Are Your Old Bosses' Ghosts Haunting How You Manage Your People Today?

As a sales manager, your first job is to hire excellent people. To lead your team to success without burning out or becoming a tyrant is impossible if you’re stuck in the old-school, command-and-control management style, because you're definitely limiting your team's potential, wasting their time or low value behaviours, tying up scarce and expensive resources and crushing their souls in the process.?

The world of sales is changing, and as a leader, you need to change with it. Gone are the days of the hard sell, where the only objective was to close the deal at all costs. Today's enterprise customers demand more from their sales interactions than a demo and a feature dump; they expect their salespeople to understand their needs, their industry, their competition and provide tailored solutions that fit their unique circumstances and align with their vision of a better future. In an era of such complex, wicked problems, buyers don’t need point solution providers - in fact selling them a point solution may make things worse by hiding the problem and moving it somewhere else not solving it - they need credible, reliable, well prepared and well informed allies they can trust who have their backs.

To achieve success in this new era of sales, you need to be an exceptional manager. According to research by Gallup, exceptional managers have teams that are 21% more productive and have 22% higher profitability than those managed by average managers. Project Oxygen by Google also found that the most important skills for managers are coaching and empowering employees, communication skills, and a supportive and collaborative approach.

So, why do you need to change? Firstly, because the traditional, command-and-control management style simply doesn't work. It leads to disengaged and demotivated employees, high turnover rates, and poor performance. How many people have you hired in the past 12 months? How many are still with you? How much of your time is wasted firing, hiring, replacing and onboarding new hires? What if you hired well and created the conditions for them to succeed?

Treat employees as cogs in a machine, rather than as valuable individuals with unique skills and perspectives, and they’ll leave, give minimal discretionary effort and fail to care about the quality or outcome of their work. The ripple effect on your results - new business, quality of pipeline, forecast accuracy, closed-won ratios, cost of sale, customer satisfaction, customer retention, customer expansion, employee retention - will be felt though for now you may be able to hide behind the fact everyone else is just as bad. This makes you massively expensive and you will be found out by your CFO if they ask the right questions ... and then what?

Secondly, the sales landscape has shifted. Customers are no longer satisfied with a one-size-fits-all approach. They want salespeople who understand their needs and provide solutions that fit their specific situation. This requires a more intimate, consultative approach, where salespeople are trained to ask the right questions, truly listen to customers (and hear what is not being said too), and provide tailored solutions that serve the customer’s best interests today and in the future.

As a manager, it's your job to create an environment where your sales team can thrive. This means challenging traditional notions of what it means to be a manager and adopting a more collaborative and supportive approach. It means treating your employees as individuals, investing in their development, and empowering them to take ownership of their work.

To achieve this, simply focus on coaching and development. Exceptional managers provide regular feedback, set clear expectations, and support their employees in achieving their goals. They also take the time to understand their employees' strengths and weaknesses, and create development plans that help them build on their strengths and address their weaknesses.

Communication is also key. You need to be open and transparent with your team, and create a culture of trust and collaboration. This means listening to their feedback and ideas, and being willing to make changes based on their input. This requires you to be vulnerable enough to invite feedback and be accountable yourself to your people. It needn’t be a scary change to make though it will feel like that at first. The payback is worth the discomfort 1000 times over.

So, you need to lead by example. If you want your team to adopt a more consultative approach, you need to model that behaviour yourself. This means deeply listening to your team, seeking their input, and empowering them to take ownership of their work. It also means investing in your own development as a manager, and seeking out opportunities to improve your skills and knowledge.

The landscape of sales is changing - tech and ML/AI, changing investor pressures, global trends, buyer preferences - but people are not evolving quite as fast! As a manager, you need to adapt or become irrelevant, or worse obstructive and short lived. By adopting a truly collaborative and supportive approach, investing in your team's development, and leading by example, you will create a culture of success that drives productivity, profitability, and employee engagement. So, the question is not whether you need to change, but rather, when will you start?

Book an initial coaching call here - https://calendly.com/marcuscauchi/

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