The Advancement Dilemma

At Acorn Growth Partners, I partner with colleagues who focus on executive coaching with C-level leaders. Recently, we’ve been having conversations with potential and current clients about how prepared they are to advance into their new executive role. If you have participated in a promotion scenario or recently have been promoted, this issue may have come up for you.

Generally, when someone is promoted to a C-level position, an important assumption is made about their skills and capabilities as they take that position. This can play out in two ways: either it’s assumed that the person taking the position already has the skills and training required for the job, or the opposite, where it’s acknowledged the person will need to improve their skills or gain experience in the job after they are promoted.

There’s also a third common scenario: no one has thought about it so the new CxO simply enters the position without any consideration as to what preparation might be necessary to assume the new role. I guess that means its assumed that they have the skills, but no one actually asked the question!

As a Sales Effectiveness Advisor, I have seen this play out with Sales leader promotions, where often a top-performing salesperson is elevated to a Sales Manager role.? It also occurs when front-line sales managers are promoted to VP of Sales or CRO positions. In reality, most sales managers have little to no training or experience in sales management best practices. ?They are promoted to a sales manager role because they were successful as individual contributors.

So, what happens? ?Usually, the new manager will try to reinterpret the practices they used as a rep to somehow manage their team.? While these practices might be effective for selling to customers, they have little or nothing to do with how managers coach reps, assess their performance or help their reps plan for improvement. As reps promoted to the manager role, they are frequently little more than glorified salespeople who focus on closing deals, often at the expense of the people they manage.

Don’t get me wrong. Managers have to focus on selling, closing deals and making quota with their team members.? Sales leaders need to understand where revenue is coming from in any given month or quarter because they are accountable to executive management to explain where revenue to meet corporate goals is coming from. But none of this has one iota of relevance to foundational need to support salespeople in improving their skills and addressing key issues that are preventing them from closing more business. This is the foundation for growing an effective sales team, so when the issue is raised about why win rates are ludicrously low, the answer is pretty obvious.

The question is, what should be done to address this problem?? Well, first of all it has to be considered a problem.? If you follow all the experts on LinkedIn, many of them have talked about this issue, but I have seldom seen any suggestions about how to address it. In fact, we keep seeing this scenario play out over and over again. What executives are listening to this advice? From what I am seeing, few if any.

I think the solution is straightforward. Sales Leaders need to recognize that leadership does not come from investors or senior executives who are accountable to shareholders, or others who don’t care about how the sales organization meets its objectives.? This direction and guidance needs to come from someone who has accomplished the objective of moving to the next level and is prepared to support managers in learning and executing sales management skills. This is what we do at Acorn Growth Partners. Here’s a list of some key issues that we often address:

• Servant Leadership: First and foremost, understanding that sales leadership is not about the manager but is about supporting and helping the reps accomplish and exceed their objectives.
• Time Management: Quit interfering in your reps deals. Let them execute and if they need help, teach them what they need to know. Don’t take over sales calls to “fix” what they did wrong (at least wrong in your opinion).
• Time Management Part 2: Quit obsessing over forecasts. There are better ways to figure this out than using your gut, holding endless pipeline meetings, and interfering with deals just so you know when they are going to close. Perhaps a better heading for this is Trust Your Team.
• Diagnosis: Do you know what your reps are doing right or wrong in the sales process? Do you even know how to figure that out, or are you concerned about how much work it is?
• Improvement Plans: NO not a PIP. This is a plan that you and your rep put together that helps them with what they need to do to become better reps.

Now you may think there are other people in your organization who should be doing this, not the manager. That is simply wrong. Revenue Enablement people should be helping you train your team, but the sales manager is responsible for improving their team, not Rev Enablement. Sales Operations should help a manager analyze sales data and should give feedback about where the improvements might come from. But they don’t coach and interact with the team: the manager has to do this.

This is why it’s helpful to apply additional bandwidth to this problem. Sales Managers probably won’t take the time to voluntarily do all the tasks listed above. They need help. Adjustments need to be made, tasks need to be reprioritized, and someone needs to help the manager when leadership tries (unfairly) to hold them accountable for not being a glorified salesperson.? But good sales leaders should know that this additional work needs to be done. That why it helps to get someone in from outside who can bring perspective to the table and work with leaders to give managers the time and priority to complete these tasks.

One final note: someday these things may be accomplished by AI (at least in part). I know there are vendors out working on building the “automated AI sales manager” (I’m one of them). However, in spite of any analysis and guidance AI might provide to managers to help coach reps, or reps to perform better on specific skills or processes, AI can’t hold people accountable. Only managers can do that. How they do that is still the fundamental issue for them and sales leadership.?

If you are interested in learning more about how to help sales managers with their transformation to best practices sales management, please reach out to me via LinkedIn messaging, or email me at [email protected].