Spend any time with a sales organization and you are bound to hear a similar story – a story about a great rep who failed the transition to sales manager. This story is about Jon.
It is set in a venerable, widely known, widely respected organization headquartered in the Northeast and Jon was their latest superstar. He joined the organization fresh out of school and wasted no time demonstrating a true knack for sales. He was charming, charismatic, and ambitious and he quickly parlayed this trifecta into performance that was nothing short of remarkable. Top 10% in his territory in his first year on the job. Top 5% in the region the next year. First sales rep to make President’s Club in every year of his tenure. His reputation spread and it wasn’t long before he caught the attention of the EVP of sales. Sales was developing a pilot program based on “pods” of high performance sellers and Jon seemed perfect to lead one of these performance pods: a team of 17 successful sales reps with a collective quota north of $85M.
Why is the story of failure so common and so pervasive in sales organizations? Lots of reasons. An unexamined and unsupported belief that “talent” in one area automatically transfers to another. But the root cause is that no salesperson worth their salt wants to work for a manger who hasn’t “carried a bag.” This is understandable – who doesn’t want a manager who has the experience and battle scars to understand what I’m going through? But it leads to the common but mistaken belief that you can’t lead a sales team unless you carried a bag. A belief that is compounded by the equally flawed assumption that a great seller must equal a great leader. Every sales organization has their version of this story.
At first things could not have gone better. Jon landed with a splash. His accounts continued to flourish, his team simply adored him and he was the darling of the EVP who was constantly recounting the exploits of this up-and-coming protégé. It was hard to say what went wrong first. There were whispers of discontent among Jon’s team. Tales of a heavy handed approach and a leader too quick to push other sellers aside in order to manage the account the way he thought was needed. The whispers grew to grumblings and sales started to soften and then decline. Three of Jon’s reps were recruited by a reviled competitor. Five more resigned within a month of each other. Exit interviews flagged a heavy handed leadership style and too much stealing of the spotlight. Jon took it all in stride with the charm, charisma and panache that was the foundation of his success as a seller
This myth that great sellers make for great managers persists even though a cursory examination of the data quickly reveals its flaws. GrowthPlay has assessed hundreds of thousands of candidates for sales and sales management roles and we do this in a way that lets us empirically assess a person’s fit to both roles. What we found is more than a bit counter-intuitive. First, only about one out of every six candidates who is a strong fit for a sales role is also a strong fit for a sales management role. Perhaps equally surprisingly, as many as five out of every seven candidates who are poor fits for sales roles are strong fits for sales manager roles. Let’s recap that. Good fit for sales = bad fit for sales management. Bad fit for sales = good fit for sales management.
Can that possibly be correct? And if so, what accounts for this? After all, many or most organizations find the bulk of their sales managers from their sales force. Isn’t that evidence that good sales people make good sales managers? Can all those organizations be doing this wrong? In a word – yes they can.
Now, before you start telling me about Jack or Jane – your example of a great sales person who was also a great sales manager, let me be clear. That the data are clear about trends doesn’t mean there won’t be exceptions – there certainly will be exceptions. But in analytics, the “exceptions don’t prove the rule” and if you want to optimize your talent decisions you will play the odds. And when it comes to sales management at least, the odds are strongly against great sales people transforming into great sales managers.
It took a bit more than two years for things to come to a head. The proverbial straw in this case was the migration of a key client who cited Jon’s insistence that he manage the account as the precipitating reason for their departure. Still an outstanding sales rep, Jon was transferred laterally into a senior sales role and a more seasoned leader brought in to stem the tide. Smarting from the loss of face, Jon only lasted three months in his new role.
Now, let’s also be clear about another thing. Great sales people are relatively rare. At the risk of being called a heretic, let’s be honest. However proud you are your sales team, it is not bursting at the seams with great sales people. Most sales forces have a few if any truly great sales people, a lot of okay sales people and some barely scraping by sales people. And, sadly, the same can be said about leadership. Relatively few truly great leaders and a lot of, well, less than great leaders.
What does great mean, anyway? One in one hundred? That sets the bar too low. One in one thousand? That seems a more reasonable standard for great. Set it higher if you think I’m not being stringent enough. Every salesforce has its best performer. And often, compared to the rest of the team they can look awfully darn good. But are they truly great? Are they that one on one thousand seller? Unless you have a salesforce of 1,000 or more it’s unlikely you have even one truly great performer.
So yes, you can fairly easily take an okay sales person and promote them to be an okay sales manager. But that’s not what we are setting out to do. Is it? I hope not. Please tell me your goal is not to find the next okay sales manager (if it is, you can stop reading now and just keep on doing what you are already doing). We’re talking about finding great sales people and great sales managers. We may settle for less, but the goal is great.
So back to the data. How do we explain the fact that great sales and great management are antithetical? It’s rather straight forward actually. At the heart of every great sales person you will find a strong achievement motive. This is the part deep inside each of us that compels us to test ourselves against an external standard of excellence. It’s what drives us to prove we are competent, capable, and can get stuff done. And make no mistake, achievement is a compulsion in every meaning of word. It’s a gnawing, never satisfied, always hungry, relentless drive. Achievement just can’t help itself, it needs success like a fish needs water. And that’s why it’s so central to sales success. It’s what makes great sales people the energetic, persistent, driven, sales machines they are. It’s the heart and soul of what makes someone great at the one in one thousand level.
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What’s special about the achievement motive is that it’s only ever really satisfied by personal accomplishment. It’s not enough that the team did well, I have to excel. And the achievement motive simply adores sales. Sales is the perfect environment for achievement. Sales has everything achievement needs to take root, grow and flourish. Sales has a clearly defined external standard of excellence – it’s called a quota. Sales epitomizes personal accomplishment. At the end of the day, one sales person is credited with the sale. Sales has a clear, objective scorecard. It’s not what my boss thinks about my performance, it’s how many dollars I put on the table. And most importantly of all, sales rewards performance – it’s called a bonus or a commission. Achievement loves sales. And that’s why at the heart of every great sales person you will find a very healthy achievement drive.
So why is that a bad thing for sales management? In essence it’s because success in sales is about me while success in sales management is about my team. This is where the downside of a strong achievement drive makes itself known. If I’m driven to prove my personal ability, I find it hard (nearly impossible sometimes) to step back and let others take the spotlight. Watching others succeed just doesn’t do it for achievement. Achievement is all about personal success.
There’s a different motive at work in great leaders. Where great sales people are driven by a need to achieve, great leaders are driven by a need to influence, to have an impact on the world. Importantly, influence does not equal personal success. In fact, whereas a great sales person can only accomplish what they are personally able to get done (and are, therefore, limited by the harsh reality of a 24/7 world) a great sales leader can inspire, train and motivate legions of sales people and have an influence far beyond what any one person can accomplish on his/her own. Achievement points with great pride to what it has accomplished. Influence points with equal pride to what others have accomplished.
Each of us has some amount of both motives. And the motives are not mutually exclusive. There are people who have little of either, people who have lots of both and people who have lots of one and less of the other. When thinking about a given person’s fit for a particular role, what’s key is the relative proportion of achievement and influence. It’s only a slight over simplification to say that a modest amount of achievement and a whole heck of a lot of drive to influence is the hallmark of successful managers while an overabundance of drive to achieve coupled with some but not too much influence drive is what makes a successful sales person.
Want to get a sense of what drives a given person? Do this. Ask them to look back over their career and tell you about their proudest accomplishment. Achievement will tell you a story that starts, “Well, I was faced with a challenge” and then go on to regale you with all of the things it did to triumph. Influence will tell you a story that starts with, “The thing I’m proudest about isn’t even really about me, it’s about Bill. You see, Bill was struggling…” and then go on to tell you how it helped Bill with his challenge and how proud it is about everything Bill has accomplished. Jon epitomized Achievement. Jon brought that motivation and all it entails with him to the new role. Jon and the organization were stunned when great sales failed to equal great management.
The bottom-line of this single failed attempt to transform a great sales person into a great sales manager? The organization lost an up-and-coming great sales person. The organization lost eight other strong reps. Counting lost sales, lost opportunities, lost clients, and lost good will, the organization counts the cost at nearly $200M. More than twice the combined quota of the team Jon was tasked to lead.
Bruce Sevy is a seasoned professional with a passion for talent management and is a 20+ year veteran in designing and implementing efficient, effective and high impact talent management systems, tools and processes that help organizations select, deploy, develop, reward, and promote high performance employees at all organizational levels.
