The Sales Manager’s Three Big Lies

The Sales Manager’s Three Big Lies

by Kelly Riggs

So, how is that sales management job treating you?

The odds are pretty spectacular that it’s not exactly what you had hoped. Your boss is hard to please. Half your team is struggling — if you’re lucky. The workload is choking the life out of you.

And, if you are a “superstar-salesperson-turned-sales-manager,” it’s probably worse. The skills that made you a great salesperson are not the same skills you need to effectively manage salespeople. Worse, if your company – like most – failed to provide any training in management leadership (outside of the new forms, reports, and budgets you have to complete), you could be in for a very long and very rough ride.

Why? Because being a sales manager is not selling.

Three Big Lies

Any self-respecting Harvard graduate can tell you about the statue of three lies. Originally dedicated in 1884, the statue was moved to its current location on the west side of Harvard’s University Hall in 1923.

Purportedly a statue of Harvard founder, John Harvard, the statue has become famously known as the “statue of three lies,” which are these:

1. John Harvard did not found Harvard, or even attend the college for that matter. He did donate half of his estate and his entire library of 400 books to the school, which helps.
2. The inscription indicates the school was founded in 1638, which is close enough, apparently. The school was founded in 1636.
3. The individual depicted by the statue is not even John Harvard. The model for the statue was actually a Harvard student at the time, and evidently a bit more handsome that John.

Which, all in all, makes for great advertising for a university whose school crest displays the Latin word for…you guessed it…truth.

It’s an interesting anecdote about America’s oldest institution of higher learning, and is relevant to sales management only because struggling sales managers often develop three core beliefs, which, as it turns out, are really three big lies.

1. You can’t find good people.
2. I can improve our sales performance by working harder.
3. I don’t have time for training.

First off, there are plenty of good people out there; plenty of top-quality, high-performance candidates that could dramatically impact your team’s performance.

However, you don’t have a process for identifying and hiring those players – or you wouldn’t recognize them if they glowed – so you never seem to hire great players.

Second, working harder is a recipe for only one thing – burnout.

Certainly, work ethic is critical, but doing more of the work yourself because you don’t trust your people to do it right is not the solution. Sales management is about achieving your sales targets through other people. Clearly, you’ve shown that you can hit your own individual targets, but can you help other people hit their targets – without doing the work yourself? Unfortunately, when you don’t develop your salespeople, the only other conceivable solution is to work harder. At least until they replace you with someone else.

Third, failing to train your salespeople is exactly why Lie No. 2 exists.

No, not product training. Selling skills training. Sales managers often claim to spend enormous amounts of time in “training,” but what they are usually doing is spending a lot of time learning products. Take this nugget to the bank: sales will increase when your salespeople’s selling skills improve.

Remember this: The skills that make for great salespeople are not the same skills that make for a great sales manager.

That’s the veritas.