Model Manager: How to motivate your reps by treating them the way they should treat customers

by Kim Wright Wiley; SellingPower Magazine

In some ways, being a manager is like being a parent: You can talk about what your sales team should be doing until you’re blue in the face, but if you aren’t modeling the behaviors you expect of the team, then your lectures will likely fall on deaf ears. This is especially true if you urge your salespeople to treat their customers and prospects as individuals but don’t model this behavior when dealing with your own staff.

“I’m not a big fan of the player/coach analogy in sales training,” says Beverly Flaxington, author of Understanding Other People: The Five Secrets to Human Behavior (ATA Press, 2009) and founder of The Collaborative (the-collaborative.com), a firm that helps companies and individuals reach their highest level of effectiveness. “The coach analogy implies that you’ve gathered people in a locker room at halftime, and you’re giving them all the same message in the same way. The manager’s real job is to see each person as an individual and ask, “How do I evolve this person? How do I get him or her to the level where he or she needs to be?” Click here for the rest of the article.