10 Mistakes of First Time Sales Managers

As your business grows, your sales team is likely to expand as well. Whether you're the owner or the CEO, soon, you won't have time to keep an eye on whether your pack of wild salespeople is selling or sunbathing by the pond instead of meeting. There will be more and more meetings with potential customers and you simply won’t be able to keep up. You will need a sales manager. By the way, the term “sales director” is still used within the Czech Republic and, in my opinion, it does not get along well with sales because you can direct workers, warehousepeople, but hardly salespeople. Except maybe they disrupt our sales, but then they would be highly overpaid.

I would like the following tips to help not only owners who are “training” their first sales manager, but mainly salespeople who lead their first team. As if it were yesterday that I was in the same situation. And you don’t have to repeat the same mistakes I did.

1) Being Friends with Everyone

Yes, it is fine to treat everyone decently and friendly. Generally, this stands for all people, if only everyone would follow that. However, when you lead a team of people, it doesn’t apply so much anymore. You are responsible for results and you can be sure that the attitude towards work and performance among team members won’t be anywhere near close to friendliness. The quote by the Swedish business theorist Jonas Ridderstrale applies literally here: “It is better to be someone for somebody than to be nobody for everyone.” Be a natural and friendly authority, but do not tolerate a bad job.

2) Being a “Tough Guy”

Many “do-gooder” managers fail in their roles because they think that accusing someone of making a mistake or a poor performance must be accompanied by frowns, raised voices or shouting, and an exemplar punishment. And they are afraid of these, so they just let it be. Yet the opposite, i.e., complete calmness and composure in the voice, has a much more serious and confident effect on non-performing “offenders”. A manager builds respect through this behaviour, and everyone wants to be friends with such a person in the end.

3) Micromanagement

Of course, it depends whether a manager discusses mainly strategically and tactically important things with his team, such as results of clients meetings, revisions of further planned steps, changes in purchasing behaviour in the region, and competition activities. Or deals with petty issues like “So, write exactly this to the e-mail (and then put me in the CC)”, or “You failed to send me the report until 14:00... this is the second time” etc.

4) Believing the Middle Management is VIP

It is funny how many people get the impression that they reached the sky by getting into management and that they are now a part of some sort of a VIP zone, whose members should be looked up to, should be respected automatically, and almost considered holy. The “Macho” jokes I have heard from some colleagues within this sphere are the peak of bad taste. Why am I exaggerating like that? Because this mindset is a very bad signal for every company. First and foremost, as managers, we have a responsibility; we have a privilege to lead people, and we are obligated to do it as well as we can. A model of leading people described in the book Startup Nation should also work in other places, not only in Israel. A team should have the possibility to take down a bad leader. Respectively, in today’s reality, company owners should at least find some time to ask team members whether they are satisfied with their sales manager.

TIP: As a sales manager, you can find this out by yourself as long as you ask for feedback (for more see 10 Things You Won’t Be a Leader Without).

5) Not Praising or Prasing Badly

A lot of managers and almost all Czech teachers feel they can motivate or teach someone by telling them where they did go wrong. If they had just read at least a brief article on emotional intelligence, they would have found out that the only result of this behaviour is demotivation of the evaluated, and repeating of the very same process leads to a fast loss of respect. Very simply put - you should first praise and then criticize. Feedback and praising are such a vast topic that we definitely get back to it again and again. For starters, it should be enough that before each praise or feedback, a manager should think carefully about what he/she is going to say; how will he/she say that, and when it will be said. In case you want to increase/reduce someone’s bonus, you shall not call them from your car. Assuming that you want to praise someone for a good job, you should know that there is nothing like an honest, face-to-face acknowledgement. Not even a framed diploma, not a heartfelt commendation e-mail sent to the entire company.

6) Siding with Somebody

Rule No. 1: NEVER side with somebody on your team.

Rule no. 2: ALWAYS communicate so it does not look like you SIDE with somebody.

You don’t even have to side with somebody, but it can look like you do. Why? Let’s say Frank has good results, John worse. It goes on like this for several weeks. Frank is praised; not so much John. Ultimately, it will be your fault because you keep demotivating John.

This must never happen. You always have to communicate transparently enough so the whole team knows why Frank is praised whereas with John, you discuss every step and every customer much more intensively and in detail. At the same time, John gets extra support from you, you ask him more frequently. Simply, you have to keep such a balance so nobody gets the impression you privilege someone.

7) Not Checking Reports

There is not much added value in a strict control of attendance, GPS, and the exact number of sale activities. It’s even worse if you check these inferior criteria at the expense of the important ones, such as financial results and development of the customer’s status in the CRM. These are the things you should regularly check, at least once a week, maybe a day. You should live with it and know it by heart (without learning it like a poem). Short version: As long as I do something consistently and with passion, I know it like the back of my hand. Then, a regular business meeting should not start with the question “how many meetings have you made” but “what was your biggest success this week?”.

8) Obeying Every Command from Management

Your salespeople shall have the best knowledge of the market. And you should be able to strategically use their knowledge the best you can. It is a common problem in bigger companies that management, who does not have this information (or ignores it), keeps giving commands that have zero chance of success. The sales manager, thinking it must be very well thought out (or just follows blindly), will do everything the bosses want. Actually, he/she wants to please them. In such a moment, however, he/she should come with strong arguments based on facts and numbers explaining why not to do that or redo the whole thing. He/she should not be afraid of saying: “I appreciate your support and your new plan, but assuming that you want to meet the budget this year, we are not doing this. Yet, we can use some of its parts and redo them...” A bright management wants to hear objections and will listen to your informed opinion. Don’t take it that you have to defy them. It’s just that you must not be afraid of being confident and persuasive. And the best way to do it is to know more about the issue than anybody else.

9) Drinking at a Company Party

There are many types of company parties and teambuildings. And people drink there. They even drink alcohol, sometimes even more than they can handle. That’s not your case. Every manager is responsible for results, his/her team, and reputation, and to a lot greater extent than anybody else within the company. You can say that your company is relaxed and you are a big bunch of friends. You may believe that it is not that serious in your company. Nevertheless, you can be sure that once you get drunk at a company party with your team, you lose a huge portion of their respect towards you. You must not ever get carried away, not even by your co-managers. If they don’t value their reputation enough, it’s their business. You save the “party” for your friends outside of work. And always leave the company one first.

10) Talking Too Much about Their Personal Life

Some people are more open, honest, and sharing than others. The view of what is intimate privacy and what is acceptable to the public also varies person to person. For instance, it can happen that somebody on your team shares some private, God forbid, intimate, experiences. It subconsciously makes you turn on the same honest page and contribute to the topic as well. It is necessary to be careful in the relationship between the manager and a member of his/her team. Sharing your personal, e.g. family, matters; it’s like getting drunk in front of your team. You can reveal something that may eventually turn against you. At the same time, the team may lose their inhibitions about what they can dare towards you. Your salespeople start to be cheekier. They start to test you. They will take it to mean something like as long as you have no problem talking to them about an argument with your wife, you won’t mind if they publicly send you to a place where the sun doesn’t shine. Therefore, maintain decorum. And remember, it is not your duty to respond to everything. Sometimes, silence is the best answer to saying it all.

Thus, it is hard to build a reputation; but it is possible to ruin it within an evening. Just avoid trivial mistakes and you can’t go wrong. And if you have already made some of these mistakes, don’t hang your head. Everything can be fixed. Sometimes it may take longer, but your team watches you. They are people and they know you are a person as well. When they see you are changing, working on yourself, and you care about them, they will follow and support you.