Sales tales

Becoming a Sales Manager is often seen as the culmination of a great sales career.  It is the formal recognition of performance that an organization bestows on a sales person, and is often considered more valuable than any monetary reward.  Especially in countries like India where formal hierarchy in organizations is still important, the change in status from an individual sales person to a Sales Manager (do note the capitalization) is considered a matter of pride and prestige.  Many sales staff eagerly await their so-called “day of redemption”, when all the things they really shouldn’t have done as sales people to win business (remember the unauthorized discount or the impossible delivery commitment or the credit period offered that would have given the CFO a heart attack… the list goes on) are forgiven when their status is altered from that of a mere mortal to that of an organizational phoenix.  Getting the Sales Manager’s job is the corporate equivalent of washing away one’s sins in the Ganges and starting anew, with the Lord’s blessings.

But as anyone who has worked in sales knows, great sales people rarely make great Sales Managers.  So as a sales person if you have a great manager, it’s quite likely that your manager either never worked in sales, or probably was never very good at it (so how did he get that promotion?).  Conversely, if you have a lousy manager—well, that’s probably what you’re going to look like in a few years, you sales star you.  Extensive work has been done in the field of why great sales people don’t make great Sales Managers, especially in the US, the mecca of sales (we need to promote the idea of our kids selling nimbu-paani aka lemonade in India if we want to get anywhere close to the US in sales excellence).  And it’s interesting to note that great sales people in the US don’t really care about becoming Sales Managers—they would rather continue as individual sales people and achieve professional satisfaction and good remuneration while doing so, rather than taking on the complexity of a different role. And boy is it different.

Being a successful Sales Manager requires a completely different set of skills compared to being a successful sales person.  All the key traits of a great sales person—setting a high bar for individual excellence, great tenacity in pursuit of the opportunity, fantastic communication skills (selling ice to the Eskimos as it were)—can actually become a liability when one moves into the Sales Manager’s job.  The key difference in my view is that suddenly the sales person has to transform into a listener instead of a talker—now there are other sales people with their individual quirks and ways of operating who need to be managed, and in order to do that, one first has to listen.  The greatest punishment one can inflict on a super sales guy is to ask them to sit patiently in a room and remain silent for 60 seconds—it’s the corporate equivalent of water boarding (“Please don’t EVER do that again, I’ll take the higher target”).  But that’s exactly what a Sales Manager’s job demands—listening (patiently at that) to whatever the people they are managing are saying, without jumping to conclusions and resisting the urge to remind the sales person of his or her lineage. 

But it’s not only about listening skills.  If there’s one thing that really separates a Sales Manager from a sales person, it’s the ability to manage conflict.  Sales is an unforgiving line of work—you’re only as good as the last deal.  The Sales Manager’s job is equally risk-fraught—you’re only as good as last month.  The only thing that can be guaranteed about being a Sales Manager is that there will be conflicts on a daily basis.  There are many types of conflicts inherent in the job—channel conflict (direct vs. indirect, or one channel vs. another), account conflict (who takes the lead on the account), competitive conflict (the good old cabals don’t exist), customer conflict (are they serious about doing business with us or just using us to drive down the price), and internal conflict (sales vs. support functions).  Managing conflicts is about being able to understand the problem (as distinct from the person) and providing effective resolution.  It involves being able to distance oneself from the issue to maintain objectivity while at the same time being close enough to the problem at hand to ensure that the resolution offered is acceptable to both sides.  Essentially, therefore, managing conflicts is about adding a 3^rd dimension to our black or white, win or lose view of a sales-driven world.  It’s about believing in the power of “and” over “or”-- there can be 2 winners in the game, there are 2 sides to every coin (don’t think about getting another spouse, though). This becomes incredibly difficult to do for great salespeople, as they now have to fundamentally alter what has successfully worked for them for so long.  This isn’t a transition but a transformation, it’s the woods and not the trees, it’s the original Coke and not the latest cherry flavor, it’s the Test match and not 20:20—but hey, who said a Sales Manager’s job was easy? If it was, we’d all be Sales Managers, and to be honest, being a sales person is much more fun (and often more lucrative) than being a Sales Manager. So the next time you meet a sales person, congratulate them on their status and tell them to be proud of who they are; the capitalization is not important.