When you stop to think about the blindspots you might have, you’re obviously going to struggle to see something that you can’t see.

Think of your blindspots as you ‘getting in your own way’.

Frasier Crane, played superbly by Kelsey Grammer for so many seasons, routinely got in his own way. In one episode he planned the perfect evening with a lady friend, in control of every well-thought out detail, only to see it collapse due to something the audience could see coming, yet he was blind to.  In another episode, he orchestrated a public ceremony in honor of himself, gratuitously attended by hundreds in a downtown park, only to miss it due to a string of transportation snafus brought on by his insistence on wearing a particular pair of Italian shoes that were painfully too small.

Frasier got in his own way because he committed a lot of unforced errors.  But since these are blindspots how do you become aware of them?

You get in your own way because of the ‘vice in the virtue’, that is, when your  success traits, your virtues, eventually betray you, and become your vices.  Here’s an example.

One of my success traits is discipline.  I’m naturally effective at getting something done that I put my mind to.  Could be a house project, like the 22 x 20 deck I built mostly by myself two years ago.  Or, publishing my latest book Blindspots.  But because I am good at starting and finishing things I’m not quick to seek help.  Therefore, I sometimes lack the patience to slow down the start or finish of a project to take in someone’s advice.  Therefore, I often miss out on getting some really good advice.  I could point out lots of opportunities in my career where I would have been better off reaching out to someone for feedback or coaching. Thankfully, I am getting better at this.

When a new sales manager doesn’t take the time to get to know his team, the business, and if appropriate the marketplace if that too is new to her, she’s likely to double down on success traits that worked for her in the past.  And it’s only a matter of time before this leads to her getting in her own way.

I’ll brag on my wife for a second.  She’s held leadership positions in three companies in her career.  Each of those was in an industry that she had never worked in. What did she do?  She asked tons of questions of the people who reported to her. She asked questions of people in other departments.  She visited customers.  She avoided jumping to conclusions early.  She was patient.  Instead of trying to form what she heard and learned into a pre-formed framework or model of what worked in the past, she used her rich experiences to create new models and frameworks for how to lead.

She operates this way because she has a strong desire to learn, she has empathy, she’s humble, and she has no personal agenda to drive.  She commits few unforced errors.  She avoids getting in her own way.

If you know of anyone who seems reluctant to try new things, or consider alternative points of view, or who doesn’t seek much input or feedback, don’t be surprised to see this person often getting in his own way.  These people double down on success traits to a fault – until they become vices that get them into trouble.

Maybe that person is looking back at you in the mirror.  Think about your top 3 or 4 success traits.  Traits or characteristics that for sure helped you succeed.  Think about how you could ride these traits too far to where they get you in trouble.  This week be more aware of how you are using these traits, in meetings with customers, with people on your team, or with your peers.  It’s important not to judge yourself if you catch yourself pushing it too far.  If you judge you’ll be tempted to shut down the observation and the lesson could go to waste.  You’ll have to learn to accept that your next significant growth will come by failing or ‘falling’ and learning.

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In the pursuit of the truth, sales managers routinely set themselves up for not getting it, by asking these three questions:

1) What’s your confidence level on this deal? 2) Who’s the decision maker?  3) What’s your next step?

What’s your confidence level on this deal?

Sales managers ask this question when their funnel/pipeline stages have ‘confidence measures’ assigned to them.  Stage 2 might have a 30% measure of confidence in winning the deal.  Stage 5 might have 80% confidence.  The intent is to drive a logical, objective conclusion of the deal status which drives the manager’s coaching regarding next steps.

The problem is the confidence measures too often steer the manager away from the intended objective – what’s really going on?  They get squishy replies like ‘I have a good relationship’, or ‘they like our solution’. A manager confided in me not long ago that he lost count of the number of deals he ‘felt confident’ were going to close that didn’t.

Instead, managers should ask pointed, specific questions to inside the confidence measure. Questions about stakeholders and influence, about what matters and what doesn’t, about why they want to change and why change now.  Managers should seek ‘tangible evidence’ in the reps’ replies.  They should ask questions that challenge assumptions, especially about relationships.

Who’s the decision maker?

There are at least two problems with this question.  The first is that it’s not always clear what it means as therefore you’re handicapped in coaching to it.  Does it mean final approval?  Veto authority?  Does it mean the ability to disqualify your solution from further consideration?  When your rep Kyle says yes Mary’s the decision maker how do you coach Kyle to the next activity?  The second problem is this is the same question your reps will be asking the stakeholders they call on.  They will often get misleading or insufficient information.  They’ll ask someone in purchasing “Are you the decision maker?” and she says “Yes I am!”  And yet, as my clients have shown me the past 20 years that question too often misleads.

A better question to ask is around role in the buying process.  What role does the head of engineering play in this buying process? What role does the IT manager play? What role does the construction supervisor play?  You’re more likely to identify the stakeholder whose role is to deliver on a top line or bottom line objective, and that includes being able to make investments to achieve those objectives.

What’s your next step?

Every manager in a deal review discussion has jumped to the question “What’s your next step?” ‘What’s next’ is internally focused on the rep’s activity.

Problem here is this too often leads to busyness and busyness doesn’t always lead to effectiveness.

A better question is one that is based on the customer buying process.  Customers have to make commitments to buy something.  All of those commitments collectively make up the customer buying process.  So let’s trade ‘what’s next’ for ‘what does the customer need to do next?’

For example if a problem isn’t a priority then some stakeholder needs to take time (commitment) to make it a priority.  Or, if your salesperson knows the cost of the problem, then a stakeholder has to commit to acting on information.   Otherwise the deal is stalled or even dead.

Mark Sellers

Managing Partner, Breakthrough Sales Performance LLC

Sales training, coaching and consulting with businesses from 25M to 250M in revenue

Author The Funnel Principle – named a Top Sales Book to Read by Selling Power

Author of Blindspots: The Hidden Killer of Sales Coaching (to be released in 2019)

If you’re privileged to sit in the sales manager chair long enough you’ll experience the most difficult task a manager has – you’ll fire one of your salespeople.

I’ve had many conversations with my clients about people they are considering firing.  Some clients use me to pressure test their conclusions and some want a sanity check.  None of them have taken lightly the responsibility.

Firing a salesperson is difficult for at least the following reasons:

It’s personal. Someone’s livelihood and life is affected.  Their income stream is now cut off.  Their ego is likely injured.  They have to go home and tell the wife or husband.

You think you’ve failed.  All managers are affected by firing someone but some believe they have failed.  They think about what they have done, and what they have failed to do.  In the song These Days, Jackson Brown says “these days I seem to think a lot about the things that I forgot to do – for you.”  That’s a heavy burden to carry, so it’s reasonable that a manager would put it off.

You avoid conflict.  Some people are wired to avoid conflict and certainly firing somebody falls into that category.

You hang on with hope.   Let’s face it.  Deep down us sellers are heavily optimistic and romantically hopeful in our trade.  We resist purging our funnels of Plymouth Rock deals, and we often put too much stock in what a stakeholder tells us.  We like glasses colored rose.

The challenge is to know when you have a ‘necessary ending’ on your sales team.  In his wonderful book Necessary Endings, Henry Cloud gives us an entire field guide for understanding the complexity and necessity of endings.  He says we need to make them a normal part of life throughout our lives, instead of making them artificially unusual and often overly traumatic.

Anyone downsize lately? Yikes.  Anyone have that box (or boxes) of stuff in your basement that you haven’t opened in 12 years?  The ones that have survived 3 moves?

One way to know if you have a necessary ending on your team is to consider the following:

• Is this butt in the right seat? People who aren’t an ideal fit for the sales job can still succeed in it.  However they might need to expend an enormous amount of energy.  Over time they can flame out. Can you afford to keep this person on?  Can you invest time and training in them?
• Have they gotten your best effort to make them successful in the job? Be honest.
• Have they repeatedly not taken the message of direction, strategy and what you need them to do? The scientific term for this is thick skull.
• Do they show a pattern of not being coachable?

With such a dramatic outcome at stake it’s always a good idea to get another person’s opinion.

Finally, for those that need to go, this is your responsibility to your entire team.  You can’t shirk that duty.

Good selling,

Mark Sellers

Companies in the range of 25M to 250M hire me to train, coach and consult around sales matters

Author of The Funnel Principle, named by Selling Power magazine a Top Ten Best book to Read

Author of the soon to be released book Blindspots:  The Hidden Killer of Sales Coaching

He was lovely.

This past week our 41^stpresident of the United States George Herbert Walker Bush passed away. He was 94 years old.

Like most of you, I yearn to find those brief and random moments of civility as I scan the papers or scroll through the sound bites on my phone.  I was thrilled to read the tone of the reporting on the former president’s passing.  The New York Times reported that when James Baker, the former president’s secretary of state appeared at Mr. Bush’s side sometime during his final days Mr. Bush suddenly grew alert and asked “Bake, where are we going?”  Baker replied “We’re going to heaven.”  The president responded “That’s where I want to go.”

The Washington Post offered a wonderful reflection of Mr. Bush as a high school senior when Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941.  Instead of choosing the security of Yale, he enlisted.  Before he was 19 years old he was assigned to fly torpedo bombers off of aircraft carriers in the Pacific.  On a sortee toward a Japanese island Bush’s plane was shot down.  He commanded his crew to eject before the plane crashed into the sea.  Miraculously Mr. Bush survived.  His two crew members died.

CBS’s Sunday Morning had a reporter who recalled the 1987 Newsweek cover story of George Bush that labeled Mr. Bush ‘a wimp’.  The reporter said man did we get it wrong.

This is the paradox of humility.  What looks like weakness is actually strength.  Thomas Merton might say when you’re humble you’re living a second half life, a fuller, richer and more meaningful life than the false impression that a first half life wants us to believe.

We applaud humility but would rather not wear those shoes ourselves.  It takes too much sacrifice, too much risk, too much vulnerability. We fear how we’ll be seen (weak). We fear being taken advantage of. We fear we’ll miss out on something. Which is true, but in an ironic way.

Another article highlighted the relationship that Mr. Bush nurtured with another former president, Bill Clinton.  With the game clock expired neither one had anything to do against the other so they joined forces.  They used their heavy weight influence to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for charities.

It’s ok to think that it’s hard to be a strong leader today.  It probably seems that every day there are multiple forces working against you, some as simple as a flight delay to an important meeting and others complicated like a poorly functioning salesperson or manager.  It sure helps to have something to believe in, or maybe multiple things to believe in. Your strength needs a rock solid base.

Mr. Bush believed in country, family, friendship, God, service, the power of kindness, collaboration.

As for lovely comment, that came from Mr. Bush’s longtime friend Mr. Baker during the 60 Minutes interview.  Mr. Baker was emotional.

I watched the interview at our kitchen table with my wife Sunday evening and said to her “when was the last time you heard a man call another man lovely?”

Me neither.

How lovely.

Mark Sellers

Author The Funnel Principle, named by Selling Power magazine a Top Ten Best Book to Read

Author of Blindspots: The Hidden Killer of Sales Coaching, available late Q1 2019

Sales trainer, coach and consultant

If you are a front line sales manager looking for ways to be a more effective coach, you need to get to root cause to better understand the underlying motives and factors that prevent you from becoming more fully the person and sales manager you can be.

You may have to go somewhere you have not before been.  You’ll need to be vulnerable.  You’ll need to trust the process.

Most of all you have to learn to confront your blindspots.

Before I explain what a blindspot is let me suggest that there’s something generally accepted, fundamental, and even pivotal to your salespeople achieving quota year after year.  They’re more likely to hit that quota when they are motivated to sell for you.  And they’re more likely to be motivated if you make emotional connections with them.

As it is with people in general you’ve probably found it easier to make an emotional connection with some salespeople.  The conversations with them seem to naturally flow.  The coaching you give seems to be more easily received.  For these people you seem to know what to say and how to say it to get the response you want.   There’s a connection.

Making an emotional connection with other sales people doesn’t effortlessly come.  Maybe they repeat the same behaviors that you’re constantly trying to change.  They repeat the habits you’re trying to break.  This frustrates you.  It might drive you crazy.

The problem is your blindspots are out to sabotage your ability to create emotional connections, build relationships with your salespeople and motivate them to succeed.

So, what exactly is a blindspot?

Blindspots are unflattering behavior that you don’t know you do that prevent you from emotionally connecting with your salespeople.  Blindspots can also be unflattering behavior that you are aware of doing but you just can’t stop from doing it.

Here’s an example.

Urban Meyer, the head football coach for Ohio State, unwittingly confessed to a blindspot.  In the wake of a personnel crisis in 2018 that became a PR disaster involving one his assistant coaches, and that resulted in a 3 game suspension for Meyer, he was asked in a press conference the day before his first game back from the suspension, if he thought members of his staff were reluctant to bring him negative information, such as information that contributed to the crisis.  He said he hoped not, but then added “That’s something that (athletic director) Gene (Smith) and I have talked about that I need to do. I always thought I had that atmosphere,” he said.  Meaning, he was unaware that his super intense, intimidating demeanor could actually keep people from coming to him with potential problems.  Classic blindspot.

What do blindspots look like for sales managers?  One is being judgmental toward a salesperson.  If you’ve ever struggled managing a salesperson who is a lot NOT like you, you’ve likely shown some judgment toward this person.  If she doesn’t work the territory like you would, or if she has a very different personality than you have, you might show signs of judgment.  Or let’s say you think you always have the right answer for something.  You likely don’t have much patience to let your salespeople arrive at their own discovery.  Instead you tell them what the deal is and you expect them to get it and move on.  When they don’t you are frustrated, even angry inside.

These aren’t healthy attitudes to build a coaching foundation on.

If it makes you feel better, every sales manager has blindspots.  The more you can discover and acknowledge yours the closer you’ll be to dealing effectively with them.

Stay tuned. In future blogs I’ll help you do that.

Mark Sellers

Author of The Funnel Principle

Author of Blindspots: The Hidden Killer of Sales Coaching (due out in Q1 2019)