Management Excellence - How the best are getting ahead

In 2016 I realized that I needed to take action - My decades old training in the Theory of Constraints kept pointing to a single point of failure in sales organizations: Front line sales management.

It was and still is a trope to talk about the best reps being promoted to managers, to (at best) become unscalable super-reps and at worst, diminishing the effectiveness of their team through micro-management and other non-value adding behaviors. What I had learned in the prior 16 years of sales management was that the best managers had two things in common:

1) A first principles understanding of why they did things in a certain way (eg Forecasting or 1:1s)

2) A peer community from which they were constantly learning

As I reflect on my career I believe that the highest performing and fastest evolving group of managers I saw was from 2005-2010 at Salesforce. The earliest front line managers had the following context:

1. Change: They were figuring out how to grow from $176M to $1.3bn* in revenue in real-time. The growth was staggering, and last year's playbook wasn't going to work this year. It is not so much that someone moved the cheese, but that last year it was cheddar and this year it is gruyere. The underlying operating assumptions and sales motions changed dramatically and managers needed to evolve with it.
2. Talent injection: Growth being as it was, internal promotions weren't going to fill the ranks of the frontline, and hence new perspectives and insights were being brought in from hiring across the software industry - This led to practices constantly being questioned and tested as we all sought to crack the code on hypergrowth.
3. Brain trusts: Salesforce did an incredibly good job of facilitating internal networking and best practice development. During that time I was able to collaborate with some of the best minds in sales management at our quarterly management off-sites in Half Moon Bay California. During these times we challenged each other and got together in small working groups to surface solutions to the challenge du jour.
4. Expertise: Salesforce was not just selling salesforce automation (SFA) - We were selling the process itself. We won business not just because we had the best solution at the time, but because every FLM could consult with prospective CRO/VP Sales buyers and help them understand how SFA would impact their business and what sales motion/pipeline management and forecasting approach would work best in their business. It was the antithesis of arriving with a playbook. Rather than turning up with a pre-configured construction set, FLMs had a bag of building blocks and helped buyers figure out how to put them together for best effect. FLMs (and AEs/SEs) were constantly teaching, which we know is the best way to truly understand a topic.

If you are looking to build the next generation of highly effective sales leaders, then I can offer you the following core topics that they need to have a first principles grasp of:

• Sales process & methodology: Not learning it, but understanding how to build it, and how it informs predictability/coaching.
• Management operating rhythm: Which meetings needs to be held and why; the data needed as an input and the actions to be taken as an output. The highest impact potential meeting of the week is the AE 1:1, which is too often poorly executed and delivers minimal value/insight.
• Recruiting: It is a rare instance when a sales manager admits to not hiring well, but I do hear many lamenting the weak AE players who absorb too much of their time. The reality is that most recruiting processes are generic box ticking exercises, masking the fact that the hires are still being made on gut.
• Developing talent: We hear about FLMs as being the 'coach', but there is so much more they need to do in order to drive success. At times they are the coach, at others they 'role model', facilitate, direct and teach. Most FLMs don't know when and how to adopt and execute on these roles.

This week in San Diego it was my pleasure to support the next cohort of JMI Equity portfolio FLMs in their management journey through a new 'JMI Management Excellence Program'. We commenced a 6 month journey with a 2 day workshop where we dived into all the topics above and made commitments to focus on the highest impact areas for unlocking growth. We will be meeting monthly as a group and all of the managers have direct access to me as a mentor and guide in the months ahead - To all the sales managers out there, I hope that you are able to access this sort of career acceleration support, but if not, then of course your could always put your hand up to join one of the JMI portfolio companies. ...

*Source: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/crm/revenue/