Inside Sales Telesales Tips Blog

What makes a great Inside Sales Manager? Ask Pete Tarbox!

This week, I've had a significant amount of commentary on a number of posts I've written on what makes a superior sales manager. There's been a bunch of traffic on my posts entitled 5 Great Sales Demotivators: Decrease sales by following these practices, and Increase sales by conducting an effective Telesales Employee Performance Appraisal, among others. Earlier this week, Pete Tarbox weighed in on what he feels are traits that are critical in being a successful inside sales manager. Pete's been around long enough to have seen a lot, and I profiled his techniques for selling to the Defense Department in my 5 Critical Tactics when Selling to the Defense Department post.

I like Pete's approach to management excellence so much that I'm producing it verbatim here. What do you think?

Traits of an excellent sales manager:

1. Like a great rep, a great manager listens and asks probing questions before taking action. This is crucial when diagnosing a sales situation.
2. Comes across as truly wanting to help their reps (instead of beat them up). I've encountered a number of VP's who will react in a negative, emotional way before (or without) making sure that they really understand what's going on.
3. Helps their people to build skills by teaching in detail (or getting someone who can, like you) what needs to be done, as opposed to only saying what needs to be done (such as "you need to talk to executives").
4.  In my experience, people who have actually done the job at their company - or are willing to learn in detail what it really takes -  make the best sales managers. I once had a new VP come in and learn NOTHING about our product or market. He thought that he could increase sales by teaching new sales techniques (he never learned what the real problem was, nor did he understand our market). That's an extreme case, but I frequently see VPs hired that come from other markets - and then come in and show a lot of aggression to their sales force. People who are promoted from within are able to better empathize with their reps and translate winning skills.
5.  Do not overload their reps with non-value-add tasks. Forecasting, reporting, tracking all serve a purpose and must be done - but that needs to be balanced with actual selling.
6.  The best also understand how to carve up territories in ways that make sense for their people (provide enough opportunity without providing too much busy work), i.e. when you have 12 multi-divisional accounts and are asked to generate a "quick" overview for a meeting tomorrow... or all of a sudden find yourself in the middle of 5 enterprise upgrades (which may not represent current revenue opportunity but must be successful in order to keep your customers and have future opportunity).
7. Helps to insulate their people from constant change (this is a tough one because things are constantly changing, but it's demotivating to work a bunch of accounts that then get handed out to other people, or to start and stop on an account, and so on).
8. And like all managers - makes it fun to work for them, communicates to their workers the linkage between their activities and the big picture, communicates corporate objectives.

(Geoff here again) Thanks for your perspective, Pete. Managing is never easy, especially when times are tough. In my experience, managers never get enough time sharing best management practices and discussing areas of challenge with one another. But a number of inside sales managers read this blog, and we have some very good posts that managers can read by clicking on the Management Techniques link on the left side of this page. Our telesales management classes are always popular, too.

Pete's thoughts provide some great food for thought, and represent timely discussion points for sales reps and managers alike. Why not add them to your Best Practices Playbook?

5 Personality Traits of a Superior Inside Sales Person

The most popular blog article I've ever written is 20 Characteristics of a Superior Inside Salesperson. In that post, I primarily covered activities and behaviors that most successful inside sales people have, relating to prospect/customer interaction, and interaction with the people with whom they work.  What I didn't address were the personality traits of a superior salesperson.

When I'm asked what personality characteristics make a good telesales person, I'm always a little leery of spilling the beans. There are companies that make a lot of money "testing" job hunters to see if they have what it takes to be a salesperson, and I think any kind of personality testing is balderdash, because of the thousands of people who've gone through my telesales training courses, loads of them broke a whole lot of rules. They would have "tested" right out the door and never gotten hired in the first place.

Nevertheless, I've noticed five personality characteristics common to many of the successful reps with whom I've worked. Warning: you may not want to live next door to these people, marry them, or discuss world politics with them. You want them on your sales team, though.

So here they are. A great sales person:

1) Is Arrogant: believing he or she is every bit as smart as any CEO in the world, and smarter than most, including the CEO of his or her own company. That's why these reps are so good at calling high. That arrogance can occasionally annoy others in the workplace, but helps the superior rep to get through the tough days when the orders aren't coming in. When something isn't working, he or she will just get creative, then go out and figure out an alternative strategy that will.

2) Is Impatient: and doesn't like anything, or anybody, getting in the way of sales. Occasionally he or she will piss off co-workers and people at prospect companies that stand in the way of him or her getting to the right person on the decision team. This individual will moan and crab at co-workers that don't pass along leads fast enough, and can be an absolute nightmare to Marketing folks and IT people. CRM not working at optimum level? Your top salesperson may be the key complainer.

3) Is Messianic: he or she is absolutely driven to improve the work lives of his or her customers. That's why sometimes the rep crosses the line by continually bugging prospects about new ideas and ways to improve the prospect's bottom line. This rep may actually go to the lengths of telling the prospect that he or she is stupid for not "getting it."

4) Is Righteously Indignant: he or she will act as an advocate for customers when they have a legitimate beef with his or her company. I've seen top salespeople demand that their companies refund customers' money and take back the product months after installation if the product didn't work to spec. When the rep is successful, his or her company loses money in the short term, but gains a reputation for honesty that money can't buy.

5) Is Greedy: in enterprise selling, he or she isn't satisfied with just one product placement; he or she wants to sell every opportunity in the enterprise, all over the world, if possible. That salesperson wants tons of great leads, too, and will work them all really fast in order to get a better paycheck. This may very well cause occasional territory conflict within a sales organization. As a manager, you won't have to guess who the greedy one is: all the other reps will tell you.

Each one of these 5 personality traits has a real potential for offending someone. In my classes, I say that it's better to occasionally err on the side of aggressiveness, and when you do, you'll occasionally really annoy someone on the other end of the phone. But if you don't, you'll never know if you've stretched the envelope enough. I think annoying somebody on the phone once a year is about right, because then you'll know the limit. More than that, and you might have to scale it back a bit. The old line about it being better to ask forgiveness than permission goes a long way here.

If you're a really successful rep, I'll bet you management has called you on the carpet at least once for something related to one of the personality traits mentioned above. You may have even been nailed on them during performance reviews. I always end my blog posts with a note to apply what I've written to your own Best Practices Playbook. But not today, because these personality traits are not Best Practices. They're not the worst, either. Great salespeople aren't always the best liked, but they are totally focused on making themselves money. And if they do it honestly and ethically, they, their companies, and their customers end up in the win column.

How do I get my PO in faster?

In addition to writing my weekly blog posts on telesales training topics, I monitor a few other blogs in which sales questions arise. A few weeks ago, the following question popped up about getting POs in faster. We're closing in on year-end now, so I think it's topical to repeat the question in today's post, as well as my answer. Have a look:

Question: What methods do you use to put a time limit on a quote without exposing yourself to pressure? Let's say it is two weeks before the end of the quarter. You want to get a sale before the end of the quarter. What methods do you find effective to get the PO in the time you need it? I find that discounting does not contribute to that and that I am not able to back up from the discount even after the time limit. In other words, the discount is gone forever, even if the Purchase Order was not submitted on time. Please assume the customer is ready to decide, that is all other conditions for the purchase are already met.

(Geoff's answer) "You did the right thing by not further lowering the price. But you have to determine how the prospect perceives that your solution will either help him or her make money, or stop losing money. 99% of the time, companies buy for these reasons. This is always best done early in the sales process, but you can still do it now. Call the prospect and ask, and then try to quantify it. For example, let's say the prospect tells you that she will be using your solution to get her product to market faster. You can then ask how much faster she perceives your product will get it to market. Once you find that out, ask how much revenue is projected for that product in the next 12 months. Once you get that figure, divide by 52 (weeks), and you will know how much his or her company is losing based on lost opportunity costs, per week. Then you can tell her that for each week the decision is delayed, his or her company will be losing that much money. Those are real numbers, based on what she just told you, and you've given her a compelling reason to get the PO to you now. In addition, you'll have given her a good, financially sound argument she may have to take to her CFO. I've probably got a dozen examples of how to build an ROI model like this, but this one's one of the most common (for more on "Selling by ROI," read my whitepaper).

"This technique works equally well if your target company is building an external project (for use by their customers) or an internal project (for use by themselves). Ultimately, people buy solutions because they make financial sense, and sometimes the finances are based on projections. But you do have to ask what their thoughts are as to how the implementation of your solution will pass muster on both the technology and the financial sides of the fence. It sounds like you've won the technology battle. Now you've got to tackle the financial element."

(Back in the present again) The technique of drilling down on the financial reasons people perceive a need for your solution is critical to accelerating the sales process, and it's most effective when you're early in the sales cycle (I encourage you to do it on the very first call) because the prospect is not yet in price negotiation mode, and much of the time will be fairly comfortable giving you some hard numbers. Add this technique to your Best Practices Playbook, and you'll be getting those POs in a lot faster, and with less resistance.