“You must stop your negative self-talk. You must build your authority, and you must understand that it’s all about the team.” – Wesleyne Greer in today’s Tip 1005
How do you build your authority?
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Wesleyne Greer. Wesleyne understands being at the top of her game. Having managed multi-million-dollar teams, she marries her love for sales and her passion for coaching at Transformed Sales. She understands that sales leadership requires coaching to develop leadership skills & outside-the-box strategies ensuring everyone on the team becomes a sales superstar. Here she is:
Wesleyne Greer: I’m your sales manager, not your friend. How many times have you thought that in the past couple of days or weeks, or even months? If you’re having trouble with transitioning from being a salesperson, an individual contributor to actually being a sales manager, this show is for you.
It is so difficult to go from being the buddy, the one who you hang out with on the weekends, who you ask for advice on your kids, or how to close a deal better to actually having to manage people. You’re managing your old colleagues. That is one of the most difficult tasks that a new sales manager has. And you have this pressure from the salespeople who you used to call your colleagues. They’re now your employees, as well as the pressure from your manager telling you to whip them into shape, get them to produce more. And you just like, Why am I even doing this?
Most times when you first go into sales management, you make less money. That’s right. You make less money than when you are a sales rep. And so you start questioning yourself. Was this the right decision? Should I have even done this at all? Well, I am here to tell you that you’ve made that decision, and at this point, you have to at least try before you say I want to go back.
So let me give you a few tips on transitioning into sales management.
The first one is you have to remove your self-limiting beliefs. What are self-limiting beliefs? These are the things the little voice in your head that tells you I can’t. I’m not good enough. This is too hard. All of those things that are so affectionately called negative self-talk. So remove the negative self-talk. You must start thinking of yourself as a leader, as a manager. You are leading a team of people now. So all of your insecurities, you have to put them to bed. Tell yourself I can do this. I can manage. I can get every person on my team to hit quota. That’s the first thing your mindset and removing those self-limiting beliefs.
The second tip I would like to leave you is your authority. So when you’re trying to strike the balance of being empathetic as well as still, I won’t say leading with an iron fist, but still ensuring that you have control over your team, you have to ensure that your salespeople understand that there are consequences for their actions. So when you ask them to do something. Don’t accept excuses. If you say I need you to make this many calls and give me a report by the end of the day, and they don’t do it, and they give you some lame excuse. The problem is not the lame excuse. The problem is you accepting their excuse. So stop accepting excuses and let them understand that there are consequences for their actions. So that is how you build your authority.
And the final thing is you have to understand that as a salesperson as an individual contributor, it was all about you. It was about you hitting your quota. It was about you doing demos and being at the top of the leaderboard. It’s no longer all about you. It is now about the entire team. It is about all of the people that you have surrounding you. So ensure that you’re not just focused on I, I, I but focused on the team. What does the team need to succeed? How can I help the lowest person on the totem pole get up to the middle of the pack? And how can I help the people that are in the middle of the pack be elevated to the top? It is a misnomer that there has to be a bell curve in a sales team.
I believe that every single person on your team can hit quota every single month. It just takes the three things that I told you. You must stop your negative self-talk. You must build your authority, and you must understand that it’s all about the team. So again, as a new sales manager or one that is struggling to get your arms around your team, take these few tips that I gave you and implement them today. I guarantee you you will see a change within yourself as a sales manager that wants to lead by example as well as a change within your team.
Scott Ingram: Wesleyne would love to connect with you on LinkedIn, just be sure to mention Daily Sales Tips when you reach out. We’ll have a link to her profile and more a DailySales.Tips/1005 and once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!