LinkedIn is filled with surveys about, “What is the highest priority focus for [Fill In Your Favorite Role]?”
There are surveys asking for the one area sales managers should focus on. These cover things like comp/metrics, training, forecasts, hiring, sometimes even coaching. There are surveys for sellers covering things like prospecting, pipeline management, closing, sales process.
These surveys fill my feed, each trying to suggest, “If we/I do this one thing very well, we/I will achieve our goals.”
If sales management and selling were that easy…..
The problem is, these are false choices. We can’t choose which part of the job we want to do (or the parts we would prefer to avoid). We have to do the whole job.
As sellers, we have to manage our territories and accounts. We have to find as many opportunities as we can within those territories/accounts. Some have to be nurtured for some time, we try to incent as many as we can to change, qualifying them, helping them navigate their buying journey, ultimately making a decision. We have to constantly be creating value in every interchange, so that includes researching, learning, planning. We have to get things done, to support our efforts, within our companies. Maybe it’s getting support or resources, maybe it’s developing a solution or proposal, or getting approvals from legal/pricing/contracting. We have to constantly assess our pipelines, making sure we are pursuing enough opportunities to achieve our goals, looking for leverage points to improve our performance. As much as we may dislike it, there is a certain amount of administrative and reporting work we need to do to inform our managers and others in the organization. Then we must constantly focus on our own development, skills building, and learning.
We can’t pick and choose those favorite areas, we have to do the whole job. If we just focus on one area, then how does the rest of the job get done? For example, there are those that would have you focus on prospecting. But if we don’t manage those qualified prospects effectively in their buying process, we lose too many opportunities and fail to produce the results needed. Which, in turn, requires us to amp up our prospecting, until we eventually fail at that.
Likewise, managers can’t focus on just one element of their jobs, they have to do the whole job, otherwise they fail in maximizing the performance of each person on their team and the execution of the organization’s business priorities.
Every job has elements that invigorate us, that are our favorites. Every job has elements we don’t like to do. Every job has moment of great joy and moments of tedium. The problem is, if we don’t do the whole job, ultimately, we fail, and those parts that we love are no longer possible.
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