The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

If it’s been a long time since you admitted ignorance, you might want to be worried. I was talking to a client the other day asking questions about their plans for sales enablement and he said he had to admit his ignorance on the topic.

Wow. How refreshing. You have to be smart and confident to admit ignorance. Get the irony? That made me stop and try to remember when the last time was that I was willing and able to admit ignorance. I hope you stop and do the same now.

If you have not had this experience lately, you probably fall into one of two camps:

1. You’re not challenged—not talking to enough smart people or reading interesting books and articles.

I’m not talking about the hip hop ladies from Queens, who burst back on the scene recently in a Geico ad, I’m actually thinking about salt and pepper.

Salt brings out the flavor in food, and a “Salt Manager” brings out the natural talent in their people.  Pepper, meanwhile, adds a strong sensation to food, a “Pepper Manager” brings a healthy dose of expectations and accountability. 

How to be a Salt Manager

Bringing out a person’s natural talent starts by having an objective assessment of what those talents are. It’s rare that one of your people, even one of your stars, is fabulous at everything. So you need to know their aces and spaces, what comes naturally to them and what is difficult for them to do.

The natural inclination of most managers is then to (a) assume the person needs no help and support with what they’re fabulous at, and (b) lots of training and coaching with the stuff they find tough. That’s backward.

Can you complete this statement? We exist to…

If you run your company or a business unit, or even just a sales team, there is surprising value in completing that statement—it helps define your reason for being. I have experienced first-hand the benefit that comes from knowing our reason for being. Here’s how we complete the statement at The Center for Sales Strategy:

We exist to turn talent into performance.

It wasn’t a forgone conclusion that we would define our corporate purpose in that way. We considered other possibilities. We could have said we exist to help companies hire the best people and train them well. Or, we exist to help companies increase sales. Both would have been pretty good, but not as good as the one we landed on. Our final choice got to the essence of who we are, what our passion is, and the greatest value we deliver.

I saw this quote on the bathroom wall of my favorite Asheville coffee shop this week.

“There’s always free cheddar in the mousetrap baby.” 

It’s a lyric from a Tom Waits song, a song I’m not particularly fond of, but this lyric line got me thinking. The main message, of course, is that the easiest path is not always the best. The mouse would be better off slowly nibbling on alley scraps through the day to end up with enough food to survive, instead of trying to grab the full days’ worth of nutrition at one time from the mouse trap—making it his last meal!

As I thought about this timeless truth, I started thinking about the trap I see many new salespeople fall into. Too often, a new seller makes a quick sale or two before they know what they’re doing, before they are following the right steps and committing to enough activity.

"Shepherds ought to smell like sheep."

-Allan Taylor

That’s one of those quotations that slows you down and makes you think. It got me thinking about how important it is for sales managers to be in the field with their people. Sales managers ought to smell more like the funky field than the sterile office. 

It’s tempting to want to continually shut your door, block out distractions, and catch up on email and paperwork (it’s probably time to start calling this screen work, don’t you think?). Yes, there are times where you need to stop down and do some of that. But if you want to be a good leader and stay connected to your people and their work, to encourage best practices, and to spot opportunities for skill improvement, you need to get out there!

Get Out in The Field

Great leaders don’t spend all their time-solving problems, but they’re smart about how to find problems and how to fix them. I see the best managers position themselves to hear problems and to see problems.

Hearing Problems

Hearing problems means being open to the problems your people bring you. If your people aren’t bringing you problems, that’s your meta- problem, or should I say your mega-problem! There are two explanations, and they’re both ugly: They think you can’t help or you don’t care. The can’t help scenario isn’t easily remedied, but the don’t care explanation is fixable. 

Arjun Basu writes (very) short stories on Twitter. He calls them “Twisters.” You should follow him at @arjunbasu. Here’s one: 

The road narrowed. I said, I’m too fat for this road. My wife laughed, but I was serious. I was not happy with my weight. Or the road itself. 

The road keeps changing, doesn’t it? In business, it seems as if at least half our roads are under construction or subject to detours—all at the same time. Has your road to success narrowed? Or are you just too fat to fit? Those are entirely different questions. Or should I say, those are entirely different ways of defining the problem or even of looking at the world. If you see the road as the problem, you let yourself off the hook—but you also condemn yourself to whatever the road has in store for travelers who are too fat for the new road. If you see yourself as the problem, even grudgingly (because you don’t have to love that new road to recognize it, acknowledge it, and deal with it), then success opens up for you.

Leadership Lessons from This Quote

I’m reading a book called “The Leadership Wisdom of Solomon,” by Pat Williams, Senior VP of the NBA Orlando Magic.

Maybe you’ve heard the saying that no one washes a rental car. Think about it. Does anyone try to budget time on the way back to the airport to run through the car wash? Of course not. Even if they’re OCD and are obsessive about cleanliness, they still don’t wash that rental. They know someone at the rental car company will do it, and the thought won't even cross their mind.

Recently we did an informal survey with some client sales managers asking them to tell us about those things from last year for which they wished they could have a “do over.”

Not surprisingly, the responses included a very broad variety of things they’d dearly love to do over. But 100% of the responses had a single characteristic in common—these sales managers told us they waited too long to make a tough decision. By the time they did, it seemed really obvious, not only to them but also to a lot of others in the organization who had been scratching their heads over the non-action for quite a while.

Managers are Optimistic But are Often Without a Process of Evaluation

That got me thinking about what causes this procrastination and how to prevent it. Part of it is the built-in optimism and the warm interpersonal relationships that we know characterize the best sales managers. But most of the blame goes to not having a clear process of evaluation. A clear process means the manager has:

• Established the criteria by which success will be measured
• Determined the intervals at which those criteria will be noted and evaluated