Revenue Journal®

Last week we discussed two of the traits of the perfect sales manager: loyalty (first to the customer, then the company, then the sales force), and consistency. This week we will look at the remaining key characteristics. The perfect sales manager is also empathetic, process-oriented and behaves both as a mother hen and a whip-cracker.

• Empathetic

  Note that I said empathetic, not sympathetic. When you empathize with someone, you listen carefully and understand their problem, but you retain your ability to make decisions that are not driven by their emotions.

  The perfect sales manager does not get emotionally involved in the struggles of his salespeople. He listens, he understands, and he takes action, but he does not let any salesperson convince him that he should favor one salesperson over another or that he should let a salesperson's complaints override his loyalty to the company or the customer.

  The perfect sales manager will have sold at some point in his career, preferably on a straight-commission basis. He must know what it feels like to be completely dependent on commission. He must know what it feels like to live with the worry that the basic necessities of life will not be taken care of unless he can make that big sale. He must know what it feels like to lose a big sale. Only someone who has gone through this can understand the fear that the commission-driven salesperson lives with every day.

• Process-oriented

  Now we are really asking water to flow uphill. Most salespeople are just not process-oriented. The less they have to think about or participate in processes, the better. They hate paperwork. They hate having to document their conversations and activities.

  The perfect sales manager knows this, and focuses at least 50% of his daily efforts on improving the selling process. As I mentioned earlier, the customer controls the selling process, because the customer is in charge of the buying process. This is a tough reality for any salesperson to admit - most believe it is their personal brilliance that closes every sale.

  Now that we are operating in the age of the Web, consumers have instant access to product and company information. In many cases, they follow their own buying process, and can be very far down that road before they contact a sales rep. That sales rep is then expected to answer very specific - and crucial - questions. By the time the customer calls a sales rep, the customer is in a go/no go state of mind. There are just a couple of issues left that will make or break the sale. The sales rep must be able to ascertain where the customer is in his buying process - customers have very little patience for anything less - and answer these questions to the buyer's satisfaction.

  The perfect sales manager makes sure that the sales rep can answer those go/no go questions immediately and satisfactorily. We're talking about fingertip access to any answer that the customer seeks. This requires a constant discovery process, to determine the questions customers ask, and diligent attention paid to the informational systems that provide the right answers at the right time in the customer's buying process.

• Mother hen and whip-cracker

  The perfect sales manager deftly combines two opposite personality traits. He is both a mother hen and a whip-cracker.

  As the mother hen, he is there whenever they have a problem. He helps to resolve it, either with the customer or with management. He helps the salesperson learn from the experience, so the salesperson can solve that problem without help in the future. He makes sure his salespeople get the training they need. He fights for fair and incentivizing compensation.

  As the whip-cracker, he knows exactly what the salespeople are doing at all times. He meets with them every morning and talks with each person about their performance - in a group meeting. The results of each rep are displayed where anyone can see them, either on a bulletin board or white board in the sales area, or virtually as a computer "dashboard" that anyone in the company can view at any time.

  Public recognition and embarrassment is a key factor in the successful management of a sales force (without being cruel, of course). Nothing is hidden. If someone is not doing well, the perfect sales manager will give that person every opportunity to turn the situation around. He will accurately assess the person's weaknesses and work with the person until new behaviors are learned and internalized.

  He will also use the best performers as examples, and will not micro-manage them. This is important. You should never manage your under-performers the same way you manage your high-performers, and you should manage the middle-of-the-road performers differently than your low and high performers.

  Each group requires a different amount of attention. The lowest performers need a lot of training and specific instruction; the middle performers need to be reminded of their weaknesses and to be given tools to improve them; and the highest performers need to be heard when something makes their job more tedious or cumbersome. Changes should be made to accommodate them, in a way that also helps the company and the customer.
  

What is the career path followed by a perfect sales manager? Someone who has sold for many years, but who shifted into a more operational role later in their career can become a perfect sales manager. The person should still have fire in his belly, but it should be a smoldering fire that can be stoked up or damped down, as the situation demands.