Who Failed Whom?
Did our salesperson fail us, or did we fail them? Dave and I have both talked around the edges of this issue since last week's Office Hours.
Dave recounted a comment from Jonathan Farrington during that webinar in Saturday's recap, and I wrote about the same idea last Friday in Three Tests for Hiring Salespeople (Part Three).
The subject is important in thinking about our roles as sales managers and sales leaders.
Who failed whom? What do we owe our sales force? The Care and Feeding of Effective Salespeople The role of sales manager or sales leader comes with a massive amount of responsibility.
You are, for all intents and purposes, the sharp end of the spear when it comes to growing revenue.
But you are also burdened with the additional tasks and duties of management, much of which is administrative work.
These administrative tasks and duties are necessary, but they can dramatically reduce the time you spend with your sales force.
Taking care of your sales force means giving them your time.
In some cases they need your help and your experience to help them move the must win opportunity through the pipeline.
Other times they will need your help moving obstacles to their success within your own company.
These issues require your time.
But in the most difficult situations, underperforming salespeople struggle to produce results, and they don't know how or what they would need to do to produce better results.
It's easy to find time to help those already producing and more difficult to find the time to help those who aren't producing, even though your time and your effort may be what are required.
Who Failed? We ask our salespeople to make lots of commitments.
We ask them to commit to reaching their financial goals, and we ask them to commit to following our sales process, and the list goes on ad infinitum.
We hold the sales force accountable to those commitments, as we should.
But, by hiring the sales person, we have also made commitments.
We have committed to making sure that we do everything in our power to help them succeed, even when it means that we have to give them the one thing that we will never have enough of: our time.
Your time and attention are often all that are necessary to prevent the salesperson from failing.
Giving them your time is also what is necessary to prevent you from failing them.
Before we decide that a salesperson has failed, we have to first ask ourselves if we have not failed them.
Questions What do we owe our salespeople? What commitments do we make to them? Are the commitments we make to our salespeople equal to the commitments that we ask them to make? Are they out of balance? How do we ensure that we make time for the salespeople who are most in need of our time and our efforts?
Dave recounted a comment from Jonathan Farrington during that webinar in Saturday's recap, and I wrote about the same idea last Friday in Three Tests for Hiring Salespeople (Part Three).
The subject is important in thinking about our roles as sales managers and sales leaders.
Who failed whom? What do we owe our sales force? The Care and Feeding of Effective Salespeople The role of sales manager or sales leader comes with a massive amount of responsibility.
You are, for all intents and purposes, the sharp end of the spear when it comes to growing revenue.
But you are also burdened with the additional tasks and duties of management, much of which is administrative work.
These administrative tasks and duties are necessary, but they can dramatically reduce the time you spend with your sales force.
Taking care of your sales force means giving them your time.
In some cases they need your help and your experience to help them move the must win opportunity through the pipeline.
Other times they will need your help moving obstacles to their success within your own company.
These issues require your time.
But in the most difficult situations, underperforming salespeople struggle to produce results, and they don't know how or what they would need to do to produce better results.
It's easy to find time to help those already producing and more difficult to find the time to help those who aren't producing, even though your time and your effort may be what are required.
Who Failed? We ask our salespeople to make lots of commitments.
We ask them to commit to reaching their financial goals, and we ask them to commit to following our sales process, and the list goes on ad infinitum.
We hold the sales force accountable to those commitments, as we should.
But, by hiring the sales person, we have also made commitments.
We have committed to making sure that we do everything in our power to help them succeed, even when it means that we have to give them the one thing that we will never have enough of: our time.
Your time and attention are often all that are necessary to prevent the salesperson from failing.
Giving them your time is also what is necessary to prevent you from failing them.
Before we decide that a salesperson has failed, we have to first ask ourselves if we have not failed them.
Questions What do we owe our salespeople? What commitments do we make to them? Are the commitments we make to our salespeople equal to the commitments that we ask them to make? Are they out of balance? How do we ensure that we make time for the salespeople who are most in need of our time and our efforts?