Losing your best salesperson is probably YOUR fault!

In my experience, a surefire way to lose your best salesman is to make him a sales manager. It seems odd that would be the case, but unfortunately, it’s the truth. Sales management is one of the most challenging balancing acts in the business world.  Promoting a salesman ensures that they will have a drunken stumble off the tight rope, while at the same time depriving a village somewhere of an idiot. Not only do you lose his sales volume, but you also lose the guy every other salesperson admires and strives to emulate. He seems to magically transform overnight into a combination of Bob Slydell from Office Space and Blake from Glengarry Glen Ross: lazy, heartless, and not a shred of compassion.  An annoying egomaniac, who thinks his feces smells reminiscent of fresh baked chocolate chip cookies. Then, to make matters worse, his idea of what a sales manager should act like is typically based on the movie Boiler Room. My personal favorite is when he starts saying things like, “They say money can’t buy happiness? Look at the F&%*ing smile on my face. Ear to ear, baby!” It’s usually at that moment, I realize that the best use for the extra-strength Drano I have had under my kitchen sink for the past 6 years, would be to pour it down his pie-hole to silence the irritating babble emitting from his orifice.

Selecting a sales manager based on his sales ability alone is a critical mistake that I have frequently repeated. I have yet to see any correlation between one’s ability to sell and one’s ability to recruit, hire, train, educate, motivate and stimulate a sales team. The real problem seems to be that a great salesperson cannot teach traits such as a high tolerance for rejection, or the ability to read body language. Since they acquired these traits through nature and not nurture, they cannot easily transfer them to someone born with thin skin or a huge lack of social awareness. It’s extremely odd that the charisma that builds relationships with clients seems to be lost in translation when building relationships with their salespeople.

Don’t get me wrong, I love these guys. They’re the most fun to hang out with on nights and weekends. If you are going to a party, happy hour, a strip club, a ball game, to smoke a cigar or play poker…these are your “bros”.  But they really shouldn’t be managing anyone. In social situations, they’re the ultimate wingman, and always seem to have the perfect pick-up line.  But in the office, it seems as if every time they open their mouths, it is only to change feet. They mysteriously forget what it was like to be a salesperson, and what they needed from their boss when they were struggling. However, with their promotion and new found free time, they become the best Nerf basketball player in the office, and develop an astonishing read of the break in the carpet… thus enabling them to make unbelievable putts into the coffee cup at the other end of the sales floor.

So, before your next sales manager is selected or promoted, I suggest you use a different set of criteria to determine if he is properly qualified: 1) Taller than 5’8” (to prevent Napoleon complex), 2) Wasn’t previously fired from the Post Office for anger management issues, 3) Thinks it’s inappropriate to ask a female employees to sit on his lap and take notes during a sales meeting, 4) Smokes less than 2 packs of cigarettes a day, 5) Didn’t sue his previous employer for failure to reimburse him for his “9 weeks of vacation” spent in sex rehab and 6) Actually has SOME experience managing people (and no, their kids don’t count). Failure to do this will turn your top producer into an expensive, useless prima donna that will ultimately poison the rest of your sales staff. Even worse, it will leave you feeling like you won a $10,000,000 lottery, but traded the winning ticket for a 50% equity share in a company that makes Tiger Woods bobble-heads… each wearing cute little shirts that say “Family Man”.