There’s one thing a bit more scary than your first day as a sales manager, it’s your first day as sales manager with the team you were a part of last Friday.
I spent some time at the weekend with a friend who has just been promoted to sales manager within the company he has been selling with for the last 7 years. We spoke about the challenges, the fears, the aspirations and what might be the tricky bits over the next few weeks and months.
His biggest concern was having to carve it all out himself, if you’ve spent the last 7 years on a pre-defined route where people could set thier watch by you, it’s not that easy to be suddenly faced with a huge blank sheet of paper and the freedom to decide how to best do the job.
Apart from the fact that this is one of the very reasons coaching exists, it’s not in his company’s vision to hire people to help with this, therefore all we could have was that friendly chat and see what emerges.
I think the hardest thing for new managers to accept is that cloning is not a refined enough science yet, most managers who have been successful salespeople simply want to reproduce themselves, thier style, thier traits, thier approach. In this style thier salespeople pick up points for everything they do that is like the managers style, eg always be closing, and they lose points for whatever differs eg, spending a long time with a customer.
After a while the manager has a long list of “faults” with some salespeople, faults in this instance meaning ” things they don’t do like me” and what do you do with a fault…. you try to fix it, so the salesperson finds themselves being moulded into something they’re not.. and frustration begins to fester.
And what’s the best piece of advice i could give my friend having been in this exact position all of 8 years ago… well establish the groundrules… the things that are non arbitary, things like customer calls, how they present themselves at work, reporting structures et al…. establish them hard and early and stick to them, and outside of those basic fundamentals help the salepeople to grow in thier own style.
The basis of sales has always been getting what you want by helping others to get what they want, this holds true for sales managers as well, you succeed by by helping your salespeople to succeed, establish the ground quickly and then help them to prosper and develop between those ditches
And enjoy it... you actually can make a difference.
