Once I find a good salesperson, it seems like nobody else in the store can live with them! Sound familiar? It’s a quote from a survey conducted a few months ago asking about the biggest challenges faced by companies. I bet you’ve felt that same frustration on more than one occasion.
My advice on this always starts with an analysis of how bad the salesperson really is. I classify high-performing, self-confident salespeople into two groups:
- Driven winners, who usually can be managed pretty well; and
- Inflated egos, who can be real problems.
I’ve seen plenty of those troublesome inflated egos in my sales career. But because I’m not a psychologist, I have to confess I don’t know what (sometimes) makes the swaggering loudmouth types successful in sales, nor what keeps them from understanding how they get under the skin of everybody who works with them.
By letting such clowns hold you hostage, you risk losing the respect of the rest of your team. But don’t think you’re going to change them, either. That’s a job for a shrink, and probably a long job at that.
It might be smarter to bite the bullet and do the manager thing: If inflated egos are killing your team’s morale, cut them out. Sometimes you have to shoot the lead buffalo to turn the herd. I’ll bet the rest of your people will be so relieved that they’ll soon rise to fill any resulting sales gap.
Now let’s talk about the driven winners. There are a whole lot more driven winners than there are inflated egos. Your team may be full of them. Luckily, these people are much easier to turn into champions. You know they’ve got egos, right? And you know they want to excel, correct? So just make sure their egos get fed when they do good things and get starved (though not necessarily bruised and beaten) when they don’t.
The following are some additional suggestions:
n Work with their ego instead of against it. Create contests that require teamwork rather than one against all. Everyone will learn something from his or her teammates.
- Coach them to realize that their ego is an asset but not their most important one. Tell them they have to be confident, but true confidence requires an accurate understanding of what they can and can’t do.
- Above all, set firm expectations. Have clear and precise procedures and job descriptions. You’ll never again be held hostage to talent once the ground rules are clearly defined. I’ve helped many clients create these policies, and it always makes a big difference.
- Train, train, train. Hold regularly scheduled sales meetings, send them to seminars at least once per year, and give them a book every month and make sure they read it. If you have to, test them on it. This means you might have to read it yourself but what could be wrong with that?
- Anything that’s measured tends to grow. Measure their successes, not their failures. Then the successes will grow.
Last but certainly not least, try to remember that this issue never goes away. When you manage a team, there is no such word as mentored in the past tense. There are only mentor and mentoring, as in never ending.
