What a Parenting Book Taught Me About Sales Management

A firm talking-to is not going to change a behavior. When you when you sit with an underperforming rep and you you sit them down and give them the a talk, you know, you probably think you've handled it. And you didn't. You just trained them to survive one uncomfortable conversation and go back to doing what they were doing before.

I figured this out on a on a coaching call last week, or it was reinforced at least, from a question that kind of stopped the whole room for a for a split second. So, I'm on a call with a business owner in our our fractional sales management program along with one of my sales managers. And and we're talking about a rep on the owner's team—like somebody the owner doesn't feel great about. Their gut says, "Hey, this person's not going to cut it". And so we're digging into the track record, asking like exactly what's been done up to this point. And the owner's like, "You know, I've talked to him down a couple time or I've talked to him uh a couple of times, I've sat him down and, you know, I don't really see the activity pick up after we talk".

And my sales manager, who's like 20 years in sales leadership, he's trained hundreds of of sales managers and business owners, and and he asked this one question, really dead simple question. But it created this split-second moment where you could feel it land. And and by the way, this is what coaching feels like. And and we weren't even trying to coach the owner, it was just a question. And he goes: "So, when you talk to this person and they don't respond, what exactly did you do after that?"

And the owner thinks about it and says, "Well, I I call him back in, we we we had another conversation".

And my manager says, "So the real question is like, what are you conditioning this rep to do?"

And there was a pause. And that was it, like that was that was the whole thing because what was actually happening is the owner had conditioned this rep to build a tolerance for one uncomfortable conversation. You know, look at the loop of that. The the rep doesn't do the thing, the owner notices, the owner has a firm talking-to, the rep nods, you know, takes it, says, "I'll do better," and goes right back to doing the same thing that they were doing before. There's no real consequence, right? Like not in terms of action.

Uh so long as the the rep can weather that one storm—like one slightly awkward conversation every few weeks—and by the way, owners get busy and then don't have them for a few more weeks and then fall off tracking activity and this and that, like all the stuff that that's that's very standard when you're you're spread too thin and don't have time to like do dedicated management on on reps. It's it's normal, it's not a criticism. Like they get to keep doing what they're doing. And and we think the talking-to is what changes the behavior, and it's not. We're conditioning them to expect one uncomfortable chat and then it's back to business as usual.

By the way, I break stuff like this down every single week in a in my weekly newsletter—um completely free, you can sign up at at raiseemail.com if you want.

So okay, so there's back to this, there's two parts. First, give this owner credit, frankly. Like they've they've actually stepped up, they've had the conversation, and a lot of leaders never do. Like they they sit there passively aggressively, they bitch about their people not doing their jobs, they complain about our shithouse yard, they never address it head-on, they don't even have the conversation. So, having that conversation already puts you ahead of most. Okay, so like that's that's part one.

Second part—and this the one that matters more—is there has to be an action and a consequence behind the words. And the and the consequence can't be another conversation. It can't be a louder conversation of the same talk. It has to be real. It has like a change in territory, like something with actual teeth, you know, a written warning or an escalation in the process. But a real action as a result of that because if the only consequence to to underperformance is sitting through one more talking-to, then you're you're not leading that rep anymore. You're you're coaching them to do the wrong thing.

And it reminds me uh when my my wife and I became parents like for the first time, so we're early parents and we're looking at all these parenting books, and someone handed us a book called Love and Logic. And the book really hit me hard because I was sales management at the time, so you know, a decade ago, and it wasn't really about parenting, it was just about the psychology of leadership, which is what parenting is, which is what sales management is. And the gist of it, and I'm paraphrasing, is that words basically have no meaning. So if you catch yourself as a parent screaming and constantly saying, "Why won't they listen to me?" and I like you and you turn up the volume, turn up the intensity, you turn up the frequency, that's not power. Like that's a reaction to the absence of real consequences. The the yelling becomes the consequence instead of a way to communicate one.

And and leveling a consequence isn't something you do out of anger, it's the opposite. It's calm, like it's, "Hey, we built a system, you were supposed to do X, you did Y, so Z happens. My job as a leader is to to enforce that. Like my job's to to build that structure and then enforce it." That is the job.

And it maps straight onto sales management. You know, words aren't nearly as powerful as we think, and and people can people can tolerate being yelled at way more than we think, you know, because they know it's temporary. Once they know it's temporary, it comes, it goes, nothing actually changes. You don't you don't get behavior change from the words, you get it from the actions and the consequences sitting behind them.

So, the question I'll leave you with, it's the same one that that stopped the owner kind of cold: what are you conditioning your people to do? It's it's candid, it's direct, it's healthy, and you could watch it land on that owner in real time in the "oh shit" moment. Yeah, like that's that's the thing.

So anyway, important leadership lesson, figured it was worth passing along. Hope it helps. Adios.