That is an age-old question, isn\u2019t it?\u00a0 You can insert your favorite sports example here which typically involves a superstar\/Hall of Fame-caliber athlete who fails as a coach because the game came too easy to him.\u00a0 But does this analogy work in the sales arena also?<\/p>\n
This Sales & Marketing Management article<\/a> approaches the topic with aplomb. The pull quote (emphasis mine):<\/p>\n Sometimes great salespeople aren\u2019t as good at coaching and managing other people \u2013 they\u2019re excellent at being individual contributors, they\u2019re great at building relationships with customers and working deals from start to finish, but they lack the patience or coaching ability or intangible interpersonal savvy<\/strong> to be responsible for other people\u2019s performance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Intangible interpersonal savvy is a long way to say empathy.\u00a0 In assessing sales candidates for over a decade, some patterns become evident.\u00a0 Top salespeople are typically \u201chunters.\u201d\u00a0 These hunters hopefully have some empathetic skills, but they are often used solely as tools to get to a close.\u00a0 And in so doing, the hunters will usually dial down their empathy to achieve their goal of winning the deal.\u00a0 This ability is what makes them so effective as a salesperson.\u00a0 They drive themselves to succeed and use their empathy, when needed, to simply get a read on the prospect before closing.<\/p>\n Now place that profile into a sales leadership role.\u00a0 This hunter may have some empathy, but they use it within a limited scope.\u00a0 When it comes to coaching their team, they drive on them \u2013 pushing the salespeople based on the inner drive they possess as hunters.\u00a0 Sometimes it works, most times it doesn\u2019t.\u00a0 I\u2019ve even seen other hunters push back against this leadership.<\/p>\n The author of the article offers 3 strong ideas to assist in finding the right sales leader.\u00a0 I like his summary from the first point:<\/p>\n Many of the best salespeople love to work alone \u2013 they pride themselves on being great individual performers and goal setters who hold themselves accountable for excellent results. However, sales management is not an individual job \u2013 it\u2019s all about coaching and communicating and helping other people reach their goals as part of a larger team.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Sales leaders have to work through their team.\u00a0 What often happens is that the hunter turned sales leader will accompany his or her team on sales calls and actually end up doing the close for them.\u00a0 They insert their drive into the deal since that skill is more familiar to them than the coaching skill.\u00a0 I evaluated an entire sales team once that had a hunter sales leader who behaved this way.\u00a0 The sales team learned to simply get appointments, softly qualify them, then bring in the hunter sales leader to close the deal for them.\u00a0 This is an unsustainable model as was eventually born out at this company.<\/p>\n One closing thought \u2013 you do not have to guess at this behavior \u2013 it can be assessed with our tools.<\/a>\u00a0 If you are interested, please contact us today to learn more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" That is an age-old question, isn\u2019t it?\u00a0 You can insert your favorite sports example here which typically involves a superstar\/Hall of Fame-caliber athlete who fails as a coach because the game came too easy to him.\u00a0 But does this analogy work in the sales arena also? This Sales & Marketing Management article approaches the topic with aplomb. The pull quote (emphasis mine): Sometimes great salespeople aren\u2019t as good at coaching and managing other people \u2013 they\u2019re excellent at being individual contributors, they\u2019re great at building relationships with customers and working deals from start to finish, but they lack the patience or coaching ability or intangible interpersonal savvy to be responsible… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"","bgseo_robots_follow":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[21,6,31,4,11],"tags":[1719,1415,1720,1424,1708,1718,1363],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5Oho-Ga","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2614"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2614"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2616,"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2614\/revisions\/2616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}