“You need to treat your reps as a leader, you need to treat your reps like your customers.” – Jeff Bajorek in today’s Tip 770
How about you? What your perspective as a leader?
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Happy Saturday everyone. Here’s Jeff Bajorek:
Jeff Bajorek: If you’re leading a team right now, you are not going to be successful. If you still rely on the leadership techniques that you had, or the leadership techniques that were deployed with you, when you were starting out in your career. You can’t take the lessons you learned back in the day as a new rep and try to apply them to new reps today. There is a generational gap that needs to be addressed and it goes beyond language and it goes beyond attitude. It really has to do with trust.
Look, back in the day, 15, 20, 25 years ago. Yes, there were traveling salespeople and people got on planes all the time, but for the most part in most industries. And I know you’re probably shuttering to think this right now, but a lot of leadership and a lot of managers thought that salespeople were replaceable, interchangeable even.
And so look, you’re going to do this. You’re going to drive a number. You’re going to show me some revenue or we’re going to find somebody who will, that’s pretty common. Still happens in a lot of places today. Believe it or not. But you know, this kind of leadership by iron fist is, I don’t know how effective it was last time, but, or when in the past. But I know that people were a lot less inclined to move around than they are today.
What you look at sales reps of today, they’re not coin-operated as much as some people would like to assume they want fringe benefits. They want to be fulfilled in other ways non-monetary really, and quite frankly, they have more options because as more and more people work remotely, you can be in a revenue-generating position remotely from any time zone and be really, really effective.
So now all of a sudden companies realize that they don’t have an iron fist, that they can rule over their reps with. They need to engage them differently. You’ve heard me say this before. You need to treat your reps as a leader, you need to treat your reps like your customers. You need to show them what’s in it for them to succeed, to deliver the numbers that you’re asking them to deliver. You need to get to know them a little bit. You need to do some discovery with them to understand what buttons you going to be able to push, to get them to move a little bit. You’re not going to be able to take these reps and put them into an interchangeable process and treat them all, like they’re not individuals. You can’t treat everybody the same way and expect the same results.
you need to think, you always need to be thinking. And I know that there are playbooks from the past. You can’t copy the playbooks, but you need to copy why those plays worked. And one of the biggest flaws I see in people who are elevated into management roles is that they know that they were successful in the past. And they feel that they’ve earned that role, but they’re not very good at explaining or even understanding why what they did was so effective.
So if you’re a leader today, you’ve got a tough job. And I believe that frontline sales management is probably the toughest job in sales, but you’ve got a tough job because you have to engage with the team that you lead. You have to encourage the team that you lead and you cannot scale that process. It has to be individual. You have to meet people where they are and you have to know what makes them tick. You have to think about them like your customers.
Curious? You want to learn a little more, shoot me a message. I’m happy to engage with you on this. I’m happy to argue with you on this. You’re entitled to be wrong. I’m okay with that. And we’ll enjoy the talk. Even if we can’t agree to disagree, or even if we have to agree to disagree at the end. But I think if you think about this a little bit more, I hope you’re able to really change your perspective as a leader. And I hope this helps you get more out of your team.
Scott Ingram: If you want to reach out to Jeff to talk about this, we’ll have his contact info along with everything else at DailySales.Tips/770
Once you’ve initiated that conversation. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!