The Intentional Sales Manager

THE INTENTIONAL SALES MANAGER, Harness The Power of Purposeful Leadership to Transform Your Team, by Pat McManamon, Sandler Training 2020 

 Ambition and pure drive are not the only keys to building a great sales company.  There are issues of raw ambition, overly aggressive competition, and the sheer limits of human energy to contend with, but sales coach Pat McManamon unlocks secrets to transforming teams into smooth functioning machines.  Sure there are the basics, like starting with minimum standards of performance for leaders that are very different from what sales people are expected to do.  But the author illustrates these positive behaviors with a good example, a  sales manager, Tom,  who overcomes these most common challenges and eventually builds a really smooth machine. 

Strong managers illustrate the best, desired, intentional behavior by modeling as well as coaching.  They must understand not just the sales figures at hand - the results - but how the team member managed to pull in that result.  Here is where managers may find what we call "ugly surprises," methods that may work once or twice, but eventually need to change.

McManamon recommends one-on-one role-playing delivered in a positive way, the aims being:

*  becoming a better, trusted resource for salespeople

*  using group meetings to celebrate forward progress

*  taking time to understand each person as an individual

*  helping people to experience small wins early on

*  creating a list of quantifiable behaviors

*  giving credit to individual team members

What these activities do NOT include are managers who dive in, rescue, or take over the team members' role.  In fact, at a certain point, as the author's hero leader Tom illustrates, good teams become self-correcting contributors, and that's what successful teams will be working toward.

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers, pemoody@aol.com, patriciaemoody@gmail.com, tricia@patriciaemoody.com,