AS A GUEST ON A podcast recently, I was asked a surprising question: “At what point does management become the limiting factor for sales?”
I responded that while there are many reasons for why that could happen, there were two that immediately sprung to mind. The first is the manager who was a top salesperson who used his or her persuasive prowess to talk themselves into a job they were fundamentally not qualified to do.
They too often prioritize their own sales to the detriment of team development. They can also be dismissive in addressing seemingly minor personnel and customer service matters that can spiral if not handled — the kinds of things they historically edited from their own to-do list as a salesperson because someone else did that work.
The second reason I cited is the manager who is more of a chief administrator masking as a sales manager. Someone without the wiring to understand where the priorities ought to be, and who makes well-intentioned but misguided decisions that ultimately inhibit sales.
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Two examples of a ‘chief administrator’ include giving everyone an equal opportunity to engage incoming customers, otherwise known as an UP System (that peculiar logic that ensures your worst sales producers get the same opportunities as your top salespeople), and scheduling, where the driving principle is again equity and fairness, instead of ‘let’s make sure our best sales producers are scheduled when we are busiest.’
As Casey Stengel said, “The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided.”
A good manager is a coach and mentor. He or she serves the people around her by being an available resource to them and by keeping everyone focused on the goal of profitable sales in an environment that consistently delivers outstanding customer experiences.
Through regular team meetings, and in one-on-one coaching sessions, the manager keeps the team on track, removes friction, and preserves and protects the cultural norms and expectations.
They do not compete with their team for personal sales — even as most successful sales managers do, and should, make sales themselves. They do not hide out in offices creating busy work and administrative tasks.
They spend much of their time on the sales floor, observing and quietly acknowledging good behaviors, course-correcting as necessary, and ensuring customers are appropriately aligned with the best available salespeople and services.
As obvious as that assessment may seem, a Harvard Business Review article from 2002 indicated that only 10 percent of managers had the right focus and were working on the stuff that really matters. The other 90 percent were, to paraphrase my podcaster host, presumably executing some version of ‘sales limiting’ activities.
I’ll give the final word on management to the former New York Yankees manager, Casey Stengel. He famously said, “The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided.”
Who knew it could be so simple.
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