Selling vs. Sales Mgt

Myth:  Great sales people often become excellent sales managers.

Truth: Great sales managers require an entirely different skill set than great sales people

One of the takeaways from this past week's class was the huge difference in skill sets required to become a great sales person vs. a great sales manager.  One would think that both jobs are so interrelated that the skills are transferable.  Unfortunately, that is not always the case.

From the D&M Insurance case, I learned that sales managers are also sales representatives except their clients are often their subordinates.  This can become problematic when trying to communicate the corporate C-suite's changes to incentive compensation plans or overall strategies.  Sales managers are the people responsible for making sure that the sales people from the top to the bottom buy in to upper management's ideas with fervor so that sales will continue to come through the door.   

This can be a challenging position to be in for many reasons, one is because sales people have a variety of personalities.  It can be a challenge to change individuals that have strong personalities and are currently successful at what they.  Trying to implement new ideas requires a graceful demeanor and possibly telling different employees different stories in order to get them to "buy in".  Sales managers must learn how to build respect from a variety of angles if the manager wants to be successful.  

Similar to a salesperson, the manager can have tremendous flexibility when organizing their daily routine.  As long as numbers are met, corporate supervisors could care less how the manager achieves their goal.  However, because all sales organizations have a top sales person and a bottom sales person, having all employees reach their goal is unlikely.  

Another job of the sales manager is trying to encourage and train those at the bottom of the sales organization so that they can rise to at least the middle of the pack.  Taking the time to train and develop the poorest performing individuals could potentially take away time from monitoring the stars of the sales group.  This skill requires that the manager find balance in order to protect against losing your best sales people to the competition.

These are just a few of the tidbits of information I have garnered from this class thus far.  I will look forward to learning about the strategies and skill sets that separate the best salespeople and sales managers from the ones that can not sustain long term success.   

The purpose of this blog is...

to develop an understanding on different techniques, challenges, strategies, and approaches to working in the sales field.  Over the course of this class, I hope to develop an understanding of what skills are necessary to make a good sales manager as well as how sales people become successful in a field with one of the highest employee turnover rates in the industry.

Why I took this class:

The root reason of why I took this class is because I am fascinated by the sales role in organizations.  This probably stems from the occupations of both of my parents.  My father spent 20+ years in the insurance business and not runs the sales and trust office of a small bank in Ohio.  My mother also spent a brief period of her working days selling medical first aid supplies to manufacturing companies.  

As my father always told me growing up, "Rob, the great thing about sales is that you have unlimited earning potential".  You can make as much money as you can sell.  Two of the most successful businessmen I know are sales people.  One man runs an international moving company where he used skills learned in a Dale Carnegie course to grow his business into a multi-million dollar entity.  The other man worked in public accounting for six years then decided to venture out and create his own firm.  Years later he is the president of an insurance company that caters to high net worth individuals by selling them insurance policies that amount to tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars.  These two individuals come from very diverse backgrounds and have both built very successful business based on their knowledge and selling ability.

One man grew up in a middle class family and worked in US Steel's mail room for 10 years while he got his college degree at night.  The other went to an elite college, studied accounting, and eventually started his own practice once he built up a solid knowledge base to help advising high net worth clients.  

As the class progresses, I hope to learn the defining characteristics on what makes some people thrive in sales positions, while others (and unfortunately the majority) do not succeed.