Where are you spending your time as the manager of your sales team? How much time are you spending fighting fires and fixing problems compared to coaching…and leading your team? Your buyers and competitors are dramatically changing, join me as I talk about what it takes to become a stronger coach and leader of your sales team…so they can sell even more!
How are you changing your sales leadership style to best reflect today's current selling environments and what sales people need to be more effective?
Hi, I'm Jim Pancero, helping you become a strong leader for sales team. And the reality is just in the last few years, we've gone through a profound shift in our culture of what salespeople expect and define of a sales manager.
It used to be under the baby boomer philosophies, those people now the day fact that are over 58, the ones that are soon retiring out of your business, but when they were successful in sales, it was all based on independence. You left them alone. They each had their own style. They each had their own message. They each focused on different products in your product line, but they were successful and they were selling a lot of stuff, so things were good.
But now we've moved in and the new generations have joined our sales team. We have the millennials who now are anybody under 42 is a millennial and those under 27 are considered a Gen Z. And with these two generations, they have better different expectations of their managers than what the baby boomers did. So now the challenge is sales organizations have to change and evolve, to leave the baby boomer style of sales leadership, and move to the more current environment.
See, the baby boomer style of management was, the sales manager really only did four things. They did special pricing, expediting, problem solving and customer thank you calls. That was all the support they gave to sales people, except for looking at the numbers and complaining that you weren't year-to-date, but they were more of a support kind of position. That was the reality of management and it worked for 20 years.
But today, people graduating from college and people are joining your sales team, they want more. They expect more from a manager. They expect a manager to be more proactive. They expect a manager to be more positive and to be more balanced. They expect a manager to let the sales rep talk and for the manager to actually listen. It's a time of moving from a transactional manager, which was the baby boomer style, to today, much more of a selling process coach and leader, focusing tactically and strategically on what your steps are and what your message is and making sure that the sales people are putting their best practices in early in the selling process, and not just waiting for the sales manager come in and close the business like in the old days.
We're going through significant changes. Our buyers are changing, causing our salespeople to change. Because of the generational differences, it's now time that we need to change and adjust sales leadership.
We'd love to answer any of your questions would love to help you in this change process, because this is the time to develop new sales tools and new coaching approaches. Thanks for checking out my podcast. I'm posting two new podcasts each week, all aimed at helping you and your team increase your selling competitive advantage.