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. (Shortform note: Generally, sales commentators agree that sales teams with poor managers are doomed to failure. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that all sales failures are the responsibility of the sales manager. Sales teams can struggle due to major economic turbulence or shifting customer needs—factors that sales managers can’t control.)
In Sales Management. Simplified, Weinberg discusses how to successfully manage a sales team. In our guide, we’ve grouped Weinberg’s advice thematically to create five management strategies:
Throughout the guide, we’ll compare Weinberg’s ideas to those of other experts in sales and management, such as Peter Drucker, Jeffrey Gitomer, and Grant Cardone.
According to Weinberg, hiring effective salespeople is difficult because there’s a shortage of good candidates. (Shortform note: Research confirms that sales roles are among the most difficult to fill, and once filled, new hires often aren’t effective at the position. Possible reasons for this dearth of talent include negative perceptions of salespeople driving people away from the profession and small businesses snapping up increasing numbers of salespeople to drive growth.)
Further, Weinberg argues that sales managers find firing ineffective salespeople equally difficult, as they fear appearing cold-hearted or negatively judging team members’ performance unfairly.
(Shortform note: Ray Dalio highlights another reason why managers may be reluctant to fire an underperformer: They may like this employee on a personal level. Firing someone you care for can be emotionally difficult. However, firing someone can arguably, in certain contexts, be an act of care. As Gallup Press notes in First, Break All the Rules, if you truly care about someone, you should want the best for them—and in an employment context, the “best” may be a position at a different company, if their current role isn’t working out. Firing the person can free them to find a position they like and excel at.)
Let’s examine Weinberg’s techniques for improving your chances of hiring top talent. We’ll also cover his advice on when to fire poor performers.
Weinberg advises against hiring general “salespeople” who are expected to complete every task in the sales process, from finding new leads, to retaining existing customers, to assisting customers with technical questions. Instead, he suggests making each sales role on your team clear and specific and hiring people with the skills needed to excel in their particular role.
(Shortform note: Gallup Press disagrees with Weinberg’s assertion that you should hire people based on their skills, since, it argues, you can teach people most skills after you’ve hired them. It instead advocates hiring people based on their innate talents and personality traits—for instance, confidence or empathy—since these can’t be taught.)
In particular, Weinberg advises having distinct positions for account managers, who maintain relationships with current customers, and sales specialists, who seek out new business opportunities. In his view, it’s rare for a skilled account manager to be able to successfully do a sales specialist’s job, and vice versa.
Other Ways to Split Your Sales Roles
Weinberg’s suggestion of hiring for specific sales positions rather than catch-all salespeople isn’t new. Many sales experts recommend this approach, not least because sales reps who are forced to do everything are often less effective and more dissatisfied in their roles.
But is it enough to simply split salespeople into account managers and new business developers? Possibly not. Some sales experts recommend having four types of salespeople in your team:
Market response reps, who contact leads generated by your marketing campaigns
New business developers, who proactively cold call potential customers
Salespeople, who close sales with leads passed to them by market response reps and new business developers
Account managers, who manage existing customer relationships
A note of caution: If you are going to split your sales roles, either using Weinberg’s model or a more complex system, make sure there are clear guidelines for when your salespeople pass leads to each other (for instance, when exactly a salesperson hands a customer to the account manager). This prevents the confusion of multiple team members dealing with the same customer at the same time.
Weinberg advises making recruitment one of your regular tasks. Continually note down the names of potential strong candidates you’ve heard about through your network (and note down who, in your network, has been most valuable for finding good new hires). That way, when someone leaves your team, you’ll already have a long list of strong candidates to consult, saving you time and recruitment costs.
How to Recruit Using Your Network
While Weinberg encourages you to tap your network, he doesn’t specify how. Here are some tips from other sales experts for successfully finding strong candidates through networking:
Tell your network exactly which skills and qualifications potential candidates would need to excel on your team. This reduces the likelihood of them suggesting unsuitable candidates.
Use your current team members to find potential future employees. Offer your current team members an incentive, such as a cash bonus, for successfully referring candidates.
Once you’ve identified a strong candidate, maintain regular contact with them, even if there’s currently no space on your team. Endear yourself to the candidate and they may be more willing to join your team in the future.
If one of your team members is consistently underperforming and failing to meet their goals, Weinberg believes your first step is to consider whether this person has shown enough promise in the role to justify keeping and helping them. If not, contact human resources and begin the termination process.
When to Fire and When to Help
Weinberg doesn’t explore the specifics of what constitutes enough “promise” to help rather than fire someone. To decide whether or not to spend time and effort helping someone, you might consider the following questions:
Would developing just one extra skill drastically improve this employee’s performance—and do you feel able to coach them in this skill? If so, coaching may be worthwhile.
Are there mitigating factors in this person’s poor performance (for instance, extreme stress or a temporary personal issue)? If so, firing them may be premature—they may just need a little time to overcome whatever’s affecting them.
Did you communicate this person’s duties and goals clearly? If not, their poor performance may not be their fault: They can’t succeed if they don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing.
If you do decide to keep your struggling team member, Weinberg suggests beginning remedial training. Meet with the team member and tell them what the current problems are with their performance. Then, explain the specific improvements you want to see from this person (and make clear that if they fail to improve, you’ll fire them). Weinberg insists that creating a numbers-based target is the most effective way to suggest improvements—for example, “I want you to make X number of sales in the next Y months.” He believes that having such a specific target gives the person something concrete to channel their efforts toward.
(Shortform note: The type of goal that Weinberg recommends setting has much in common with a SMART goal—a style of goal praised by many authors, including Charles Duhigg in his book Smarter Faster Better. Duhigg argues SMART goals must be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. Weinberg’s style of goal is inherently specific, measurable, and timely, due to its focus on achieving specific sales numbers within a certain time frame. It’s up to you as a manager to also make the goal achievable and realistic for the individual.)
Weinberg argues that coaching your team in essential sales skills—and continually coaching them in any persistent weak spots—is essential to generating optimal team performance. After all, your team can’t excel if they don’t know how to do their jobs properly. (Shortform note: Research backs Weinberg’s assertion that coaching improves performance: One study found that more than 70% of coached employees reported an improvement in their work quality. Other benefits of coaching include increased employee self-confidence and increased self-reliance.)
Weinberg discusses techniques for both coaching salespeople generally and training them in specific skills:
To kick off your coaching, Weinberg recommends regularly shadowing your salespeople—either by conducting joint calls if they work in inside sales or joint visits if they work in field sales. You’ll gain firsthand knowledge of how each team member works, helping you to identify their strengths and weaknesses. You can then coach each person based on their weaker areas.
(Shortform note: Coaching through joint calls and visits has additional benefits. For instance, this approach may increase the likelihood of your feedback sinking in. Your team members will apply pointers for improvement more effectively if those pointers relate to a real-life situation they can remember, like a sales call or visit, rather than an abstract, hypothetical situation.)
Weinberg argues that training your team to make good sales calls should be a priority for all sales managers since calls are often the first point of contact with potential customers. If a salesperson gets the call wrong, winning over the customer becomes much harder.
(Shortform note: Since Weinberg’s time of writing, some salespeople have moved away from making initial contact with prospects over the phone, instead doing so through digital means (for instance, via email or through social media platforms such as LinkedIn—a phenomenon known as “social selling”). However, that doesn’t mean that teaching your team members how to make good phone calls is pointless. They’ll probably still need to speak with customers over the phone at some point during the sales process.)
According to Weinberg, sales managers should ensure their salespeople have:
1) A structure for the call that always begins with discovery (ascertaining the customer’s needs) rather than a blind pitch. Trying to pitch a product before you know what the customer actually wants is a waste of everyone’s time. (Shortform note: This customer-centric sales approach is arguably at odds with that of Jordan Belfort, author of Way of the Wolf. Belfort’s selling ethos is less about finding out about (or catering to) what the customer wants and more about the seller closing a deal at any cost—even if the product doesn’t meet the customer’s needs.)
2) Pre-prepared research on the prospect. (Shortform note: Weinberg expands upon this recommendation in New Sales. Simplified. He suggests using social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to research prospects. Other valuable research tools include your customer relationship management system (if a sales rep has contacted the customer before) and the customer’s company website.)
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?)
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.
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.)
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.
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:
Let’s look at each technique in more detail.
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.)
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.
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.)
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.)
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.)
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
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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To Weinberg, the most important thing a sales manager can do is use their time wisely. Consider how you currently manage your time and how you might focus more time on high-impact activities.
Weinberg argues that managers should spend most of their time focusing on important tasks such as coaching team members, tweaking their sales strategy, or holding team meetings. How much time do you currently spend each week on such tasks? (If you’re uncertain, give a rough estimate.)
Next, write down how many total hours you work each week (on average), and calculate the proportion of that time spent on high-impact tasks (as estimated above). What did you discover about how much time you devote to low-impact vs high-impact tasks? Were you surprised by the results? Explain your answer.
If you think you’re not spending enough time on high-impact activities, brainstorm three or four low-impact activities (for instance, routine administrative tasks or “work socials”) that you might cut or delegate to make time for your more important work.
Weinberg believes that time blocking can be a valuable tool in preventing others from assigning you low-impact tasks. Below, create a rough time-blocked plan for one day’s work: Write down which high-impact task you’ll focus on each hour. (Your blocks can be longer or shorter than an hour if you need them to be.)