From cradle to grave. Supporting talented sales professionals at every stage of their career.
We all know that sales is fundamentally about people, don’t we?
We’re repeatedly told we should focus our sales and marketing messages on what client problem we fix. But underpinning that, sales is always about individuals and their relationships. Reflecting on that truism, here’s a different way of looking at how we support sales people at all stages of their career.
Not exactly cradle to grave since everyone so far has survived our involvement and we don’t work with children! But you know what we mean.
Your first tentative steps in selling
You turn up bright and enthusiastic for interview after applying for your first sales job. You’re greeted by someone who seems to know everything about business. How can you ever compare to that? Slightly discomforted, you realise they hold all your hopes and aspirations in their hands.
I remember the panic when, at a graduate interview, I was handed a job description by the HR director and asked: Do you think you can do it? There wasn’t time to read all three pages of closely-typed text so I assumed it was a trick question. What was the right answer… blue pill or red pill? I just said Yes…and luckily got the job.
It doesn’t cross your mind that your recruiting manager doesn’t know how to recruit sales people does it? That they are in blind panic too at the prospect of interviewing someone with “the gift of the gab”. Yet most business owners we see don’t truly understand the metrics that ensure their new sales person will actually hit their sales target.
How many exhibitions do they need to attend each year? How many leads do they need to bring back…and how many follow-up meetings after that? How many days work will that take and will it leave time for those emails to all 500 lapsed customers in the company database?
Without this critical evaluation the job description is flaky, the job ad is wide of the mark, and the interview process just comes down to who they get on with. Even when managers grasp the key job metrics they often struggle to convert this into competencies and attributes. That means they are unsure exactly who they are looking for and can’t build the competency-based interview questions that will identify them. Tragically it’s a recipe for failure, with both sides ending up disappointed.
Helping managers figure out this crucial start point is one of the most important interventions we make – because careers and investment decisions both depend on getting it right.
The best sales people don’t make the best sales managers
The world of sport helpfully reinforces this long-standing rule of sales management. Jurgen Klopp didn’t achieve anything special as a footballer, and Arsene Wenger barely cut it as a pro. Yet they are two of the most successful managers of recent times.
It’s the same in selling, where being top scorer every month doesn’t necessarily mark you out as the leader who can pull together a team and get the best out of your colleagues. Even for those with the right potential it’s a tough step up to being a team manager, and too often people are pushed through this transition without being given the right support.
It’s easy when things are going well, of course. But as a new manager how do you manage a fair recruitment process, deal with underperforming team members, or strike the balance between hitting targets and supporting people’s wellbeing? It’s another part of the sales lifecycle where our intervention can be the difference between success and failure.
Providing new line managers with the team-building tools, the performance management skills and the self-assurance to operate at a higher level is a worthwhile investment for any company.
Sales leadership
This next step up the sales ladder demands a completely different set of skills. As a sales manager your job is typically operational and focused on helping new team members develop the sales skills to help them succeed in their role. The big sales jobs like sales director or sales VP might see you spending more time on big picture leadership than on sales management. Your day-to-day focus is as likely to be on executive-level cross-functional issues as it is on sales.
Sadly, at this level you might find yourself looking wistfully in the rear-view mirror and reflecting on the days when you got to spend most of your time with customers! Like it or not, senior sales jobs often come with an unhealthy dose of politics and process. Succeeding at this level needs not just different skills but a changed mindset. And once again it’s something that can get missed in the excitement of someone being promoted.
We are quite often called in to mentor a sales director or head of department who’s new to that level. It’s not that they lack potential, it’s just that sometimes their only benchmark is what they’ve learned in that business. Sometimes they are looking for new skills and approaches. Other times they just need the reassurance that what they think looks right really is a wise approach.
What is important to build at this level is an ability to develop strategic relationships with customers, especially where you have key account relationships. You might only interact with clients for a few hours each year and being able to use that time to move forward your business relationship is proven to have a big impact on the success of your sales team.
Our support at this stage is often really light-touch as senior people only need nudging. After all, these people have usually spent their entire career in sales! It can be very rewarding support, though, and when you consider the price of failure at this level, a sound investment for the business involved.
Life after selling
Sales jobs are not easy and few sales people make it to their official retirement age. If we were paid every time we heard the expression: “There must be more to life than this” then we would be very rich.
Hitting the numbers brings relentless pressure. Sometimes you fall short due to factors outside your control. At some point every sales person has missed targets due to breakdowns in supply chains and over-promising marketing campaigns. Other times it’s just that your key contacts change jobs or customer priorities change. For others, the repeating nature of the annual sales plan, customer negotiations and price increases just gets that little bit less rewarding with each year.
Whatever the reason, we often find ourselves speaking with people who are pulling away from a corporate career in sales. Some want more flexible careers; others want to take their lives in a completely new direction. We found ourselves starting a sales consultancy of course!
At this stage of your career it’s often a sense of purpose that motivates you rather than the drive to be top of the sales incentive chart. Wherever you are in your sales lifecycle, if you’d like to chat with someone who’s lived through all the stages – then get in touch.