PDF Summary:Sales Management. Simplified., by Mike Weinberg

Sales expert Mike Weinberg believes that the problem in most struggling sales teams is an ineffective sales leader, not the team members. Thus, if a sales manager can learn how to lead their team effectively, overall team performance will improve.

In this guide, we’ll explore Weinberg’s techniques for successfully managing a sales team, including setting goals that push people to excel, using shadowing to identify team weaknesses, and training your people to make good sales calls. We’ll also examine a factor that Weinberg sees as crucial to managerial effectiveness: Managing your time wisely. Throughout, we’ll compare Weinberg’s ideas to those of other experts in sales and management, such as Peter Drucker, Jeffrey Gitomer, and Grant Cardone.

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3) A list of questions to ask the prospect. (Shortform note: Again, Weinberg discusses this step in more detail in New Sales. Simplified. He argues the most important questions to ask are “discovery questions” that ascertain frustrations and problems the prospect is facing. The salesperson can then suggest their product or service as a solution. This advice ties in with Weinberg’s above recommendation that salespeople should prioritize discovery over blind pitching.)

4) Knowledge of how to handle common objections. (Shortform note: In Sell Or Be Sold, Grant Cardone recommends a widely applicable objection handling technique: Ask the prospect to devise a solution to the objection herself. If she succeeds, she’ll show that the objection wasn’t too major.)

5) A post-call strategy for processing the prospect’s information: For instance, is their personal data saved or discarded? (Shortform note: Another arguably important element of post-call strategy is planning how and when to follow up with the prospect. Have they requested further contact? If so, when, and in what format (for instance, face-to-face or virtually)? If not, when might it be appropriate to follow up to generate more interest in your product or service?)

Train Your Team to Pitch

Weinberg believes that as well as training your team to make good sales calls, you should also train them in giving a strong sales pitch. He states that your team’s pitch should be a simple, short, and engrossing “story” that clearly communicates your company’s value to the customer. It shouldn’t contain too much information about your company’s history or every product or service it offers—this will bore the customer.

How to Craft a Strong Pitch

Beyond the basics that Weinberg covers, how can you craft a strong sales pitch for your team? In The Little Red Book of Selling, Jeffrey Gitomer offers the following recommendations:

• Incorporate humor into the pitch. Making customers laugh relaxes them, facilitates friendship and respect, and ultimately creates an atmosphere conducive to buying.

• Make the pitch creative to add memorability and help it stand out from competitors’ attempts. For example, start the pitch with an unexpected question like “How much does inefficiency currently cost your company?”

• Encourage your people to sell themselves as well as the product. For example, ask them to craft a short pitch about what they do and how they can help customers, and encourage them to recite this pitch at the start of each sales call. Customers won’t buy a product unless they trust and respect the salesperson.

Strategy #3: Create a Sales Strategy

Another crucial element of successful sales management, according to Weinberg, is devising and communicating a clear sales strategy for your team to follow. The strategy should highlight which customers or potential customers each team member should call, how they should prioritize these customers, and which products they should prioritize selling. Your people should primarily target the most promising customers—in other words, those who can generate the company the most revenue.

(Shortform note: Weinberg doesn’t dive deeply into the specifics of figuring out which of your possible customers are the most promising. To do this, you might analyze recent sales successes: What types of customers have been buying your product or service recently? Other customers with the same demographics may be promising leads. Alternatively (or concurrently), consider primarily targeting potential customers who already know about your company—for instance, those you or your team members have met already at conferences or networking events. Potential customers often warm up to sales efforts sooner if they feel they’re dealing with something or someone familiar.)

Consistently Review Your Strategy

Weinberg notes that once you’ve decided on and communicated your team’s strategy, you should periodically review the strategy to check it’s still generating good results. If necessary, adjust the strategy to prioritize the customers who can earn your company the greatest revenue right now—even if this means sidelining customers who’ve shown promise in the past.

How Often Should You Review Your Sales Strategy?

Weinberg doesn’t specify exactly how often you should review your sales process and strategy. Research suggests that there’s no consensus answer to this question: Among one group of surveyed sales leaders, the frequency of strategy review varied from weekly, to monthly, to quarterly, to only when a major sales deal failed.

Which timeframe you decide on may depend on the market your team operates in. If it’s a market with continually changing conditions (and thus changing customer demand), weekly or monthly recalibration may be necessary. If the market is static, a quarterly review may be sufficient.

Strategy #4: Maintain a Healthy Sales Culture

Another important element of sales management, according to Weinberg, is maintaining a healthy sales culture. Weinberg argues that a healthy sales culture is one in which salespeople feel respected, passionate, and happy in their roles. They communicate openly and respectfully with their manager and each other, and they’re willing to help out their colleagues in the pursuit of shared goals. Most importantly, he notes, salespeople in a healthy culture want to work hard and generate successful sales for the company. Thus, a healthy sales culture breeds the best sales results.

(Shortform note: Opinions on what constitutes a healthy company culture differ among authors. For instance, Rework authors David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried believe that in a healthy culture, managers don’t police employees’ every action and instead trust their people to work hard. They also argue that a healthy company culture encourages employees to have a life outside of work rather than dedicating everything they have to the company. Meanwhile, in Smarter Faster Better, Charles Duhigg argues that optimal workplace cultures encourage commitment: both employees committing fully to their employer, and the employer committing to each employee’s growth and success.)

In Weinberg’s view, to create a healthy sales culture, a sales manager must:

• Set goals and push people to achieve them
• Celebrate and reward salespeople’s high performance
• Avoid micromanaging or chasing personal glory

Let’s look at each technique in more detail.

Set Goals and Push People to Achieve Them

In Weinberg’s view, if you don’t set goals, your salespeople will be ineffective and unmotivated because they’ll have nothing to push them to work hard. Your sales culture will be one of accepted mediocrity rather than success.

(Shortform note: A key benefit of setting goals for your team, according to The One-Minute Manager, is that it's easier to monitor their performance. If your salespeople have clearly defined targets, you’ll more easily be able to spot if their work isn’t up to par. Goals also reduce the need for micromanagement: As long as your team members are working toward their goals, you’ll know they’re working on the “right” thing, so you won’t feel the need to check up on them as often.)

Hold People Accountable to Their Goals

As well as setting goals, Weinberg argues that it’s important to hold your team members accountable to those goals and enforce consequences for poor performance. Failing to do so effectively renders all team members’ goals pointless and discourages them from pushing themselves to excel—why would any salesperson work hard to achieve a goal when they know there’s no punishment for coasting? Again, mediocrity will become the norm in your team.

Furthermore, Weinberg believes that if you fail to hold poor performers accountable, you’re letting down the entire business. In his view, having a successful sales team that generates revenue is the most important element of keeping a business afloat. By tolerating poor sales performance, you’re putting the company at risk.

(Shortform note: Is having a strong sales department really the most important factor in keeping a business going? It depends on whom you ask. Each department in a business typically thinks it’s the most important—for instance, the human resources department might argue that since it’s in charge of hiring, it most directly influences the company’s success, since, without good employees, it’s hard for a business to succeed. So, Weinberg’s claim that good sales teams are the key to businesses’ success could be rooted in the fact that he’s a former salesperson.)

Holding People Accountable Effectively

In High Performance Habits, Brendon Burchard agrees that holding your people accountable is crucial to helping them achieve (and exceed) their goals. He adds that to enforce accountability successfully, you must follow two principles:

• Hold people accountable firmly, but politely. Insulting or degrading struggling team members will damage your reputation not just with these individuals, but team-wide.

• Hold yourself accountable, too. If you fail to achieve your own goals while pressuring your team members to achieve theirs, you’ll appear hypocritical and lose your team’s respect. They’ll also ignore any future attempts to hold them accountable.

Celebrate and Reward Salespeople

Weinberg believes that to create a positive sales culture where your team members feel respected and happy, you must reward and celebrate their hard work. Everyone appreciates praise—and people quickly become resentful and unhappy if they feel they’re not receiving enough positive feedback.

(Shortform note: In Dare to Lead, Brené Brown argues that publicly celebrating success is crucial to maintaining an effective team. If you don’t celebrate your team members’ wins, they’ll burn out and disengage from their work.)

According to Weinberg, an easy way to reward top talent is to find out what drives them, or what they feel they need—for instance, high pay, recognition, or autonomy—and give it to them. He cautions that if you don’t do this, your top performers will leave your company to find an employer that will.

(Shortform note: If you give your high performers what they want, you may keep them happy in the short term—but at what cost? In his book High Output Management, Andrew Grove discusses how if you fulfill someone’s needs, they might lose motivation: Your top performers may slack off once you’ve rewarded them. According to Grove, you can solve this problem by creating a climate in which some of your employees’ needs are always unsatisfied. For instance, you may give a money-motivated team member a moderate bonus: big enough to reward and please them a little, but not so big as to fully fulfill their financial needs.)

Improve Staff Retention by Making Bonuses Fair

Weinberg argues that another key element of rewarding staff satisfactorily (and thus maintaining a positive sales culture) is making compensation packages fair—in particular, bonuses. He advises:

1) Making bonus requirements simple and achievable. In Weinberg’s experience, many sales managers make bonus requirements dependent on so many complex metrics that team members simply can’t achieve them. He warns that your people simply won’t try hard if they think they’ve got no chance of earning a bonus, thus hindering your attempts to create an effective, success-driven sales culture.

(Shortform note: Analysts add that complexity also creates distrust among employees, who may suspect that managers have deliberately made the bonus unachievably complicated to cut compensation costs. Your people may even leave their jobs due to the dissatisfaction this creates.)

2) Ensuring compensation plans distinguish enough between poor and top performers. Weinberg notes that your top performers should make notably more than your poor performers. He argues that if these two groups earn a similar amount, your top performers will become resentful and unmotivated since their efforts won’t be rewarded fairly, and your culture will consequently suffer.

(Shortform note: Research suggests that the consequences of rewarding poor performance are more severe than Weinberg indicates: Your top performers may leave your company if they feel the bonus system is unfair. According to a 2015 survey, around 30% of companies interviewed planned to award bonuses to their poor performers. In the same survey, more than half of respondents claimed to have difficulty retaining their most skilled performers.)

Give Top Performers Your Attention

As well as giving your salespeople fair pay, Weinberg insists that to maintain a healthy culture, you must give top performers your time and attention. Regularly check in with them, or take them out to coffee to celebrate their successes—anything to make these employees feel seen and valued. According to Weinberg, too often, sales managers focus only on coaching their weaker team members, ignoring their top talent—and nobody likes to be ignored. Ignored top performers will become resentful and your culture will suffer for it.

(Shortform note: The consequences of ignoring your top performers—or any of your employees—can be even more severe than just a damaged culture. More than three-quarters of millennial workers (and 66% of workers across all age groups) state they would quit their job if their boss failed to recognize their hard work. Despite this, less than half of employers believe that celebrating their employees is important.)

Avoid Micromanaging or Chasing Glory

Weinberg cautions against falling into various bad management traps that harm your team’s culture. In his view, bad managers usually chase glory by taking credit for their team’s successes. They also micromanage their team or even try to do their jobs for them, rather than trusting their team members to work independently.

According to Weinberg, this behavior will only generate a culture of resentment and unhappiness among your team members. It’ll also demoralize them—what’s the point in working hard if your manager is going to do your job for you then take all the credit?

How to Avoid Being a Bad, “Diminishing” Manager

In this section of the book, Weinberg references Greg McKeown and Liz Wiseman’s book Multipliers. Weinberg, McKeown, and Wiseman call the bad managers described above “Diminishers.” Meanwhile, they call good managers who help rather than hinder their teams “Multipliers.”

How can you avoid becoming a Diminisher? McKeown and Wiseman argue that any manager can overcome Diminishing tendencies using strategies such as:

• Seeking feedback from their team members to identify Diminishing behavior, rather than assuming they don’t have Diminishing tendencies

• Only helping team members when they ask for it, rather than barging in uninvited and doing their jobs for them under the guise of “assisting”

• Encouraging team members with problems to think up their own solutions, rather than jumping to “fix” things—the latter approach being another form of doing people’s jobs for them

• Giving credit to others when it’s due, rather than taking all of the credit themselves

Strategy #5: Focus on Impactful Tasks, Not Non-Managerial Duties

To Weinberg, one of the most important things a sales manager can do is use their time wisely. In his view, this means using their limited time to focus solely on impactful managerial tasks—for instance, coaching team members, tweaking your sales strategy, or holding team meetings. Your team will only succeed if you dedicate time to these crucial activities.

What if senior leaders ask you to complete a low-impact task (such as helping someone from a different department to write a report) and it’s difficult for you to say no? Weinberg argues that you can reduce the likelihood of this happening by thoroughly and publicly blocking your time. This involves splitting your time into blocks (for instance, hourly chunks) then assigning dedicated tasks to each “block.” That way, if you’re asked to complete a non-essential task, you have an excuse to decline (all of your time is already blocked out).

(Shortform note: Time-blocking—also known as “timeboxing”—has many other benefits. In Indistractable, Nir Eyal contends that creating timeboxes prevents you from focusing too much on one responsibility to the detriment of others, since you’ve already set an end time for each activity. Meanwhile, in Deep Work, Cal Newport argues that time blocking reduces your chances of becoming unfocused and switching between tasks, since you’ll have set a specific goal for each block.)

Techniques for Focusing on High-Impact Tasks

Weinberg’s view on managerial time management aligns closely with that of Peter Drucker who, in The Effective Executive, similarly recommends that managers spend the majority of their time on high-impact tasks. However, Drucker goes into much more detail than Weinberg on this topic, recommending several specific techniques for cutting non-important tasks so you can focus on what matters. These include:

• Delegating activities that other team members could do just as well, if not better, than you

• Cutting out low-value activities that, upon reflection, you don’t really need to do—for instance, work-related social events

• Cutting time-wasting activities that result from poor management; for instance, time spent frantically trying to meet an urgent deadline that you didn’t adequately plan for and thus takes up all of your time for a few days

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