time they spend doing so cuts into their sales performance.
You wind up spending most of your time with your worst performers. There’s pressure from the top to improve them or let them go, and you spend a lot of time little to show for it.
You wind up trying to develop your people instead of actually doing it.
One of our mentors once said, “You develop your people so your people can develop your business.“ Wise counsel, but how do you do it?
First, stop doing what isn’t working. If you’re compromising and being ineffective in developing your people, just quit what you’re doing. That will free a little time. Don’t use that time to come up with a grand plan. Try the following steps:
Get ready to act. Commit to a period of time each week that you will invest in developing your team.
Keep your eye on where you’re going. What will work in the long run is to give your people the following building blocks:
Method – a customer-centric way to sell that works for your business; a framework and a common language that everyone can follow.
Training – not one-off, but repeatable, professional, and embedded over time in their day-to-day work.
Coaching – creating a learning environment in which you know what your people are doing and you’re developing their ability to do it better and better.
Take the time you’ve got, and start simply, building as you go:
Meet one-on-one with each of your salespeople. Ask what they need to be more successful, move heaven and earth to help them get it.
Start with your people who are already good and ready to step up alongside your best performers.
Then meet with your best performers.
Then work with the lowest tier, perhaps in pairs or small groups.
At the end of every meeting, schedule the next one. Never cancel these meetings. They are your priority.
Trust your instincts and exercise your smarts. On this simple foundation, build something strong and lasting that you and they can be proud of.