Sales management can make or break a team. In this podcast segment Scott discusses:
- Sales managers set guardrails for behaviors and expectations
- Good managers get ahead of issues
- Good sales managers avoid sales debt
These issues and more were discussed on the Marketer of the Day Podcast with Robert Plank.
Segment and transcript below.
Full podcast episode with transcript can be found here.
Transcript – minor edits
Robert Plank: It’s one thing to do the work, but then to manage all this, I can understand how it can become just a crazy just operation to, to keep going. So what’s this management role all about?
Scott Channell: Yeah, so obviously sales management can make or break a team. I think a actually does make or break a team and what’s has been interesting to me, and I may tell you an interesting story at a company years ago and over, over many years, I would go, they’d fly me out four or five times a year.
All the new people they. Grew from 15 million to a hundred million, not because of me, they would said successful before I ever came on, but whenever I did a training the VP of sales would introduce me and he’d say to the team, and I’d always cringe when he said this. He woul say, if you don’t do what this guy says, you can’t work here.
And I would, oh my God. But what he was saying was and the reason he said that. Is because what I taught, what I, they brought me in because my, what I taught was what they believed in and they were saying is, look it, if you’re gonna take our bag of goodies and you’re gonna take our pay and our health insurance and our time off and everything like that, we expect there are certain standards by which you expect.
We expect you to conduct yourself. We expect you a certain level of preparation. We expect this to common scenarios. That, it seems like you’ve actually thought about them. Okay. And that you’re prepared to handle them. Good managers set guardrails up, I call it, I like to think of in selling, obviously, you don’t want to be a robot.
No one who’s good is robotic in terms of what they do or what they say. There is a certain leeway, but you not allowed take right turns off.
Sets those guardrails in terms of behaviors. They also, very importantly that I have a saying and I do believe in that in many respects, the game is won. Before you make a call, send an email or whatever, and management has a lot to do with that because management. Has the best information as to who to call.
Okay? And management can look at what an individual rep is doing and saying, Hey are they following through on their process? Alright. They can listen to the recordings and say, okay, we’ve given them tons of sample messaging that tends to work. They ain’t using it. Okay. Or, the scripts that they used, work that used to work for them.
And that they had prepared, they’ve abandoned them. So why is that? So I think behind the scenes sales managers have a a very important role in making sure that the individual team members are set up for success. And I think that sales managers can recognize when an individual performer is, I’m veering off the road or not executing and point these things out so they can guide him back.
Before they break through the guardrails. The other issue with management is there’s actually two things. So good. The other thing good managers do is they get ahead of things. Whenever I run into a manager, that’s what I call a thump, the table manager, when things aren’t working, we need more.
More cost, more proposal, whatever. That never works. All right. Or if it worked only temporarily and through acts of providence. And not by design, but the good managers get ahead of things, meaning they’ll sit down with new reps and say, Hey, you got a meeting coming up? What’s the plan?
What’s the strategy? Are you gonna open it up? What questions are you gonna ask? And they get ahead of it, and they guide the reps so that they get the good results. And the other thing is. There was a book it was called hard Thing About, hard Thing, and Great book Riley recommended. But in that book there was a section of what’s called management debt, avoiding management debt and management Debt is when managers do things in the short run that might give a temporary boost.
But are detrimental to long-term results. And I think the other thing that sales managers can do is avoid what I call sales debt. Okay? So you know, you if you are getting bad results. Just demanding a hundred dials a day, okay, that might get you something, but that’s not sustainable and that’s not going to lead to long-term results.
Or are people, cut down on training? Okay, so you save some money upfront and you get people out there, but they’re unprepared. Alright, so you, so you avoid sales debt situations where people are doing a lot of things that. A more short term oriented because that really is not gonna lead to long term results, I think.
So sales management is critical. Fish rots from the head.
