Tag Archives: Sales Reps

5 Sales Management Errors That Make You Look Like An Ass

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sales management assSales management professionals unwittingly look like asses all the time.

I know, because I’ve done it plenty of times.

One time, I showed up for a sales meeting in front of my entire sales team with my fly wide open (I even had the t-shirt hanging out a little bit too).

Thank God for Dustin MacPherson who coughed “FLYIN LOW!!!” as I entered the room.

Dumb…horse’s ass.

Well, actually embarrassing is more like it…that could be entire series of sales management blog posts on sales management mistakes.

Looking dumb is inevitable, you just can’t avoid it – we’re all human and were going to make mistakes.

But as a sales manager, when you start making the same mistakes over and over again they make you look like an ass…and that’s when it becomes a real problem.

And when you look like an ass on a regular basis, your sales management leadership goes right down the crapper.

So in an effort to help you not to look like an ass in front of your sales team on a regular basis, in this sales management training here are five things Continue reading →

The Sales Management Trick to Motivating A Players

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a player sales managementI once had a salesperson who just wanted to be left alone.

He was one of my top salespeople, an A player, and I figured he knew best.

“Leave well enough alone”, I thought. And I happily spent my time coaching my other, less effective sales reps; the ones who “needed me”.

I figured this was a pretty solid sales management strategy.

That is, until he left to go to the competition in his third year with the company. It was almost exactly a year after I had become his sales manager.

I always regretted that “leaving him alone” decision and I learned never to do it again…especially after he started eating our lunch in the territory he vacated to go to the competition.

The Sales Management Dilemma of The A Player

Your sales people probably tell you that they want to “run their territory as if it’s the business”. They think they’re in charge of their own destinies and all I have to do is just Continue reading →

Sales Management Training | How to Discipline Without Being a Dick

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sales management dickNo sales management professional really wants to be a dick.

But sometimes, you gotta be a dick.

And that “sometimes” occurs when your sales reps are no longer listening to you.

It usually happens when they think your sales management leadership is weak.

Don’t worry.

It’s happened to me and it has happened to every sales management professional who’s reading this post at least once (and there are a few of them) :-)

So what do you do when they start “tuning you out”?

Do you:

  • Crack down hard and make em all “bow to your every command”?
  • Just continue as if nothing is happening?

It’s a tough choice. A choice that will in fact determine your sales management leadership for months to come.

So as the Elder Knight states in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, you must not Continue reading →

Sales Management Training | How to Use Humor in Your Sales Management Speeches

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sales management humorI once took a sales management training course on how to give speeches. The well-meaning sales trainer told us the best way to “warm up” the audience he said was to open your speech with a joke.

“A priest, a rabbi and a sales manager walk into a bar…”

Excited at the prospect of finally finding the key to great sales management speech-making, I ran out that night to my local Barnes and Noble and bought myself a joke book.

Being not a particularly good public speaker, I memorized a few jokes and then tried it out at my first sales meeting after that sales management training.

When I told the joke it was a disaster. I stumbled on the setup and flubbed the phrasing in the punch line.

I bombed big time.

Why?

First off, Continue reading →

How Mistakes Make You a Sales Management Genius

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sales management mistakesI have a very close friend who is an incredibly successful internet entrepreneur.

Despite the fact that he toils in a highly competitive and cut-throat market, he has achieved an unprecedented level of success his peers could only dream of.

Last month, he made an enormous mistake. It was actually a catastrophic mistake. He was doing a project for one of his clients and documenting its success on his blog and he took his eye off the ball and just plain screwed up.

Instead of hiding from it, burying it, never mentioning it, he did the exact opposite of what most people would do:

He discussed it openly on his blog for his thousands of readers to see.

Curious about this decision to publicly “come clean”, I asked him why.

His answer: Continue reading →