Model Manager

In some ways, being a manager is like being a parent: You can talk about what your sales team should be doing until you’re blue in the face, but if you aren’t modeling the behaviors you expect of the team, then your lectures will likely fall on deaf ears. This is especially true if you urge your salespeople to treat their customers and prospects as individuals but don’t model this behavior when dealing with your own staff.

“I’m not a big fan of the player/coach analogy in sales training,” says Beverly Flaxington, author of Understanding Other People: The Five Secrets to Human Behavior (ATA Press, 2009) and founder of The Collaborative (the-collaborative.com), a firm that helps companies and individuals reach their highest level of effectiveness. “The coach analogy implies that you’ve gathered people in a locker room at halftime, and you’re giving them all the same message in the same way. The manager’s real job is to see each person as an individual and ask, “How do I evolve this person? How do I get him or her to the level where he or she needs to be?” 

The Simple Truth
The wisdom of treating customers and prospects with individual consideration is well documented. “It’s a simple truth that people tend to prefer those who are similar to themselves,” says Flaxington, who has studied the behavioral issues that influence why some prospects buy and others don’t. “Successful salespeople pay attention to how the prospect acts, using both verbal and nonverbal clues, and adapt their presentation style to mirror those clues. For instance, if a prospect is direct, energetic, and leans forward when speaking, mimic that behavior – at least to a degree. If your prospect is calm, deliberate, and soft-spoken, your approach needs to reflect those traits.”

Flaxington also recommends that salespeople show genuine interest in the client. “When you use words like ‘target,’ you reduce the person to a thing,” she says, “and the language even implies that the relationship is adversarial. A target is something you try to hit, not a person who matters to you. If you’re focused only on what you can gain from the relationship, wondering how quickly you can close the sale and move on to your next appointment, people are going to sense this. Show people that you’re concerned about what concerns them and you’re there to help them solve their problems, not simply to move whatever product or service earns you the most commission. You only do that by asking questions. Their answers dictate the approach you should use when selling to them.”

And finally, after you’ve landed the initial sale, stay in regular touch with your clients. If you merely call them back when they call you, you’ve slipped into a passive role. Understanding and meeting their needs is only part of the successful sales dynamic; it’s just as essential to monitor the relationship with frequent contact to make sure your clients are still happy with the product or service and to address new needs as they arise.

Common sense, right? The best managers are probably already urging their sales teams to A) adapt their presentation style to the client, B) focus on individual needs, and C) follow up. The problem is, those managers may not be taking those same three steps themselves. Their leadership boils down to “do as I say, not as I do.” And that earns them about as much credibility as lecturing about drinking with a martini in hand. The bottom line is that managers need to model these same behaviors for and with their sales teams. 

No Quick Fix
“A quick-fix mentality rarely works,” says Flaxington. “When a manager only thinks, ‘How can I drive these people to results? How many phone calls do they have to make a day? How much business do we need in the pipeline this quarter?’ then that manager is failing to ask the most important question, which is, ‘How do I give this person the tools he or she needs?’ Some companies approach their sales reps as a bloc, thinking they can bonus them, motivate them, and measure them all in the same way. But you can only evolve people one at a time.”

Flaxington believes you’ll understand each member of your sales team only when you understand each person’s frustrations and obstacles. It comes down to a basic question: What’s happening to prevent sales?

“Simply asking that question is motivating because it’s so unique,” she says. “Most managers won’t go there. They’re afraid they’ll end up with a big complain session or they’re inviting excuses for why people aren’t making their numbers. But asking that question is a great way to get info from your sales force and focus your efforts on real-life things that make a difference in your team’s success.”

In order to keep the session upbeat and positive, Flaxington recommends you open the discussion by saying, “We assume everyone in this room wants to be a success. Do you feel you’re all living up to that?” If the question is asked in a nonthreatening way, people will usually admit that they aren’t reaching all their goals. From there, it’s easy to direct the discussion toward the things that are standing in their way. There are three categories of obstacles: The first is things we can’t control, such as the general economy or government policy or the stock market. There’s no point in spending time discussing those, or your meeting will indeed devolve into a complaint session. The meeting should focus on the second and third categories, which are things you can influence and things you can control.

As the discussion continues, managers should do three things:
• welcome input and allow everyone in the room to be part of the problem-solving process,
• narrow down the factors within their control and focus on those that will have the greatest effect on sales, 
• find a way to track and measure pro-gress in overcoming these obstacles. 

If done correctly, the meeting becomes a win-win for both managers and salespeople. The sales rep leaves thinking, “My manager assumes I want to be successful and is concerned with knowing what I’m up against and helping me find ways to overcome it.” Management uncovers previously unknown problems and walks out of the meeting with specific strategies to overcome them and monitor the team’s future success. And, perhaps most important of all, the manager has begun the process of building a closer relationship with each person on the sales team.

 

Case Study: Turning It Around

Beverly Flaxington’s company, The Collaborative, once worked with a high-tech firm that had a sales unit in so much trouble, the company was thinking of either closing it down or selling it. “There was a manager and five salespeople,” she says, “pretty much sitting there waiting to be sold off – a complete down-and-depressed environment.”

Using its behavioral models, the team at The Collaborative quickly assessed one problem: The sales team was composed of very talkative people who were the last remnants of a rah-rah sales mentality, but they were presenting their services to CFOs in the financial-services industry – people who were inherently data-oriented. “It was a complete mismatch of sales style and client style,” she says. “The more the salespeople talked about how great everything was, the more skeptical the CFOs became. We taught the sales team to focus on the data and simply talk less.”

Almost immediately the unit began to see an uptick in sales, but the changes didn’t stop there. Flaxington credits the second part of the process, which involved managerial involvement, with turning an uptick into a complete revitalization of the unit.

“Management scheduled a series of meetings,” she says, “so that the sales team was constantly talking about what worked well and what didn’t. They were geographically scattered but had regular phone conferences, during which they could share stories and exchange ideas. The manager didn’t simply provide the training and then disconnect. He understood the need for ongoing coaching. The unit not only redeemed itself, but within nine months became the number two performing unit in the company.”