{"id":342,"date":"2006-10-05T10:15:43","date_gmt":"2006-10-05T15:15:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/?p=342"},"modified":"2006-10-05T10:16:03","modified_gmt":"2006-10-05T15:16:03","slug":"absentee-sales-management","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/2006\/10\/absentee-sales-management\/","title":{"rendered":"Absentee Sales Management"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Imagine your goal is to lose weight so you sign up for a 1 year membership to one of the large health clubs in town. You pay the steep initial fee and the monthly amount. In the first 6 months, you go to the club and workout a total of 5 times for 30 minutes each time. Suffice to say, you have not lost the weight you expected to lose. In fact, you have actually put on 5 pounds in those 6 months.<\/p>\n<p>You could call the club and complain that you have not lost the weight you had intended to lose. They will probably pull up a record of your visits and mention that you have only visited the club 5 times in 6 months. They might also mention that all of the equipment is there in the club for you to use. They might also mention that they are open 24\/7. At this point, you would have difficulty looking externally for an excuse.<\/p>\n<p>Now let&#8217;s apply a similar situation to a sales manager. Suppose they spend their time working on their own accounts, sitting through management meetings and meeting with their own team once a week. If a new salesperson, with many skills and talents, joins the team and does not perform well, one place we have to look is the sales manager.<\/p>\n<p>Many sales managers prefer to hire salespeople with experience in their industry or market. I am convinced that one of the major reasons for this approach is that the sales manager believes they will not have to spend as much time training this experienced salesperson. This approach would work if every competitor approached the market in the exact way (same value proposition, market niche, product\/service offering, etc.).<\/p>\n<p>Obviously they do not. A strong salesperson with direct industry experience still needs <a href=\"http:\/\/www.selectmetrix.com\/Coaching_Sales.html\" target=\"_blank\">consistent interaction<\/a> with their sales manager. I don&#8217;t think sales managers consciously decide to ignore new salespeople, but I do believe they underestimate the amount of time needed to properly ramp a new salesperson into high performance. Much like the health club, successful sales management requires frequent, consistent work with each member of the sales team.<\/p>\n<p>Sales managers have to be a motivator, a coach, a disciplinarian, a guide, a psychologist, a sales star, a communicator&#8230;I could keep going, but you get the point.<\/p>\n<p>The one thing they <strong>cannot<\/strong> be &#8211; absent from involvement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Imagine your goal is to lose weight so you sign up for a 1 year membership to one of the large health clubs in town. You pay the steep initial fee and the monthly amount. In the first 6 months, you go to the club and workout a total of 5 times for 30 minutes each time. Suffice to say, you have not lost the weight you expected to lose. In fact, you have actually put on 5 pounds in those 6 months. You could call the club and complain that you have not lost the weight you had intended to lose. They will probably pull up a record of&hellip; <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/2006\/10\/absentee-sales-management\/\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"","bgseo_robots_follow":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hiring-salespeople","category-sales-management"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5Oho-5w","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2466,"url":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/2010\/12\/the-presidents-club\/","url_meta":{"origin":342,"position":0},"title":"The President&rsquo;s Club","author":"Derrick Moe","date":"December 15, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"This is a funny story from Yahoo: The company that makes Hot Tamales candy offered its sales team an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii if it met its annual goals, and a trip to the nation's arctic tundra if it didn't. The Just Born team did not meet its target and,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Sales Management&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Sales Management","link":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/category\/sales-management\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":143,"url":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/2006\/06\/getting-rid-of-the-dead-weight\/","url_meta":{"origin":342,"position":1},"title":"Getting Rid of the Dead Weight","author":"Derrick Moe","date":"June 28, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"We see many sales teams that have a handful of under performing salespeople on the team. Often, the sales manager rationalizes something to the effect of a warm body is better than no body. I don't subscribe to that thinking and neither does Jack Welch as you can see in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Sales Management&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Sales Management","link":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/category\/sales-management\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1066,"url":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/2007\/07\/new-article-setting-a-sales-dept-foundation\/","url_meta":{"origin":342,"position":2},"title":"New Article &#8211; Setting A Sales Dept. Foundation","author":"Derrick Moe","date":"July 12, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"The Independence Day week must of got the best of me since I forgot to mention an article we released.\u00a0 The Foundation of Expectations is the first article in a 3 part series regarding proactive sales management. The hiring tension that is building within our economy means that retaining strong\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Articles&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Articles","link":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/category\/website\/articles\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":711,"url":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/2007\/03\/communicating-your-sales-strategy\/","url_meta":{"origin":342,"position":3},"title":"Communicating Your Sales Strategy","author":"Derrick Moe","date":"March 1, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"From Managesmarter.com's Crystal Clear Communication: To hear Scott Glatstein tell it, as much as three quarters of American companies \"do not broadly communicate their sales strategy\" to their sales teams. The result, not surprisingly, is a breakdown in the sales process. Aligning the sales compensation plan with the desired business\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Compensation&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Compensation","link":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/category\/compensation\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1115,"url":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/2007\/08\/more-regarding-proactive-sales-management\/","url_meta":{"origin":342,"position":4},"title":"More Regarding Proactive Sales Management","author":"Mike Cardinal","date":"August 7, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"The first two parts of our series on proactive sales management have been focused on foundation and structure. An experience about a year ago, sums up the crux of the problem - and the eventual fallout. Depending on the sales scenario, product knowledge can be a foundational item that should\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Sales Management&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Sales Management","link":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/category\/sales-management\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1634,"url":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/2008\/06\/subtle-hiring-tells\/","url_meta":{"origin":342,"position":5},"title":"Subtle Hiring Tells","author":"Derrick Moe","date":"June 26, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm thinking of the poker colloquialism \"tell.\"\u00a0 From Wikipedia: A tell in poker is a detectable change in a player's behavior or demeanor that gives clues to that player's assessment of his hand. A player gains an advantage if he observes and understands the meaning of another player's tell, particularly\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Sales Management&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Sales Management","link":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/category\/sales-management\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<!-- WP Super Cache is installed but broken. 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