The Costly Pitfalls of Sales Leaders

The best salespeople should not be promoted to management, claims Joe Winker, the VP of Sales at Momar.

And Rob Hornish, the CSO at Redaptive agrees.

“When you promote the wrong people to sales management that are not passionate about coaching and mentoring salespeople to succeed, they don’t do it as much, and it affects the outcomes of your sales organization. They also do not know how to develop, coach, and mentor their sales teams to continue to get 1% better every day.  That leads to attrition and poor performing teams.”

We use our magic wand and make them sales managers without training and coaching them. Although, the skill set of managers and sellers is almost the opposite, according to Becca Hammer, the Head of L&D and Sales Enablement at MNTN.

You’re successful if your team is. Yet most first-line managers accept the role without them expecting to coach, understands Tom Hewitt, the VP of Partnerships at Ceros.

Larry Doiron, the Sales Enablement Manager at Notified, asked me a serious question:

If your sales managers are not trained in coaching, how do you expect their people to deliver results?

Based on Channing Ferrer, CSO of SEMrush you should get clear on:

How do you coach efficient sales processes?

What’s the sales coaching cadence?

What is the detail of our pipeline reviews?

You need to identify how we run 1:1s, deal coaching reviews, and have career development conversations.

Leadership and coaching are all about showing people you actually care about them as human beings; then they start performing.

If people feel well, they sell well, told Ryan Katzenberger, the Sales Development Director at SmartRent.

“I’m just trying to figure out how they can help themselves and show them they do not need me. If I’m on my vacation, my team runs smoothly as if I was there.

Do not do the work for them.

You are not helping them.

You are crippling them and hurting sales performance too”.

I had to transition from telling people my experience to asking them questions so they come up with their own solutions, admits Max MacCready, the Sales Director at Jellyvision.

Her coaching practices were shared with me even by Stephanie Sanders, the Head of Sales at Contractbook:

I’m letting my team members review each other’s calls using our scorecards, and then we meet as a group to review some of the clips together to dig deeper into relevant topics. I found out that when people assess their own performance, they are typically harder on themselves than I would.

Del Nakhi, Sr. Director of Global GTM Strategy & Enablement, also advises: “Sales coaching conversations should start with “them.”

How did you feel? What went well?

What were your observations?

Do not give them a laundry list of things to work on. Managers can sometimes confuse coaching with feedback. These are not the same things.”

We have to give regular feedback to managers about how they coach and coach them as coaches.

For example, Dianne Kleber, the VP of Sales Enablement at Paradox, started doing 3:1 call coaching sessions. “I, my enablement manager, and the sales manager got together to coach an AE based on his call, asking things like – in this part, talk to me about what was happening.” It also teaches the sales manager how to coach in the future.

Overall, try to do what Peter Galiano does.

Strive to be an expert on the people you lead. First-line sales managers should then become the experts in their sellers.