As the manager of your sales team, you might have more sales expertise, business savvy and (maybe) even more street smarts than any of the reps on your team.
If you are an experienced manager, this might be true. (Even worse – if you are an inexperienced manager, you probably think this is true.)
One trap that this leads to is that you become “The Answer Man”.
When I managed my first sales team, I was the Answer Man. My reps would bombard me with all kinds of problems like:
- This client wants a discount on his existing service. What should I do?
- Customer Service dropped the ball and now my customer is upset. Can you handle it?
- I’m sending out my email blast, what should I put in it?
Since I was obviously promoted to my management position because of my superior intellectual skills (ha!) , I would take on every problem and come up with an answer.
Until it wore me down.
What eventually happened was that I couldn‘t get everything done. Despite my overconfidence in my own problem solving abilities, I had to come up with a system for getting the most important things done. I wrote about my system – the 3 Big Rocks – here.
As a manager, I had to learn the hard way that I couldn’t and shouldn’t provide all of the answers.
First, I simply didn’t have the time. Second, my sales reps would never learn effective problem solving unless they had to do it. Third, I was getting frustrated answering the same types of questions over and over again.
If your reps come to you with problems that you would like them to resolve on their own, here are two techniques that will help you.
#1 Don’t respond to requests for basic information quickly (or at all). This includes things like:
- Can you resend that document you emailed me last week?
- Where can I find our price sheet?
- How should I handle _______? (fill in with any routine issue that the rep is capable of handling)
If the request came via email, just don’t respond. If it is in person, say, “Sorry, I cannot help you right now, please add this to your weekly report if you cannot get is resolved before our next 1:1.”
Many times a rep will come to you because it is easier than doing the work to solve the problem. But if you delay providing the answer, he’ll find it on his own.
#2 During 1:1s, or even in the moment, empower your rep to resolve the issue.
Ask the rep, “What do you think you should do?” Then whatever their answer, say, “Ok – do that. And the next time something like this comes up, you don’t need to run it by me, just use your best judgment (see Rule #1).”
In order for this to work, you have to be willing to tolerate your rep making some mistakes.
Obviously, if your rep is headed down a path that jeopardize his career or a client relationship, it’s best to help him rethink his approach.
Short of that, even when I would solve the problem in a different (and in my head, better) way, I bite my tongue. If his approach results in mistakes, I just have him fix them.
This way, our reps learn that we trust them, how to be autonomous and how to be accountable. I’ve also found that my reps often come up with better solutions than I would have.
When you have a new sales team, this technique becomes even more critical. If you are the new manager, chances are your sales reps do know more about company policy, product features and how “things are done here”.
But they’ll still come to you to see how you make decisions and also to test you by playing “stump the chump”.
Since I clearly don’t have the answers when I take over with a new team, I’ll always ask, “What do you recommend?” If the rep cannot come up with something, I’ll ask “What has the company done in the past when a similar issue came up and what do you think of that?”
I’ve done this with more than 10 different sales teams. It has always worked.
I encourage you to give it a shot. The results of this approach will quickly become evident in your sales, your team and your ability to get things done.
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