The Exceptional Sales Manager | "Sales Manager" Archive

Celebrate strengths, downplay weaknesses

by Robert King
for Virginia Business
April 2007

The first quarter of 2007 has passed. I hope that you had the best quarter in the history of your business, and that you feel like you are on your way to your best year.

In previous columns, I have shared with you thoughts on the ABCs of Sales Management: Attitudes, Behaviors and Coaching. Your attitude toward your position and toward those around you is key. The behaviors that you institute will either quantify your success or define your struggle in your responsibilities. Your ability to coach will determine the future of your organization. Properly applied, these principles will translate into better practices and better outcomes. Today, we will turn our focus away from you and onto those around you.sort of.

What do we do when we have a "loose cannon?" See if any of these adjectives or phrases describes people on your team. The good: top-level producer, experienced, high-product knowledge. The bad: Lack of follow up, obstinate, unpredictable. The ugly: obnoxious, a rebel, lack of a genuine interest in helping others, rotten apple. Do any of these describe a particular employee on your team? Sounds like me when I was selling!

Well, there's good news, and then there's good news. The good news is that you are working with people who can be taught to excel and instructed to be the best that they can be at their jobs. They can also be trained to care for others and work within a team dynamic, instead of just for themselves. The other piece of good news is that it matters more what your management approach is to this type of personality than the power of the personality by itself. (That last statement is true in all cases, but let's stay focused on the current challenge on the table.)

Follow me through the next story. Several years ago, I found myself in the office of an executive-level manager reporting on one of my best employees. As I remember, my report was primarily grievance-ridden. After a rambling list of denunciations, the seasoned supervisor said: "This guy you are bellyaching over is 95 percent great and 5 percent inconvenience. Do yourself a favor and focus on the 95 percent." Wow!

Isn't that just like us, sales managers? Do you ever find yourself focusing on the negative things about your sales team members instead of celebrating their individuality and maximizing their strengths? Allow me to acquaint you with one of my new favorite books: Discover Your Sales Strengths, by Benson Smith & Tony Rutigliano. Smith and Rutigliano worked with Gallup and studied data from more than 250,000 salespeople and 25,000 sales managers. Their findings are illuminating. I strongly recommend you and your team read this book.

The authors propose that each of us has specific strengths that we bring to our sales career. Trouble is, as sales managers, we tend to concentrate on our team members' limitations and not on their strengths. You have a person on your team that talks too much. Smith and Rutigliano would suggest that this person possesses a "communication" strength. Another salesperson on your team questions everything. The authors would most likely say that that person might have an "analytical" strength.

A complete understanding of sales strengths empowers you as a sales manager to encourage, nurture and properly place each person in the position best for them. Additionally, it could help you define what type of client/prospect this person should be seeing. If you are on the search for talent and exploring best practices for the application of that talent, you will love this book.

My advice to you is to seek out the uniqueness of each of your team members. We are not interested in clones. If that's what you're looking for, you are doomed to frustration. The Exceptional Sales Manager discovers the strengths in each person, celebrates and cultivates those strengths, and accepts any personal limitations as an inappreciable part of the whole.

Robert King is president of The King Consortium, founder of Executive Exchange and author of Are You An Exceptional Salesperson? He lives in Midlothian with his wife and two sons. To learn more about The King Consortium, visit: www.thekingconsortium.com.