Why Good Salespeople Often Turn into Mediocre Sales Managers

A topic dear to my own heart, turning your best sales person into a mediocre sales manager! Check out this article:

Why Good Salespeople Often Turn into Mediocre Sales Managers by Dave Kahle

We've all done it. Promoted a good salesperson, often our best, to sales manager. My files are full of cases where the results were below expectations for everyone involved. Principals and CSOs are often disappointed in the lack of results, and the sales managers are confused and frustrated with the lack of achievement of their teams.

A variation on this theme usually produces even more angst. A good salesperson, without any real management experience, is hired from outside the company to fill a sales manager position. When these decisions go bad, the hurt feelings, negative attitudes and difficult situations which result can be ugly.

Not that this is always the case. Many CSOs and executives rose through the ranks in just this fashion, contributing exceptionally at every stage. But, these cases are generally the exception, not the rule.

The rule is that few good salespeople make good sales managers.

Why is that?

Consider the unique blend of strengths and aptitudes that often mark the character of an exceptional salesperson. Exceptional salespeople often have very high standards for themselves and everyone around them. They are highly focused on the customer, often to the determent of their relationships with their colleagues. It's not unusual for your star salesperson to irritate and frustrate the people in the operational side of the business, with a brusque and demanding attitude. After all, they think, I'm extending myself to take care of my customers, why shouldn't I expect everyone else to do so also?

When they become sales managers, they expect all of their salespeople to be just as hard driving and achievement oriented as they were. Unfortunately the reality is that most of their salespeople don't share the same degree of drive and perfectionism that they had. If they did, they would have been promoted to sales manager.

That means that the sales manager often is frustrated with the performance and attitudes of his charges, and confused as to how to change them.

The exceptional salesperson is often an independent character, who thrives in a climate where he can make his own decisions, determine his own call patterns, and spend time by himself.

Alas, he loses almost all of that when he is promoted to sales manager. He's expected to work a consistent, well defined work week, to spend a certain number of hours in the office, and to fulfill certain administrative functions. The freedom to make his own decisions, to determine his own days, is gone. So, he often struggles with how to adjust to this new work environment and still be productive.
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Wish List Aces Hiring Shenanigans!

Reading an article from Kevin Wheeler today Why Do We Love Hiring Shenanigans?reminds me of why I decided to use a "Wish List" when getting down to the nitty gritty of what a company REALLY needs their sales person to do to be successful.
Kevin related 4 good and bad things about practicing this elitist approach to hiring, and some reasons why it is so hard to not practice it:
"Acceptance rates go up. If you want your candidate acceptance rates to go up, make getting accepted really hard and stressful. We all like to believe that we are special, gifted, or better than others. If we are asked to take some sort of test or go through an initiation process that supposedly selects the best, those who get accepted feel superior to those who do not. This belief, even when not supported by facts, is a motivator for people to accept an offer from you. The more exclusive the choice seems to be, the more rigorous the selection process (regardless of its rationality), the more likely a potential hire is to say yes to your offer. A recent book by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson called Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts carefully and clearly relates story after story about the power of belief in superiority. They conclude the section with these words: "The results are always the same. Severe initiations increase a member's liking for the group."
Short-term retention may go up, but longer-term retention may go down. While I have no empirical evidence to support this claim, I do believe that being part of an exclusive group of similar people at first makes life easier and fun. Social patterns, likes and dislikes, language, and academic experiences will be similar and compatible. Organizations that select employees with rigid criteria tend to have little diversity. Over time this can become a limitation. As an employee grows more mature and finds that she is competing against similar people with similar advantages or not progressing as rapidly as she would like, she may leverage the exclusivity and desirability that belonging to the organization has bestowed on her to get another position at the competition or to start her own business.
Hiring managers like it because it validates their superiority. Hiring managers are usually enamored of tough interviewing processes and rigorous selection criteria because it supports and underlines their own skill, insight, and wisdom. They can boast that they have chosen the most talented or gifted team of employees. It can also provide a sense of security: If I have the best people working with me, we must be making the right decisions. This is one of the problems that Enron encountered. They had so many smart people that no one believed they could make bad decisions. When selection is based to a significant degree on suspect interview criteria and unverified reactions to events, it is very hard to account for success or failure. It provides a way to discriminate. Unfortunately, rather than creating workplaces full of contradictions and differences where creativity thrives, the practices described above create a workforce made up of similar people in thought, attitude, background, education, and belief in their own superiority. All real creativity occurs at the edge, at the juxtaposition of opposite ideas and experiences. The healthiest and most creative workforces are those where people are assembled almost at random. The creativity of Silicon Valley, for example, has been correlated to the influx of diverse people and ideas from all over the world. It was the coming together of these people that created the integrated circuit, the Apple computer, and computer games. Organizations should embrace diversity as a means to creativity and innovation.
In the end, good selection is based on matching candidates' competencies and skills to the particular set of activities an organization needs to have completed or outcomes that need to be achieved. These competencies can be identified with a variety of objective tests and properly constructed behavioral interviews.
Whether someone can answer the manhole question, has a 4.0 GPA, or has gone to Harvard makes no difference at all to potential performance."
So, in the long run, my "wish list" aces these hands down! I ask the client to tell me what are the 5 most important things they want the person to have done in the past and the 5 most important things they want that person to do for them. They are far more likely to find the perfect person for their job opening!

11 rules that students do not learn in high school or college.

Maybe it's different in other parts of the USA, but when I look around at high school and college students today, I wonder what on earth is going to happen when they get out into the real world of work. A perfect example is a young high school freshman I know. One of her teachers gave her an assignment and reviewed it before she submitted it for grading. The teacher told her she needed to cite her sources at the end of her report and gave her a URL to learn how to do this. The student went there and immediately complained that she couldn't figure out what the page said. I looked at it with her and pointed out the page covered how to cite sources from newspapers to web sites, magazines to books.

The problem? She had to actually read the whole page to learn how to cite the sources she had used! Maybe it's the Internet age - we are used to instant gratification now. How did we ever wait 3-5 days for a letter from a friend?

A great article on Training Systems, Great Training for Great Employees, lists 11 rules that students do not learn in high school or college from Bill Gates' book "Business @ The Speed of Thought"

RULE 1 - Life is not fair; get used to it.

RULE 2 - The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

RULE 3 - You will NOT make 100 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice president with a car phone, until you earn both.

Read all 11 rules here Retain Young People

11 Challenges Facing Hiring Managers

In a recent article that I saw on Recruit, Inspire & Retain they listed 11 challenges that hiring managers face today.

One of the things listed was not having a formal sourcing strategy in place, so companies end up hiring the best of the bunch - and not THE BEST. Here are the top 3 challenges:

Most companies lack a formal sourcing strategy and end up hiring the best of the bunch rather than THE BEST. Top talent needs to first be found. In a robust economy or tight labor market, many of the best people are working. In other words, they are passive candidates that need to be located.

The wording in typical job descriptions limits the number of qualified people who will apply for the position. Rather than looking at what people are exceptional at, abilities and talents that are instinctive, many companies make their hiring decisions based on what people have learned, acquired and experienced to date. Because the essence of people is not what they have learned, acquired and experienced, hiring based on those limited aspects will bring limited results.

Most companies only list the "necessary" skills, experience and knowledge required without appealing to the real reasons top talent accept new offers.
You can read the full article here:Cool Recruiting Tips

Waking the Sleeping Giant - Passive Candidates Won't be Passive for Long!

I hear so much about active and passive candidates and it used to be true that the best sales rainmakers never had to "look" for a job. We called them passive because they had people chasing after them, begging them to work for them, without ever looking at job ads online or in a newspaper.

Things are changing now though. Just as it isn't common for employees to retire after 20 years at the same company, the Rainmakers are looking for much more in a career than the highest pay - and they are willing to shop around for it quietly.

This article Waking the Sleeping Giant - Passive Candidates Won't be Passive for Long! by Bryan Johanson goes into great detail on how you can attract these Rainmakers. The recruiter can't do it alone - everyone on your hiring team has to work at wooing the best!

Baby Boomer Rainmakers - Are you writing them off as candidates?

Everywhere I look there are headlines shouting about the baby boomers retiring:
VARs Face Brain Drain as Baby Boomers Retire
Job market to boom as baby boomers retire
Preparing for Baby Boomer Retirement

But the truth of the matter is Baby Boomers don't really WANT to retire! At least, many of them don't. Unlike the days of our fathers when the average life span was about mid-50 to mid-60, baby boomers are still healthy and active now in their 50's and 60's. And they want to keep working - in the same industry as they have been in or in a new career altogether - they just aren't ready to lay around all day.

More often than not, it is the perception of employers that stands in the way of these baby boomers remaining in the workforce and ultimately that is going to be the cause of an economic crisis when these experienced workers are forced to retire.

Not long ago a potential client told me that he didn't want someone too experienced for his job opening because they thought they knew it all and wouldn't learn new ways. I asked him how much his average "entry level" sales person was selling and he gave me a number that seemed very low to me. I pointed out how much more an experienced person was likely to bring to the table with very little "learning".

So, how can you take advantage of those baby boomers who are looking desperately for new jobs?

Hire them!

Allow them to share their experience with your less experienced sales people and turn all of them into Rainmakers too!

Don't let your biases stop your company sales from soaring. The job market might boom, but it will take twice as many people to make those sales until they get up to speed. Do you want the job market to boom? Or your sales to boom?

Finding and Keeping the Best Employees

After posting my follow up comment to Ford Harding this morning, I saw this fantastic article from Mark Hewitt of Allyis on Workforce.com's Blog. This company appears to really "walk the walk as well as talk the talk" where their employee's are concerned. Having a retention rate of 95% is the "proof of the pudding", as my grandma used to say!

Read the full article here Finding and Keeping the Best Employees: 3 Ways To Ensure That Employees Stay