Every sales manager has a particular management style, but all would agree success depends on one common element: a clear vision. In this Q&A, Peter Wells, senior vice president for sales and service at inbound marketing company Eightfold Logic, expands on vision, coaching, and leadership essentials. Wells is a seasoned sales manager who has worked for TouchCommerce, WebSideStory, and AltiGen Communications.
Q: What’s your management style?
I want to hire the best people, not just the best salespeople, but the best businesspeople. I’m looking for very entrepreneurial-oriented salespeople who can run their patch as if they’re running their own individual business. I hire them under that context and they have the benefit of resources as a business consultant so they can focus all their efforts on running an appropriate sales process. Unlike a lot of other companies that are hiring good pitch-and-convince salespeople, I’m typically looking for ones that can really be more strategic-minded in terms of their approach.
Q: How do you get the most out of your employees?
I think what’s critical is to be very, very clear with the expectations. At the very top it’s the company’s responsibility, and it starts with the CEO, to have a very clearly defined vision and strategy to what the company is trying to accomplish. And then below that there needs to be a business plan that’s written to accomplish that strategy. And then the next layer of the pyramid is the organization that will fulfill the need associated with the plan to accomplish those key elements.
I also create a pyramid for people that work for me that, unlike the company where the top of the pyramid is vision and strategy, the top of the pyramid for the salespeople is results. If players are successful, if I don’t even engage with them, then that’s fine. If the goals of the salespeople are not being met, then I need to get involved and look more in depth at the activity that’s going on. If I find the activity is not what it should be, then that’s where I would impose my adjustment, have a discussion, and understand the reason for the lack of activity or change in activity. If the activity is in fact in place and the results aren’t being hit, then that goes to the third and final level of the pyramid: skills.
Q: Do you think there are a lot of salespeople who don’t ask prospects if they are the ones who are the final decision makers?
I think at least 80 percent to 90 percent of the salespeople I’ve come across do not ask if the prospect is the final decision maker. Hearing no 99 times, for those who haven’t been in sales, is a challenging job. My general experiences have found that sales reps are just excited to get a meeting with someone who will listen. One thing that I’ve been preaching in the last seven or eight years is to get to no as quickly as you can. Good business-minded people should analyze their successes and failures and make sure that they ask themselves what happened and be able to duplicate that if it’s a success, so in the next opportunity with a prospect they can be very upfront and ask, “Do you have budget? Do you have time? Do you have this problem? Are you willing to focus on solving that within the next three months?” If the answer is no to half of those questions, then fine, disqualify them and move on
Q: Do you stress the duplication of success with your salespeople?
My most successful guys have always done that and it is constant coaching that I provide them. It’s funny but there has to be a third-party moderator, if you will, that is involved in the win-lost calls after a sales process has been completed. Otherwise if you leave it solely to the sales contributors, it will inevitably be that every time it’s a win, it was great sales execution. Every time it’s a loss, well, it was the products, the features, the functionality. The successful people are the ones who get very real. They want to understand why they won. Was it the value proposition and how the offering was presented? Was it sales execution because they forced themselves to meet with the top person? Was it the product, service, pricing, features, or the competitive advantages? All those categories should be scored on a regular basis for both wins and losses.
Q: How do you put together your team?
If I can put together people that I’ve worked with in the past, that’s always the best. I’ve had the benefit of bringing people from previous organizations that I know are top performers. If I go out into the open market, I look for a combination of someone with a big-company background who has sold big-ticket items to big companies consistently. That’s a value. But I think also that a salesperson that has more experience in the Internet-oriented or technology-based product companies out there is more valuable and applicable to the companies that I’ve been running. I have hired superstars from Oracle and Cisco, to give an example, who have come in with fantastic track records and fell on their faces when they were forced to sell a brand or a product that wasn’t as well known as those big companies they previously represented.
Another thing that is really quite important as I look at lots and lots of resumes is that I have no interest in anybody who has been with companies on a regular basis one or two years. We all make mistakes and maybe go to the wrong company, and I’m fine with that happening once or twice if it’s spread out, but I have seen so many resumes where the sales contributors have been at seven companies in 10 years. And there are a lot of people out there like that.
Q: What are the most common mistakes sales managers make?
I think a lot of sales managers, and I’ve done it myself, and this is with small companies keep in mind, is that sometimes they can get too involved with selling. If they continue to do the heavy lifting and selling for the individual contributor, the individual contributors don’t fail and don’t learn from those failures. If you let the executive team and the head of the sales team come in and just sell, then you create an environment that can be limited from a scaling perspective. You have to let the salespeople sell.
Q: What three qualities make a great salesperson?
I think intelligence, the will to prepare, and the desire to be No. 1. There are more that go into a great salesperson but I think the second one is important. The will to do the boring stuff, the practicing and preparing, the grind, is an important lesson.
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