This Wednesday I’ll be the guest of sales performance expert Dave Stein on his Sales Executive Webinar Series for Sales & Marketing Management Magazine. If the title of this blog post intrigues, angers or interests you, click here for more info and to register. And since you are here already, let me encourage you to take two minutes and keep reading.
Here are sales realities that I observe every day:
- There is a shortage of top sales talent
- There are no unemployed A-player salespeople
- It’s pretty darn rare to find an exceptionally healthy, high-performance sales culture
Not too many people will take issue with the above observations. Almost every company and sales team could benefit from more top sales talent and a healthier sales culture. However, and this is a big however, it seems that very few executives and sales managers realize that it’s their own dysfunction preventing them from being able to attract, retain, and develop top sales talent in the first place, or create the type of healthy, high-performance sales culture they desperately want (and need).
In Sales Management. Simplified., I suggest in a not-so-gentle way, that before pointing the finger of blame at the sales team, execs and sales leaders might benefit from taking a long look in the mirror if their sales culture and sales results are not what they want them to be.
In the webinar this Wednesday at 1:00 Eastern, Noon Central, I am going to unpack these eight ugly sales leadership dysfunctions:
1. Sales managers are misused, abused, distracted, and diverted from their primary job.
2. Sales managers have devolved into CRM/Desk Jockeys who are deceived into believing that they can “lead” their teams by staring at CRM screens and sending a high-volume of emails.
3. Sales managers with a “hero-complex” disengage the hearts of their reps.
4. Big-ego, self-proclaimed sales expert senior executives deflate the team with their constant micromanaging and pontificating.
5. Anti-sales attitudes dominate the organization; it’s fashionable to openly criticize sales reps when things go wrong, and deflect or deny credit to the sales team when things are good.
6. Entrepreneurial, visionary senior leaders don’t grasp that the sales team requires more clarity and direction to succeed than they realize.
7. Silly compensation plans underpay or cap top-producers’ earnings causing them to question whether they’re fairly compensated and if they’d be better appreciated (and paid) elsewhere.
8. Companies regularly put the wrong salespeople in the wrong roles and also foolishly expect zookeepers to have success hunting for new business, while their best sales hunters are often forced to stay involved way too long after making a kill.
Join Dave Stein and me Wednesday for more on these eight sales leadership dysfunctions and we will also offer practical, powerful, simple tips to attract top-talent and build a healthy, pro-sales culture that will help you not only keep, but maximize the impact of, that talent!
