Fire Your Sales Manager

Try to shake this image!!

This article is for ambitious salespeople who have an inkling that their sales manager is not fit for purpose because they aren’t helping you evolve or meet your full potential. And for owners/revenue leaders who realise that their sales manager is probably the biggest obstacle to growth.

Sales Managers have 5 critical functions. If your manager is not executing well on these 5, fire them.

1. Hire the best people
2. Get the best out of them
3. Make sure you have the tools and resources you need to do your best work every day
4. Help you clear the path of road blocks and protect you from acts of idiocy from above (your senior leadership team)
5. Manage inclusively

If you are one of the senior idiots who has hired a manager who is failing in any one of these 5 critical areas, consider firing yourself or at least find someone who knows what they hell they are doing to take care of this critical part of your business. And if you are creating irresponsible demands on your salespeople’s time (producing reports, pointless meetings, driving meaningless activity metrics etc) that are taking them away from:

a. Prospecting

b. Time in front of the customer

c. Developing their capability

… then consider removing yourself entirely from any involvement in sales (or marketing, or customer success, or account growth). You have no business starving your business of revenue potential. You have no business creating obstacles to your salespeople servicing your customers to ensure they achieve the outcomes they paid for when they bought your product or service. And you certainly have no business taking your manager’s attention away from their 5 core functions. My suggestion is a strong laxative or a quick swallow of hemlock.

Managers are the single greatest point of leverage you have in your sales operation. But most are spending their life as spreadsheet jockeys, bullies and narcissists, or drowning since you never prepared them for the reality that is sales management.

Hiring The Best People … Is Hard

Recruitment is not an inconvenience. It is not an interruption to the managers’ day job. It is every managers’ most important role. Hire excellently and 95% of your management problems disappear. Hire excellently and you can spend your time looking for more excellent people to build your bench so that when you do hire, you hire the best fro the entire market, not the best compromise candidate from those available when you have a vacancy.

Hiring well is a rare competency.

Most managers hire reactively, and hire in their own image. … only weaker.

Hiring well is difficult work. Few managers are trained to hire, let alone hire well. Most take a cut & paste job description from the previous incumbent (who they probably fired or left before they could get fired), speak to a few recruiters or run a dreadful advert that appeals only to people who need a job, not to those who don’t need a job because they are already succeeding in their current role.

Before you write another bad job advert, design the successful candidate hiring template. What are the non-negotiable qualities? What are the red flags? What are the habitual behaviours that this person needs to bring with them to succeed in the post? What are the predictors of success in terms of their motivators (attitudes, beliefs and values) and their ability to adapt and learn?

Job Adverts Should Sell The Job To Happy, Successful Candidates

Once you’ve designed the ideal candidate get help writing the job advert. This course is excellent, simple and delivers the goods — https://www.copywritingforrecruiters.com/

Job adverts need to sell the job to candidates who are NOT looking for a new job, and are doing well. What is it about your job that will make them think, “That is my next job. I can see the value to me even though I love my current job and am knocking the ball out of the park. I want that job in that company. It sounds like an amazing role in a great company where I will thrive”? A job advert should talk about your company and your products/services only AFTER it has sold them on what is in it for them.

Stop With The Gestapo Interrogation

Interviewing is not an interview as most of you think it is. Being a candidate is not a passive act where you are asked questions, which you answer, then you are asked more questions which you answer. And at the end you are invited to ask any questions and you ask bland, vanilla questions about the package or work conditions. A sales candidate who passively accepts your bland, predictable, unimaginitive questions about their experience, their skills and historical results should be respectfully told they are not suitable for the role. A manager who conducts such an interview needs training and coaching to learn how to hire well and is NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE.

A worthwhile interview is a two way discovery where both sides establish if there is a good fit and discover if the candidate will succeed, thrive and evolve in the role. Sadly, most interviews for sales roles involve a couple of meaningless interrogations where the manager guesses, based on gut feel and irrelevant blatherings about past experience, and the decision ends on whether the manager likes the candidate. This kind of interview is wasteful in the extreme and should be treated as an act of gross incompetence on the part of the manager.

You are about to spend the price of a small mortgage hiring this person who will represent your business to customers. Bad hiring should be a disciplinary offence. Repeated bad hiring should be an act of gross misconduct. If you doubt me, read this article on the true cost of a wrong hire. Run the calculations using your own numbers. If you finish that exercise without a knot in your stomach and tears in your eyes, you’ve either been in denial or you are exceptional and I want to speak to you about joining one of my teams.

An Interview Is A Sale

Both sides need to prepare, do their research and rehearse. The candidate needs to demonstrate that they can sell. So have them sell to you. Have them do a full discovery process to understand the outcomes you need the candidate to deliver and establish if they are the best person for the job. Experience what it is like to buy from them. Do you want them representing your company? Can you see them on your team 3 years, 5 years, 10 years in the future? Do they play nicely with others? Can they drive discretionary effort from your own team, within the customer, from partners, even from competitors? Do they have great story telling ability? Do they have a high level of self-awareness and empathy? Do you find yourself closing yourself and invite them to the next stage of the interview process?

I digress. Sorry. Let’s get back on track … Getting the best from their salespeople.

How Do You Get The Best From The Great People You Hire?

You do so by understanding and caring about them as human beings, not by treating them as a utility to be burned through and exploited. If you have a manager who hasn’t had the decency to learn from you what you want your career in sales to give you in life, chances are you have a manager who isn’t fit for purpose. If they don’t understand what you need help with, how can they possibly coach you, help you grow.

Why You MUST Fire Your Manager

Odds are they are beating their chest and pounding the table telling you that you need to make more calls, do more demos, send out more proposals without actually helping you get better at your job. If you have one of these arseholes, fire them. There are PLENTY of sales jobs out there for decent salespeople who want to learn. Find one. Find one with a decent manager who wants you to be successful and will SERVE YOU because they understand their success is tied to your success.

Own Your Shit

Your responsibility is not to make excuses but to take FULL responsibility for where you find yourself, for every one of your outcomes, for your results and to be open to learning. Make sure you are reflecting on what worked, what didn’t and the lessons your customers are offering you every day. Capture them IN WRITING. Work out what isn’t working and try at least 3 ways of fixing your problem for yourself. Only once you have done that, go to your manager and tell them what you’ve tried that didn’t work, and then ask them to help you WORK OUT FOR YOURSELF how to fix the problem. That is called coaching.

Sales Proctology

Managers who coach each salesperson for on average 3–3.5 hours per month have a quota attainment of 105%. “Managers” who coach less than this achieve average quota attainment of 40–60%. They are not managers. they are pretenders filling time before they get fired. Check out this article if you have questions about your sales culture, your manager or your sales leadership. It pulls no punches.

If it reflects what you are experiencing send an anonymous message with the link to your managers and leadership team. Fire your shit manager as soon as possible. Get another job in a company where they value you as a human being and want you to succeed. Working in a boiler room is not a good apprenticeship for a career in professional sales. Glengarry Glenross, Boiler Room and the Wolf of Wall Street are great dramas, not great films about sales. They glorify arseholes, bullies, narcissists, and swindlers.

Add This To Your Reading List, and Then Read It & Apply It

Read a great book called Horse Sense by Jack Trout and Al Reis. Apply it in your career. But for God’s sake, fire the idiot who is pretending to be a manager and is sucking your soul dry. Do it TODAY. If you want help, I am open to mentoring young salespeople. I know hundreds of other great sales leaders who are too. I can’t help all of you but I will do whatever I can to help you. And you can join Sales: A Force For Good, which is a global community set up to help your generation break free of the chains of bullies, the idiots, the greedy, self serving bastards to who treat you like you are expendable, that you don’t matter and that you are there to be exploited for their selfish gain. We are making all the lessons and resources we develop freely available forever to members of #SAFFG. Our goal is make sales an aspirational career and create the conditions for your generation to thrive without ever having to lie to a customer. put them under pressure to buy so you can make your quota, or bribe them into buying so you can keep your job for another excruciating month.

A Genuine Offer To Help

My email is marcus@laughs-last.com. Send me a message that makes me want to respond. Don’t be a fucking victim. Own your situation. Own your decisions and tell me why you are in sales in a way that makes me feel like you are worth helping. Explain to me why you live to sell, not why you sell to live. I have very little spare time but I love helping young, up and coming salespeople who want to reach their full potential, who are seeking to reach new heights and love to serve their customers. Convince me you are the one person I should mentor next and will do everything in my power to help you. I have very rigorous terms. No charge. But the price is heavy and non-negotiable.

Clearing The Path & Protecting You From Acts Of Idiocy From Above

I’ll say only this. Your manager should come to work ready to be fired every day to protect you from your idiotic senior management. Is s/he’s not, s/he’s not doing his or her job. Clearing the path is helping you see ways around, over, under or through your problems. That comes back to every great manager’s superpower coaching.

Giving You Your Voice

Managing inclusively means managers need to encourage everyone on the team to have a voice, realise their opinion matters. Great managers hire people who are better than themselves. Managers don’t need to be great salespeople despite what idiotic senior managers often think. They need to be great at getting the best out of other people and their soul must be fed by seeing others succeed.

Your opinion matters. It doesn’t mean everything you say matters. It does mean that you can contribute, MUST contribute.

Right, rant over.

You know what to do.

If you own or run a tech company in the £10–50m revenue range and you want to have a chat with me about where you’re leaving money on the table and you want to scale up without spending a fortune in wasted marketing or taking on an army of additional staff in marketing, sales, channels, customer success or account management, drop me a line at marcus@laughs-last.com, DM me on LinkedIn.

Please visit https://linktr.ee/marcuscauchi to check out my 350+ podcast interviews and schedule a 15 minute Zoom call.

I’m always looking for talented salespeople, sales managers, channel managers and customer success folks.

I’m also looking for strategic partners. If you sell into tech scale ups in the region of £10–50m in revenues, let’s have a chat