of one such company and she said with excitement: “There is an energy inside the building as the month draws to a close. Everyone just seems alive with the certainty that we’ll exceed the sales target, just as we do every month. You can’t walk through the halls without noticing the tempo.” That’s magic.
If you were to walk through the halls of this company, you’d notice large TV screens with all of their sales results by individuals being continually updated for everyone to see. You would find screens that highlight which customers they’d recently lost to competitors and who were on a win-back list. This team didn’t like to lose, and they didn’t often lose as a result.
Imagine walking into this company as a new salesperson. What would you be thinking? You would instantly know that you were about to play on a great team and would perform better as a result. Any smugness you had about being a star player at your last company would disappear in your desire to prove that you deserve a spot on this A-team. This is the environment you will design for your team when you are a Sales Boss. It makes everything easier.
It’s all in the rhythm. What rhythms have you established for your team that inform them about how the game is played at your company? A great Sales Boss has well-established “Sacred Rhythms.”
What do I mean by sacred? One typically thinks of sacred in a religious context, but the word means that we hold something as highly valued, deserving of respect or devotion. To have Sacred Rhythms within your sales department, you must have established rituals that the team can depend on to be used consistently. We’ll talk throughout this book about what some of the rhythms might be. For instance, your monthly, weekly, and daily communications with your team form the foundational rhythm. The format and expectations of what happens during these meetings become another rhythm. Your team comes to depend on this rhythm for informing them what the beat is of your company and how they sync up with it.
Here is a challenge I see in many underperforming teams: the manager doesn’t have any rhythm! The manager will put a monthly meeting on the schedule, but a few days before will move the meeting for some unexpected travel or another event. Pretty soon the monthly meeting is a quarterly meeting, and this sloppiness seeps into every aspect of the sales team. The weekly coaching sessions become weakly done sessions, if conducted at all. There is no excitement in the halls and no cause for celebration. The month ends as though the team has been running on a treadmill set one setting higher than they can sustain and then, just as they get to the end, they start a new month already drained.
The sales manager makes bad hiring decisions. Sales roles are filled, and then the people are let go, impacting the cohesiveness of the team and sucking out the willingness of the team to get behind the next new salesperson. As a result, the rest of the company treats any new hire with a “wait-and-see” attitude before jumping in to help the person be successful. The manager loses any credibility. That’s not magic. It’s the kiss of death – indeed, a slow painful death. A Sales Boss doesn’t have that problem.
You are responsible for the energy, music, and rhythms in your jazz club. Would they make you want to dance and stay longer than you intended? Developing Sacred Rhythms means that you decide what needs to happen and that those items are sacred. They don’t move, alter, or change. Your team understands that’s the way it happens. They understand the beat, and they start to depend on it.
Not everything can be sacred; you’ll need some flexibility. But some things must be highly valued, deserving of respect and devotion, or nothing will be. Your role as manager is to decide what is sacred and communicate that clearly to your team. I’ll be offering some suggestions within the pages of this book, and you will want to pick the ones most important to you for the stage of development of your team.
Before we move on, how would you rate your rhythm? Better yet, how would your team rate your rhythm?
CHAPTER 3
The DNA of a Sales Boss
What It Takes to Be Great
The path to becoming the sales manager in most organizations is familiar. Typically, a particular salesperson is the top performer, and so he or she is promoted to the manager role. Sometimes this works, but more often than not you will find that the newly promoted manager struggles. Some of the very things that made the person a great salesperson stand in the way of him or her excelling in the role of manager.
What makes a great Sales Boss? This is not an easy question to answer since on the surface many different personality styles succeed, but I have found some key DNA that it seems the best Bosses all possess.
1. They have been in a sales role, but usually not as the top performer on that team if the team was composed of high performers
Why is this? In sales, there are always some very high earners whose success in sales defies any checklist or traits that might be taught. They are, to use a cliché, “born to be a salesperson.” I call them the Awesome Anomaly. While nice to have on your sales team, they make terrible managers. To them, sales are effortless and unexplainable. These are usually the ones who have been best managed by the manager staying out of the way and letting them work their magic. In some cases I have seen these high-earners be the very ones you might think least likely to have success, but nonetheless close sales month in and month out like clockwork. The problem is that if you make them into sales managers, they can’t teach someone else how to do what they do. They’ve never struggled. It has always come easily to them. They have never had to become students of selling and adopt new and creative, perhaps counterintuitive, ways of selling. When push comes to shove, they’ll rescue the new salesperson on the team by closing the business for her rather than teaching her a lasting skill. These high-earner Awesome Anomalies, the naturally talented salespeople, will typically shy away from any management duties, viewing any effort at managing the team as micro-management, because they felt similarly about anyone who tried to manage them in the past. They’ll end up being miserable in the process, and their effectiveness as salespeople will also be ruined. It is better to keep them as the wise sages on the team to whom you can turn for insights into your sales process and customers, rather than promote them into the management role.
Sometimes, despite knowing the low chance of success, a company is tempted to “try them out” in the management role thinking they can always be moved back into the sales role if it doesn’t work out. This is never a successful plan. Once you have moved an Awesome Anomaly into the sales management role, this person’s ego will now see him- or herself as a manager. If you require anyone to move back into a sales role, this will be seen as a demotion or a failure. The Awesome Anomaly isn’t used to failure; he or she’s been awesome forever. These people either resent you when you force the issue or more likely will move on to another company (your competition) as an Awesome Anomaly salesperson. This is not the outcome you want.
The best manager is one who has had success in selling, but usually not as the top person on the team. This person is credible with a sales team because he or she has been there and understands the fears, the emotions, and the reality of the sales world. These people experienced the pressures of being required to carry a quota. Unlike the Awesome Anomaly, because they weren’t naturally gifted, they had to be students of the art of selling in order to have success. They benefited from coaching and mentoring. They tracked their activity and behavior to know that they were improving. They relied on their sales manager to help them have success and so will know the invaluable role they can play in their team’s successes.
2. They have a high level of emotional intelligence (EQ)
What is emotional intelligence? It is said to include three skills:
● Having the ability to identify and manage your emotions and the emotions of others;
● Having the ability
