Episode #335: How Can The Player/Coach Sales Leader Manage The Twixt And Tween Problem

You have done an excellent job as a salesperson, hitting your numbers and getting a strong reputation as a “producer”. The big bosses like the cut of your jib and decide that they will promote you into the role of player/coach to lead the sales team. No training is provided of course. It assumed that as you know how to get results, you can just sprinkle your pixie dust on the rest of the crew and clone those good outcomes.

The first thing you discover is that what made you awesome, is different to what will work for the rest of the team. “Do what I do” sounds highly reasonable, except they are not you and it doesn’t seem to work for them. You have your own clients too, so you are pretty busy trying to get the revenues in the door. The amount of time you have to spend leading the sales team is limited. They keep producing at the same rate, you now have a lot of non-sales stuff to get done as well and your workload seems to keep going up. The annual targets keep going up too and in two years time, you find yourself fired, because your team didn’t get to their number. You are held accountable and so you are replaced. The same cycle then kicks in again for your successor. None of the big bosses lost their job by the way.

You found you were stuck between your role as a leader and your role as a producer – you found you were twixt and tween two contesting goals. So, what is the sale’s leaders job then when you have your own targets? Leverage is the key to success here. If we can help our team members be more successful, then we will be able to hit the team target. We absolutely need to provide opportunities for training the crew. It could be formal training aimed at substantially raising sales capability and technique or something simpler.

By the way, the time to ask for a training budget is when the bosses first offer you the job. This is the moment of the most influence with the training budgeting decision. Having sales training professionals come in substantially speeds up the process and in the long run, saves you a lot of time and effort. Once you start the job, you may find the hierarchy just expects you to get on with it and they are not prepared to financially support your success. They are in that “harvest” rather than “invest” mode. So push them hard to support your success. The worst result is they don’t agree, you turn down the job and they put someone else in that role. You will just keep producing and getting paid well for doing so. In two years time the job will be available again. However, if you still want to take the offer and step up, even if you are unsuccessful getting any training budget out of them, there are still some things you can do.

You personally may have benefited from the stars aligning for you in sales and you may have never had any training either. As the leader you need to study sales and understand the basics. Your personal flair or talent no doubt, will not have been sprinkled across the team and they need to absorb the basics. To do that you need to master the basics first yourself, so that you can educate yourself, to be able to teach them. Have everyone read an excellent tome on selling and form a type of reading club. This is a cheap and good idea. It gets everyone on the same page and it creates a common vocabulary of sales. This will make the communication of concepts and practices much more effective. You will have a number of critical points to check on, to see if they are doing their sales role professionally. It will also assist to align the direction of the team.

Role plays at the start of the day, to practice on each other, are a vastly better idea than letting salespeople practice on the clients. These role plays need to be supervised however and the salespeople need feedback in order to improve. Tell them what they are doing that is “Good” and then tell them how they can make it even” Better”. This type of positive feedback is vastly superior to criticising people. If you ignore this advice and you prefer to critique your people, you will find you are either driving up their resistance to you or driving down their confidence to do the job.

Visits with the salespeople to their clients, to watch them in action, are also a good practice. Obviously, there is a limit to this, because of the time involved, but from time to time, this is a good idea. In this way you find out their issues and after meeting the client together, you can give them good/better coaching feedback to help them improve.

The temptation is to see all of this as taking time away from your own sales. That is true, but if we understand leverage, then we can trade our time for bigger, scalable results. If we have ten people in our team working eight hours each, they collectively put in eighty hours a day. As a group they will always be able to sustain the work hours being put in, compared to what we as an individual can do. How many twenty-hour work days do you think you will get through, before you start to have major psychological and physical issues? If we can get their eighty hours a day working well, then the scale capacity comes into our favour. It will justify the time we give up for them in multiples of revenue return.