Unbound Growth Blog

Last week I presented brand new data on sales managers and their impact on their salespeople. If you were one of the sales managers and executives with growing teams that were there- thank you for your questions, the conversations in the hallways after, and the multitude of messages saying it was one of the best sessions all week.

For those of you who missed out, this post is for you.

Last year a sales manager asked for sales coaching because he “...didn’t want his shortcomings to become the collateral damage to his team.” After going through a 3-6 month program to ‘coach the coach’ and the team at the same time, his SaaS sales team is now #1 in their company, with a 98% customer retention rate.

Many of us have heard the phrase, “As goes the leader, so goes the team,” and much has been written about empathy in leadership (put yourself in their shoes), servant leadership (put others first), and ethical leadership (do what is right). And there are studies that show that these things help team members be more creative and more efficient when doing their jobs.

Imagine if your teenager was taught to drive by spending only a week or two watching training videos and sitting in the passenger seat watching you and others drive. Would you want them driving you across the country? Or even just across town in a snow storm?

It is pretty normal at the beginning of the year for many companies to start hiring salespeople, or to at least start thinking about hiring. When I ask VP of Sales and CEOs what their ideal salesperson is like and what they will need to accomplish, I have gotten answers that included;

One of the salespeople we have been coaching asked, “Could I be a good sales manager? It seems like a thankless job of being pulled into many directions at once. I can’t say that there is any one at my company that I would want to be like…”

Last week my husband asked me to teach him how to play piano. The extent of his piano skills was playing with one finger the Miami Vice theme song. Showing him how to play reminded me how I first started and also how many sales people and managers end up starting in their roles as well.

First thing on Monday morning one of our inside sales clients, let’s call him Scott, told us that their manager insisted that they send a proposal to all the opportunities in their pipeline that “might possibly close this month.” Didn’t matter what was happening or not happening in the conversation.

Yesterday was the beginning of 4Q16 (the beginning of the end), and I got up early to make sure I had time for plenty of coffee, yoga and reflection before I started the day with 90 minutes of back to back coaching calls at 8am. It`s not very often that every one of those calls are around the same issue, but yesterday and into today was one of those times.

This is a question that came up several times last week and twice this week already. First was from a current client who is a salesperson at a small but growth focused technology company. Like many other small and growing companies, there is a small sales team (less than 5) and one member of the team is also the “sales manager”.

This post has been sitting in draft for a few weeks because for me, there is no easy answer. When I heard Chris Beall, the CEO from Connect and Sell say at the Sales 2.0 conference in Boston that he didn’t believe that sales managers should coach- my ears pricked up and the room went silent. That’s a pretty bold thing to say and goes in the face of the accepted best practice being touted by many in the sales development industry.