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Effective sales team management can be challenging because there are vast opportunities for missteps and a minefield for businesses, especially when you try to scale.
But what do you need to know about this critical driver of revenue?
Stay tuned to this episode because Hanna Hasl-Kelchner sits with Rex Knechtly, the founder of First Avenue Advisors, to share his insights on what you need to know about having effective sales team management.
Rex has built several successful sales teams, turned around struggling organizations, and led multiple cultural changes. Hit that play button now to hear more buckets of wisdom from Rex!
What You’ll Discover About Effective Sales Team Management
- What makes someone effective at sales team management
- A newly minted sales leader’s biggest challenge in transitioning into leadership and achieving effective sales team management
- The biggest upfront issue in implementing effective sales team management between the salesforce versus the sales team
- How a sales force or sales team impact training and coaching for more effective sales team management
- What can the Senior Management do to help their sales manager be more effective in their sales team management
About Rex Knechtly
Rex has built several highly successful sales teams, turned around three struggling organizations and led multiple cultural changes. He has averaged 22.3% annual organic revenue growth over 25 years of sales and marketing leadership. His experience in the US, Europe and Asia covers a succession of roles including managing territories, reviving a national accounts program, building an international SBU, and leading global sales organizations for two different billion dollar companies.
Equally effective in commodities, specialties and custom offerings, Rex has led direct, indirect, domestic and global sales and marketing. Additionally, he has led and grown R&D, customer service, application engineering, customer satisfaction and retention and technical service efforts. Rex finds the key to sustainable revenue generation is a healthy balance of Domain knowledge and Enabling skills.
In 2006 Rex created First Avenue Advisors, an industry agnostic professional service firm based on process discipline and the belief that ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary outcomes when they know how, why and on what to focus. The firm enables middle market and lower market businesses to increase organic revenue and retention. Clients are generally pre or post ownership change transaction involving entrepreneurs and private equity firms.
Rex holds a double major Bachelor of Science degree in business from The Ohio State University and has completed executive education at Harvard, Wharton, Michigan, UCLA, Covey and Critical Thinking Institute.
Related Resources
If you liked this interview, you can hear more of Rex’s tips and strategies in his earlier Business Confidential Now interview: How to be the Rock Star of Sustainable Sales Growth.
You might also enjoy these Sales episodes featuring other sales experts.
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Everything You Need To Know About Effective Sales Team Management With Rex Knechtly
Effective sales team management can be challenging, filled with opportunities for missteps, and a minefield for businesses, especially those who are trying to scale. What do business owners and C-suite decision-makers need to know about this critical driver of revenue? In a moment, we will find out.
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Welcome to Business Confidential Now, the show for smart executives, managers and entrepreneurs looking to improve business performance and their bottom line. I’m your host, Hannah Hassl-Kelchner. I’m excited to welcome Rex Knechtly back to the show. Rex is the Founder of First Avenue Advisors, an industry-agnostic professional service firm based on process discipline and the belief that ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary outcomes when they know how, why, and what to focus on. He enables middle-market and lower-market businesses to increase organic revenue and retention.
The last time he joined us, we talked about how to be a rockstar in sustainable business growth. It’s one thing to be a rockstar and quite another to build a successful team of rockstars. He has built several successful sales teams, turned around struggling organizations, and led multiple cultural changes. He has averaged 22.3% annual organic growth over 25 years of sales and marketing leadership. I’m very interested in his experience and perspective on effective sales team management. Welcome, Rex.
Thank you, Hanna. This is exciting for me. It’s certainly one of my favorite topics and you’re one of my favorite people to talk with. We’re going to have a good time together.
I know so, or you wouldn’t be here. Let’s put it that way.
I would be off selling something.
Lots of times, there’s a star salesperson. They get promoted into a VP position because they’re so good at selling but leading a team of sales professionals is a different animal. In your experience, I’m curious about what makes someone effective at sales team management besides steadily increasing the bottom line. Those are the results we’re looking for. What characteristics does somebody need to bring to that role besides being a stellar salesperson?
That’s a great question and one that’s not answered all that effectively in the real world, from my experience. A lot of people will look within their organization and say, “That guy or that girl is a great seller. The customers love her or him. The numbers are great. We need a sales manager, a sales leader, or a sales VP. Let’s promote them.” Everybody knows that’s done and not the most effective.
What I have done in the past is figure out some things that have worked for me, and I’m assuming that they would work for most people to give it a try. We will talk about those. If you ask me the question, “What makes someone effective at sales team management?” the first question I ask myself and then ask them is, “Can you teach it? Do you want to teach it?”
You would be surprised how many people who are up for promotion and love to ego-trip aren’t interested in teaching it because they don’t understand everything about their success. Many of them don’t want to teach it because they like what they do. They don’t want to let anybody else down. They don’t know how to get out of it.
Is the biggest challenge you find that a newly minted sales leader faces being able to let go and make that transition into leadership? Is there more to it?
There’s much more. It depends on the individual on which one is the biggest. We will call them failure points and things that can certainly be corrected. This is pervasive. One of the biggest is, “Does the organization and then the individual taking on the role understand that they have a sales team? Do they have a sales force?” You may think that they’re fungible terms. You may think that they’re synonymous.
Let me tell you my perspective. A sales team shares a common goal. They’re team members. They help each other. They have complementary strengths. Sometimes you hire based on other people’s weaknesses. They often get rewarded collectively. That’s a sales team. Quite often, it’s bigger than salespeople. It also includes customer service or tech service and that kind of thing. You have a sales team that works independently. You lead for interdependence.
Contrast that with a sales force or a group of individual contributors. They’re rewarded for their performance. All selling behavior is independent. You can think about car dealerships and even very large software companies. As a leader or a manager here, you want to manage the eventualities to enable individual success, not necessarily team success.
Normally, in a team scenario, you spend more time protecting the organization because the people, individuals, and sellers you have on a sales force are individual contributors. They get rewarded for their performance. They’re more interested in their performance and success than they are. I’m not saying they would do anything nefarious toward their company, but they’re not as interested in protecting their company.
In a team scenario, you spend more time protecting the organization because the people, the individuals, the sellers that you have on a sales force, and again, they're individual contributors and get rewarded for their performance. Click To Tweet
That is left up to someone else. To me, those are two big scenarios that people may or may not be aware of. Quite frankly, they try to mush the two together. It’s like anything else. You’re going to get the worst of all worlds as opposed to the best of all worlds if you’re not clear on this, either as senior management or as the individual that has taken on the role.
That’s an important fork in the road. I’m glad that you raised that. In which category would independent reps fall?
Independent reps would be on a sales force. That would be car dealerships. I know a car dealer that changed from that. They’re quite successful. They have a sales team now, not a sales force. Most car dealerships, software companies, and large computer companies, anytime the infrastructure is set up in such a way that they need to move products or services, want to hire highly-skilled salespeople that are not interdependent. They are independent. They’re fungible. They come and go. You’re hiring skill. If they stick with you for a while, that’s great. If they come and go, you might have to expect that. A sales team is more nurturing and interdependent. You find that sales teams stick together longer with each other and stay with the organization longer.
Is one better than another?
No. What is required is to understand which system you need for your business and organization. What is tragic is when you mismatch. If you have, for instance, a company or a service that would lend itself to a sales force, which would be independently hired guns as it were, and you try to make a team of interdependent individuals, you’re not going to be as successful as you could be. Quite frankly, your competitors probably are not going to make that mistake. You’re going to be outperformed in the field.
The reverse is true. This is what I see the most. There will be sales teams out there. They should be managed, led, and compensated interdependently. They try to mix that by saying, “We’re going to pay our salespeople on their performance, but we’re going to expect them to act as a team.” To some extent, you see that transition from college sports to professional sports.
In college sports, you see people acting as a team. Up until recently, they were not even compensated. They’re acting as a team. They’re interdependent. You get into the realm of professional sports. Often you will see free agents and all kinds of things going on that indicate to you that these are individual contributors that happen to play in the same organization with the same team colors.
That’s a great comparison. That helps make it crystal clear. In your consulting practice, when you’re asked to come in and evaluate a sales organization regardless of which bucket it falls in, is that what you find to be the biggest issue up front? They’re mixing and matching these two culturally incompatible types of forms between a sales force versus a sales team.
It happens honestly, for lack of a better term, because people help make these decisions on how to have an organizational structure or who to hire. Quite frankly, there’s typically senior leadership. Sometimes they’re private equity owners or a group of folks that own a company that may or may not have been in the field and understand these things. They’re making these mistakes and guiding inaccurately with the best intentions, but that’s exactly what I see.
I’ve heard the very pejorative term, “All salespeople are coin-operated.” It is pejorative but what it tells you is that person’s background. We want hired guns that understand how to sell. They take a product, whether it’s a widget, a gallon, a pound, or a service, go out, make magic happen, and sell that thing, but they aren’t part of a team. That’s what the person that would say that term is used to. They’re not necessarily ever been exposed to or at least understood what an interdependent sales team is about.
It also sounds to me like they’re strictly numbers-oriented. If it doesn’t translate immediately to the bottom line, all the magic that happens doesn’t register with them as drivers of that bottom line.
That happens in business because things are on shorter terms. If somebody buys a company, their selling window is 3 to 5 years. Back in the day, you were going to be with the company for a long time. You had time to develop interdependent teams and quite sophisticated operations for your customers.
Effective Sales Team Management: Things are on shorter terms. If somebody buys a company, their selling window is three to five years.
Whether you have a team or a sales force influences tremendously who you’re going to hire. How does it impact the training and coaching?
Getting back to the sales manager or sales leader, there are more things that they must understand. Somebody that’s going to be accountable and in charge of the selling effort needs to understand the difference between management and leadership. Management, in my humble opinion, is a response or reaction to outside events or inputs. Leadership is thoughtful proactivity based on a vision. You can have management and leadership in either one of the scenarios I spoke of earlier as a sales team or a Salesforce, but you have to be clear on what kind of organization you have and then be clear on some things like the difference between management and leadership.
There are several things. The critical success factors of anyone that’s in a leadership role or a management role are not that dissimilar to any other profession, awareness, knowledge, skill, execution, and continuous improvement. If your sales manager or sales leader has an awareness of what is going on as basic as, “Do I have a sales team scenario? Do I have a sales force scenario?” knowledge on what to do, the skill in which to do it, the ability to execute, and then continuous improvement for himself and others, whether that’s taking courses, reading books or peer reviews, spending time with other people in the same scenario, and learning from them, those are the critical success factors.
Effective Sales Team Management: If you are a sales manager, you must be aware of what is happening.
A lot of people get lost in the sauce because of the daily grind of what they must do. They’ve got this job as vice president, national sales manager, or global sales manager, and they’ve got a lot of pressure for results. Sometimes they forget. Tongue in cheek, I say, “You could never be too busy driving to stop and get gas.” Gas here is the understanding, the awareness, the knowledge of the execution, and certainly the continuous improvement.
One of the challenges of a newly minted leader or manager is this. Do they know who they are? What I mean by that is this. Do they have a brand? Do they understand it? This isn’t about me, but I can tell you what’s worked for me. I was clear on who I was. I was going to project that. It was going to be my brand with the audiences that I have in my new role or even my consulting role. My brand is authentic, transparent, consistent, and has no surprises, which means I tell bad news as fast as I would tell the good news. I’m highly available. This is going back 20 to 30 years. This has been consistent for me. I know this about myself. I want to project it.
When I say it’s my brand, the definition of the brand that I use is the space owned in the mind of the customer or the receiver. I want people to know that I’m authentic, transparent, consistent, with no surprises, and highly available. The reason I harp on this is a lot of times, people will get a new role and forget who they are. They try to mold themselves into what they think other people want them to be or somehow or get a drift of what worked for them before. My strong advice is to look in the mirror, talk to your spouse or some friends, and say, “I want to make sure that I know who I am and what got me here because I need this to help get me to the next level.”
That’s important for any role because sometimes you don’t appreciate how others see you. What you may think is a weakness, they think is a strength and vice versa. It’s always good to have those reality checks. I wholeheartedly endorse that.
One of the other things that I was going to mention while we’re under this large umbrella of transition from seller to sales leader or sales manager is another failure point or thing that people forget is now, they have different audiences. What do I mean by that? When they were a seller, they had two audiences. They had their boss and then they had the customer. They knew how to work with those audiences quite well and got them successful.
This is why they’re up for promotion. This is why they’re now being asked to take on a different role. With a different role comes audiences that they want to recognize and understand. They have senior management as an audience. Senior management wants results. The sales professionals that they lead are their audience. They’re no longer their peers. They’re folks that report to them and are depending on them. That’s their audience. They have customers that are their audience.
The outcomes that they’re looking for have their expectations managed. Most of the time, their expectations can be summed up in how they want things in specification on time and at a fair price. Here’s one of the failure points. Sometimes it takes a little while and sometimes, it takes a long while for people to realize that their audiences, their senior management, the sales professionals that report to them, and the customers that depend on them have changed.
That’s the perfect segue. You may not realize that, but when you talk about the different audiences, especially senior management or the business owner, now being more of a direct line to them, my question is this. What can those business owners or senior management do to help make their sales managers more successful?
That’s a great question. I certainly wish it was asked more often in boardrooms across the country. The first thing would be to listen. That sounds obvious, but many times, the question asked in the boardroom to the sales manager is, “Tell me about the numbers.” Those are important. Don’t get me wrong. They’re very important conversations. It’s happening more but not as much. The next question is, “What can we do to help?”
Typically, the answer of the sales leader or the sales manager is resource enablement. When I say enablement, I mean perhaps a sales analyst. I’m seeing more of this now where sales analysis used to be taking up a huge amount of time for the sales vice president, the sales manager, or the global salesperson. They’re hiring an individual to most likely sit in an office, crunch the numbers, and answer the questions both for senior management and the sales team or the sales force so they can make better decisions and audible calls while they’re out in the field.
Is there anything else that senior management can do to help their teams be more successful?
Understand and support whatever the sales leader has decided the organization is, whether it’s a sales team and the team members are going to be interdependent or it’s a sales force and they are going to be independent. Sales force employees are going to come and go more rapidly. The understanding is that when somebody leaves the company, it’s not that something bad is happening in the company.
If salespeople leave the company and they’re on a sales team, that probably takes a little bit more analysis to understand why than if a hired gun that’s quite frankly and appropriately out for themselves. They may jump ship for somebody that has a higher commission rate. They may jump ship for somebody that has a better scenario for them and the earning power that they have. It’s listening and understanding that all sales forces and sales teams are not created equal.
That’s fair enough. We have covered a lot. I particularly like drawing this distinction and giving us a better understanding between a sales force and a sales team and how they speak different languages when it comes to expectations, the management, and the leadership necessary to get the performance that maybe an organization is looking for. Is there anything else you would like the audience to know, especially smaller businesses that don’t have those deep resources, to hire an analyst about what they can do to be more effective in managing their sales team or a sales force?
A good salesperson is who I would hire or promote to be a great sales manager. I’m choosing my words carefully because great salespeople, and when I say great salespeople, I mean people that have great numbers and make a lot of money for themselves and their company. Great salespeople are often highly self-oriented. That’s not a bad thing. It is a fact. They are less other-oriented. Good salespeople tend to be a little more balanced, other-oriented, and maybe a little less self-oriented.
Great salespeople make a lot of money for themselves and for their company. Click To Tweet
They have what it takes, in my perspective, to be great sales managers. The three things that I look for are genuine curiosity, very well or highly organized, and enjoy helping people get what they need. If I’m promoting someone or hiring someone, I will look at what made them a good salesperson person. Without a doubt, it’s going to be that they’re genuinely curious, they’re very well organized, and they enjoy helping others get what they want.
Now that they’ve got senior leaders depending on them for sales numbers, now that they’ve got salespeople depending on them for leadership and knowledge and helping carry them through on their careers, and now that they’ve got a larger stable of customers that are requiring and demanding from them even more, the genuine curiosity, being very well organized, and enjoying others get what they need is critical and will help them be great sales managers.
We’ve got a blueprint for what to do and how to figure out where we are in the grand scheme of things. Thank you so much, Rex. I appreciate you and the important work you do in helping organizations be more prosperous by building and developing more effective sales teams or sales forces as I’ve now learned. If you would like more information about Rex Knechtly and the First Avenue Advisors, that information can be found at BusinessConfidentialRadio.com. Thanks so much for reading. Be sure to tell your friends about the show and leave a positive review. We will be back with another episode. Until then, have a great day and an even better tomorrow.
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