Here is a sales management question for you – in terms of coaching and developing your sales team, is it best to focus on your top performers to make them better or your bottom performers to build them up? I have recently read articles that argue from each side of this equation. It’s a good question.

My position would be to manage top-down with a focus on your top performers. The main reason I take this position is retention. I would qualify this position by assessing the top salespeople and adjusting my management style slightly to match their preferred communication, motivation and reward pattern. Simply put, some top salespeople are prima donnas and enjoy much adulation, some prefer an engaged sales manager who is involved in the selling process and others prefer to take a bit of a lone wolf approach.

I would focus on these top people and ensure that they are growing in their roles and supported in their goals. I wouldn’t say I would want to pamper them or overmanage them, but I would want to keep their path as straight and smooth as possible.

The worst scenario would be for the top performers to think they are underappreciated to the point where they leave the company for a new opportunity elsewhere. Just like your top customer is your competitor’s top prospect, in this present employment market, your top salesperson is your competitor’s top candidate.

Now, I’m not focusing on the top performers to the exclusion of the bottom dwellers. Obviously, I would spend time with them and attempt to neutralize their weaknesses and develop their natural strengths. But my priority would be to the top salespeople first.

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Lee and I had lunch with a customer of ours who is the VP of Sales for a medium-sized business.  We were discussing why candidates lie about their education, primarily stating they have earned a degree when they have not.  This information is easily confirmed so lying about it seems foolish.

We had one candidate who has been in the workforce for 30 years yet lied on his resume about earning a B.S. degree from a local university.  A degree was not a requirement for this position.  Besides, 30 years of sales experience easily trumps a degree in our world.

My only thought on this topic is that candidates must do it to get past the automated candidate software that provides first-pass filtering of respondents based on simple criteria (like a degree).  I suspect the respondent’s thought is that they will do so well in the hiring process that the lie about the degree will be disregarded.

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It is difficult to classify telecommuting as a trend – it is more than that today.  We encounter telecommuting in almost every position we source, even some where you wouldn’t expect to find it.  Managers must have the skills to be effective with their team even though they may not seem them face-to-face on a daily basis.

ManageSmarter.com offers up Talking Telecommuting which provides some excellent tool suggestions for a manager faced with a geographically-dispersed sales force.  The example company is Cisco which obviously has some powerful tools for keeping remote workers informed.  Check out this proprietary tool:

Cisco ensures it’s easy for mobile workers to find and use internal company information. It does this with help from a proprietary tool, Cisco Storybuilder, that automatically stitches together PowerPoint modules to create a complete “story.” Strict operational procedures for content freshness, and requirements for documenting notes mean remote teams can benefit from the latest content in one streamlined location. When Karl, a Cisco sales manager in Singapore, needs to prepare for a meeting, he uses Storybuilder to create a presentation. He reads up on the current talking points for his particular area without needing to chase people down in San Jose.

Wow, what I would give for that capability.

On a much more rudimentary level comes this final point from the article:

Flexibility. Mobility works best when it’s supported by a variety of mediums. Everyone has a phone and a PC, but you have to move beyond e-mail to encompass a corporate instant messaging standard and smart phones. It may seem counterintuitive to provide more forms of communication, and run the risk of employees losing focus, but it turns out employees on average wind up being more productive and responsive.

That is key – offer more forms of communication.  We are far from cutting edge in our technology, but simply using instant messaging and smart phones has been a huge benefit to our productivity.  This is a low bar to clear and almost every company can offer these capabilities.  And should.

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