335 How Can The Player/Coach Sales Leader Manage The Twixt and Tween Problem?

<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" xml:lang="EN-AU">You have done an excellent job as a salesperson, hitting your numbers and getting a strong reputation as a “producer”.  The big bosses like the cut of your jib and decide that they will promote you into the role of player/coach to lead the sales team.  No training is provided of course. It assumed that as you know how to get results, you can just sprinkle your pixie dust on the rest of the crew and clone those good outcomes. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" xml:lang="EN-AU">The first thing you discover is that what made you awesome, is different to what will work for the rest of the team.  “Do what I do” sounds highly reasonable, except they are not you and it doesn’t seem to work for them.  You have your own clients too, so you are pretty busy trying to get the revenues in the door. The amount of time you have to spend leading the sales team is limited.  They keep producing at the same rate, you now have a lot of non-sales stuff to get done as well and your workload seems to keep going up.  The annual targets keep going up too and in two years time, you find yourself fired, because your team didn’t get to their number.  You are held accountable and so you are replaced. The same cycle then kicks in again for your successor.  None of the big bosses lost their job by the way.</span><span lang="EN-AU" xml:lang="EN-AU"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-AU" xml:lang="EN-AU">You found you were stuck between your role as a leader and your role as a producer – you found you were twixt and tween two contesting goals.  So, what is the sale’s leaders job then when you have your own targets?  Leverage is the key to success here.  If we can help our team members be more successful, then we will be able to hit the team target.  We absolutely need to provide opportunities for training the crew.  It could be formal training aimed at substantially raising sales capability and technique or something simpler.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><