The secret of sustainable sales management

(4 minutes read)

Last week we talked about sustainable selling practices through a concrete sales experience. Today, we are going one step further… and we are going to look into sustainable selling from the manager’s point of view.

The management and drive of sustainable selling start with a change in the mindset.

The traditional sales mindset considers salespeople (as well as other employees) as self-interested agents. That means their work is fully contractual, and employees, by default, look for minimizing their efforts to get their salary and commission.

According to this mindset, the organization and targets of the company are split into small pieces and each of them is seen as a solution to an individual linear stream of individual problems. Here, the sum of achieved objectives is equal to the final objective. This is what I call “Management by objectives”.

In this mindset, every salesperson is responsible for the sales results of their territories only. The sum of the territory sales makes the sales results of the country sales managers. The sum of country sales makes the sales results of the global VP of sales. Therefore, they are all paid according to their respective results, which means that a territory sales manager has no link and interest in the global sales results of the company. Similarly, the global VP of sales is not very much interested in the sales results of each territory sales manager as soon as the global sales objectives are reached.

In this system, each salesperson works individually, and they have no interest in sharing their best practices, helping another salesperson, or cooperating with other departments as soon as they deliver their numbers.

Here, the focus of the team is on what to do and how to do it. Thus, people do only what they have to do. When the results fall short of expectations, managers tend to clamp down and make changes if necessary.

As an example, imagine that you are a country sales manager at a company in the solar panel business and one of your territory sales managers is asking WHY he must reach the targets. And your answer is because it will firstly, make him get his commission paycheck and make the country reach the sales objectives. And he asks, WHY it is important? And your answer is because it will make the company reach the global sales objectives. Then comes the same question… Why does reaching global sales objectives matters? And the response is because it will make shareholders receive more dividends.

How likely, in such a scenario, for this salesman to care about what is happening beyond his territory sales? The traditional system forces this salesperson to become the same kind of salesperson as the “Salesperson1” mentioned in the previous post. (Sustainable selling)

A sustainable selling mindset, on the other hand, goes beyond objectives, providing training, altering incentives, or increasing managerial oversight.

In this approach, managers accept that we live and work in an environment that is constantly evolving, consists of holistic, interconnected self-organizing systems. They understand and embrace the chaos. Moreover, they believe that effectiveness emerges at the edge of this chaos. They are ready to change and reinvent the rules.

They put their focus on meaning, vision, and values, rather than the objectives. (It does not mean that they undermine the importance of sales objectives though) I call this type of sales management “Management by values”.

Different than the traditional sales mindset, those sales leaders do not consider salespeople as self-interested agents. They trust people and the system, building relationships, and teams, remain flexible and in dialogue with changing circumstances. Open and ready for many possible futures. They believe in cooperation because they know that the sum of the work of each team member will serve a greater objective. Besides explaining what to do and how they provide clarity on WHY they do it.

Under such sales management, the territory sales manager in the solar panel business (mentioned above), believes that, beyond getting his commission paycheck, each time he achieves his objectives, he is, indeed, contributing the decrease of the CO2 emissions and therefore, he is helping humanity to build its future on this planet in full prosperity. Therefore, he will build his mindset accordingly. He will be more open to cooperating with other people in product teams or marketing teams because he will know that even if he misses his targets, working together with others will still serve this higher objective, the purpose. (There is a great TED talk from Yves Morieux, a senior partner from BCG, on this topic.)

So, the more managers and organizations come up with meaning, vision, and values, the more individuals will get away from the logic of self-interested contractual workers who look for minimizing the efforts.

It starts with the managers’ mindset change but it is not enough. This new mindset must have reflections on the incentives of the sales teams. Otherwise, it would be impossible to reach long-term success with the mechanical incentives schemes which encourage individuals to focus on measurable achievements only.

We will dive into this topic in the next week’s post.

Stay tuned…