Seven Sales Managers, Part 2: Coach, Tool, Bro, Leader
Survive, adapt, and thrive no matter who is the boss
[This is Part 2 of 2 in this series. Click here for Part 1]
In our last article, we discussed why Salespeople often have difficulty transitioning to Sales Manager Roles. We also introduced the Tyrant, Teacher, and Closer Sales Managers. This article presents the Coach, Tool, Bro, and Leader Managers.
The Coach
Once you have some experience in sales, the Coach is usually the best manager for you. Coaches, like Teachers, are great at assessing where you are in your development. Unlike Teachers, Coaches are more targeted, strategic and are not there to train you on the basics. Instead, Coaches help take your current performance to the next level.
The best coaches
Understand that a new person in an organization or team needs to be set up for success and provides a thoughtful territory that can deliver a quick ramp to performance.
Can balance the needs of all team members to ensure they have the right resources, development opportunity, and quota to succeed.
Coaches you proactively (to get you ready to excel) and retrospectively to improve (when she sees something that is off target.)
Have strong strategic insights into salespeople and understand where to focus, push, or pull to get you to be better.
Ensures fairness on the playing field with quotas and territories - taking the burden off reps where needed to ensure long term team health of the team if necessary.
Stands up to management when needed.
Holds salespeople accountable for delivering performance, improvement, and making sales commitments.
Grant was my manager mid-way through my sales career. Our initial interviews consisted of him asking lots of questions about how I’d approach my territory, should he hire me. He assessed my knowledge, process, and domain experience areas. Grant had me develop a 90 day plan as part of my interview process.
When I joined, he’d carefully selected a mix of accounts that included new, partially developed, and later stage accounts so I would quickly learn the sales process at that company through opportunities in all stages, simultaneously. This saved an enormous amount of time in getting me competent within his organization.
Grant worked closely with me, initially checking in a couple of times a day to make sure I was on target with my plan, dialing touches back as I took wing. He advised me how to navigate my new company, so I’d learn fast. Because of his thoughtful setup and coaching, I had good success and learned the sales process quickly there. Grant was a great coach and I could easily see why his teams have had great performance and enjoy working for him.
Coaches provide the strategic information and guidance you need to take you from where you are to where you need to go. I wish that you will have many Coach Managers later in your career. And that you’ll look for them when you are interviewing for your next role.
The Tool and the ToolMaster
I’d been invited to apply for a front line manager role at a company where I’d had years of success as an individual contributor. Since I’d been a manager in the past and the role interested me I applied. Interviewing with the hiring manager, Todd was enlightening. He asked very few question about my management experience and approach to management. Instead, he spent our time vetting how I would feel about implementing his processes and playbooks with what would become my team. How did I feel about complying? He detailed the playbooks he had built, working for another company and how he was going to implement all of them with all of his managers. He explained how these playbooks had to be executed faithfully to achieve their desired effect. He described the exact criteria he expected me to use to manage my team.
I felt quite uneasy. To me, it seemed that Todd was looking for enforcers, Tools, to execute his wishes, not thinking sales managers. After the interview I did a little research. I learned he’d left his previous company after it had declined precipitously, presumably at least in part as a result of Todd’s management. Wait, Todd was going to bring that here? Worse, his previous industry was completely different from ours. He had sold hardware. We sold software services. Different budgets, buying cycles, buyers.
I graciously withdrew from consideration for the role and thereafter left the company as quickly as I could — before he and his methods could demolish my earning power.
Todd was a ToolMaster and he was looking for Tools: mindless, hard nose, formulaic drivers — people to be used as literally a tool for someone else.
Tools are famous for rolling things out. One size fits all. Playbooks, processes, quick, sharp, snappy-sounding “solutions” to complex sales organization selling and scaling problems.
“This worked great for me / my last team. Everyone here will do the exactly same thing going forward.”
Hard and fast rules that don’t recognize reality — rules that end up doing harmful things to great people and great organizations. Tools and ToolMasters also require 100% compliance with their rigid formulas and processes.
“You’ve gotta have 3 times your sales goal as opportunities in your pipeline by Q2 or you’re gone.”
(Said to a salesperson with years of above-quota performance who just closed out her largest opportunities, putting her over quota again, but now with a light pipeline. Wait, you’re going to let her go because she was so successful pushing her deals through and now her pipeline is empty? “Yep, that’s the deal.” Said the tool.)
“50 calls a day, 10 to brand new contacts. Or you’re on plan.”
(Told to a salesperson in good standing in a well established territory where a lot of other activities would be a much more productive use of time. If only the Tool took a moment to dig into that reps current situation.)
Playbooks and processes are important and useful. What gets dangerous is the unthinking rigidity exhibited by Tools in the face of complex sales environments. Tools are often hired when management is desperate because they advertise quick, simplistic answers to complicated problems without the patience to do it right.
But people, territories, books of business are not all the same. Treating them this way is a recipe for disaster. Tools may for a time dazzle management but almost always, in the end, harm organizations and drive out great salespeople, who always have other options.
ToolMasters are senior Tools: sales leaders like Todd who convince senior executives that their one-size-fits-all approach is exactly what needs to be applied to bring success and victory to the entire sales organization.
I’ve often seen Tools and ToolMasters talk themselves into manager and manager of manager roles, usually in companies that are experiencing some type of sales trouble. They advertise that they have all the answers and often look like a savior to a company in trouble. But I’ve never seen a Tool or ToolMaster succeed. They never seem to learn the wisdom H.L. Mencken shared years ago.
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
-H.L. Mencken
Instead, when a Tool runs the show, everyone who works for him starts playing games. People understand that all the nonsense the Tool is asking them to do just doesn’t make sense. So they begin to adapt, to survive.
You want 3X pipeline by next Tuesday? Sure. Reps will invent some big opportunities with way-out-in-the-future close dates. You’ll look brilliant with senior management until those vaporous opportunities never happen.
You want 50 calls a day? No problem! Reps will bang those (exceedingly low value) calls out. Look at all those calls! Management will love the numbers — until everyone sits around wondering why the sales aren’t coming in.
Eventually, though, all those chickens come home to roost. Then the Tools really start firing people. Your only hope is that the Tools get fired before you do. In the end, the company ends up in worse shape. The Tool’s processes will also corrupt all the sales productivity and forecasting data -- creating loads of successful sounding bogus activities and overstated opportunities that won’t bring in a dollar extra of sales.
When you find yourself working for a Tool, if you choose to stay, you’re going to have to decide how much to appease their process and activity demands while simultaneously doing the things that will actually build your book of business. This strategy is similar to what would you do under the Tyrant, but the problem is that Tools’ playbooks, processes, procedures can be much more controlling, invasive, and consuming of your time — so much so that leaving is often actually a better strategy.
Consider a move to a different group, company, or simply switch roles in your current company. Because if a Tool is directing your every action, you’re probably not going to be able to build a viable book of business. Plus you’ll be miserable.
The Bro
My manager, Trent, came bouncing into my cubicle
“Duuude! [fist bump] How’s it going? Just checking in to see how my fave rep is today?”
Well, I very well knew I wasn’t Trent’s fave rep. I was the new guy there and Trent had to know that I was struggling like the dickens to get my feet on the ground. Trent had been a salesperson at the company for years and was promoted to a sales manager role shortly before I came aboard. Unfortunately, he was not prepared to be a manager. Trent wasn’t able to exert enough authority with his former peers (now his employees) to carve out a discrete territory for me. He’d been close friends with all the other reps before he was promoted and Trent was simply unable to resist his friends’ requests to retain their previous accounts. So Trent pretty much hired me, gave me a quota, gave me a territory in name, but let his buddies keep all their accounts that were in my territory. This left me in a terrible spot — responsible for quota in a territory I nominally owned but had no control over. It took many months to work through this nightmare.
Trent was the Bro who just couldn’t say no to his buddies.
The Bro wants to be your friend. In fact, he probably was your friend before he got promoted. Bro Managers form when they struggle with the transition from friend to manager. The Bro continues to put the cheerful face of “friend” on while desperately trying to figure out what it means to be responsible for managing former peers.
The Bro Manager is particularly uncomfortable because deep down both he and the employee know that their roles have changed, but the manager is still acting as if you were a co-worker pal. There can be a strong passive aggressive aspect to the relationship, where expectations (on the manager’s part) and needs (on the part of the employee) go unexpressed or indirectly expressed at best. (“Hey, I can’t ask my pal to do that/provide that, can I?”)
In a more healthy manager/employee role, the manager will sit down and describe expectations, what she is doing to support the employee, and help to plan going forward. Good managers will also learn where their employees need help and motivation and work with them to achieve those. In a healthy situation, employees can express needs and make commitments knowing their manager will treat them fairly and not second-guess where they stand among the Bro’s friends.
But a Bro Manager still wants to be your friend and is afraid to have that kind of dialogue with you. So everything is sunshine and roses — to your face — and you never get the kind of gritty, practical blocking and tacking that a good manager can provide. You’re left with the sense that that behind the Bro manager’s ever-present smile that something isn’t quite going right. The smile even looks disconnected from the emotions the manager is feeling. It can be downright creepy.
So if you find you’re working for a Bro manager, you have to be the adult in the room. It’s kind of weird, but you’re going to have to be the one having the hard conversations with yourself, just with Bro in the room.
Meet with your Bro manager
Get granular. “Let’s walk through at the territory, the accounts, opportunities, and the actions I’m going to be taking.” Enumerate what you can and cannot do with the current lay of the land and be prepared to make recommendations. That will let him see the effect of favoritism for his buddies on you and avoid glossing over the gritty effects they have on you. Follow up these meetings with a written summary that you email.
Project the future. “Here is where I see this going without something changing. Is that where you want this to go?” Often a Bro is afraid to make tough decisions because they impact the feelings of his friends. By you projecting where the current status quo will lead, you can let the Bro manager think hard about the future he is creating.
Become one of her buddies. “When in Rome do as Romans do.” Often Bro managers take years to get better, if they do so at all. An effective coping strategy is to become one of the buddies — the people she wants to protect. Then you can be on slightly more equal footing in the jockeying that ensues where Bro’s buddies all lobby for their desired outcomes at your expense.
Punt. Find another manager to work for. At times, you can transfer to another group with better leader or, worst case, leave for a different organization.
The Leader
You’ll most often find a Leader as a Manager of Managers or running the sales organization. There is no guarantee your manager’s boss will be a leader. But when you find a Leader in that senior role, odds are the sales organization is a good one and the Managers there will be Coaches or Teachers.
Leaders
Inspire— driving you to feel great about being at the company.
Ground themselves in and connect to the business — the best leaders understand the reality of why customers buy, what real sales processes look like, and how long things take.
Often drop in on sales calls to remain connected. They walk the walk and talk the talk.
Expect excellent performance from their sales managers to support the healthy growth of the organization.
Attract, promote, and train great Managers. (Hopefully lots of Coaches, Teachers, some Closers)
Are willing to say “no” to anyone who needs to hear it.
Because Leaders won’t be your direct boss when you’re hired, why do I bring them up here? Well, because you should be looking for Leaders when you are interviewing with an organization. If the company you’re interviewing has a Leader at the helm, you’re likely to have a good Manager. The Leader builds the sales culture you’ll be inhabiting. So be sure to ask to talk to your boss’ boss when you’re applying. If you find that your Manager’s Manager is not much of a leader, well, that tells you something pretty darned important.
And best of luck as you assess and navigate your manager. Remember, no matter which type of Manager you have now, it will likely change soon. Sales is volatile and you’ll end up working for all of these folks if you hang around long enough.
You’re responsible for ensuring you have a great career, no matter if you have the Dali Lama or Attila the Hun as your Manager, understand who you’re working for, develop your strategy for success, and realize it will change with each new manager you have.