This is an excerpt from a live training by Adam Bensman about common mistakes sales leaders make and practical fixes. Core claim: ‘‘you will get the behavior that you accept’’ — leaders set the cultural floor by what they tolerate. Recommended fixes include: set clear expectations, get in the trenches coaching, enforce standards (no tolerance for part-timers/coasters), hire only A-players, and institute daily and weekly accountability rituals (morning Slack WIGs focused on controllable actions, end-of-day sales reports with metrics, and weekly after-action reports with one focused improvement). The talk mixes personal anecdotes, specific tooling suggestions (Slack, SalesRabbit/Spotio), and blunt leadership stance to raise team performance.
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These are the biggest mistakes that sales leaders make. And at the end of this video, I'm going to share with you the advice that I wish I got when I got started in sales management for the very first time. Now, whether you're a sales leader, being an owner running a small team, a sales manager in charge of sales for the entire company, or a team leader, oftentimes a high producing sales rep who's taken the new recruits under your wings, your role is simple, but it is not easy. It's simple because what you need to do is coach each and every person to reach their fullest sales potential. Because roofing sales truly is personal development in disguise. But we have to balance ourselves. We have to balance running the entire team. We have to balance individual personalities and coaching each person to reach their biggest potential. We often struggle with questions like, how do I keep my team motivated? How do I make sure they're hitting quota? What do I do when people get complacent? Now I'm going to be covering all of this and more in this upcoming video. You're about to watch an excerpt from a live training event that I ran. And at lunch someone asked, hey, what were the biggest mistakes that you made as a sales manager and what advice would you give me to be as successful as humanly possible? And that is exactly what we are about to cover. So let's get started. As a sales manager, what is my advice on the mistakes I made and what can we do to help you guys lead better? You will get as a sales manager the behavior that you accept. And I would write that down, you will get the behavior that you accept. If your team is underperforming, that's your fault because you're allowing it. By the way, I'm not you ing you as an individual. This is a collective you. You will get the behavior that you accept, tolerate and allow and it will never increase from that point. So if your bar is set to accept, tolerate and allow people to show up late, not work on Saturdays, be lazy, turn in one deal every couple weeks, if you accept and tolerate that, it will happen and it will create a culture of not high performers. When you raise the bar and you don't accept anything less than that, naturally the tide will raise with it. So my team, currently I have a players and aspiring A players. Actually, I can confidently say now I have all A players. On my next hire, I will have an aspiring A player because they're not an A player yet. I do not tolerate anything under that. I let someone go on my team recently, not because they didn't do good work. They did, but it wasn't a player. It was good work, but it wasn't great work. Why would I settle for good when I could have great talent on the team? So I let them go. And I use that as an example. I told the team, I said, hey, guys, I let this person go because they're not an A player and we're all a players and we have a culture here where we're all getting better every day. It's not just about sales. It's not just about making money. It's about having meaning in what we do. Being flexible, having psychological flexibility in developing new skill sets. And if we're not all in on this because everyone needs to be on the boat rowing in the same direction. And if I have someone that's not rowing in the same direction, they're out and it starts at the top and it's really scary. Well, how do I do that? And a few examples of that. And I learned some of this from Cody, who's my partner on the solar side and a fellow mentor in the pitch pro movement. I'm looking for my phone and it's right there. We use Slack internally. You guys can have any communication channel you want, but I'll share how we do it. Slack, we have a wig. Every morning, everyone posts their wildly important goal for the day. And it has to be something that they can control. Okay, so I'm going to go make a sale today. You can't control that. Not one person in this room can control if they make a sale. Because not one of you can control whether a customer signs with you. But what you can control is when you say, hey, my number one thing I'm going to focus on is doing this when I pitch at the door, overcoming objections three times before I'm out of the house. So if a homeowner says, thanks for coming out, we'll call you if we're interested. I'm going to lean into that three times with three different questions before, before leaving. And that will create that habit. So again, something in control. Then we have group accountability. So everybody sees who's up, who's working and what time. Then at the end of every day, there's a sales report. My team, what we post is our sales total dollar amounts, the number of customers, the number of appointments they had, their no shows, and then the number of new appointments booked on their calendar for you, that could be the number of doors knocked and or the number of appointments generated, the number of Deals closed and deal value. And if you're storm, you can just count them as contingencies. Every day that's posted and now everybody sees what everybody's doing and then every in Slack, in a channel, dedicated channel. What was that? If you're in a position to use sales Rabbit or Spotio, do that. If you're not. Because there are some folks that are 1099, they don't want to be dabbling with that software because of the tracking and yada yada. But yes, that can be there. My point, however you track it, is the details. The key point is that we have group accountability on what am I focusing on today? What did my day look like? Because when you have a culture of people who are hustling, you know other people are watching, it'll raise the bar. Pressure is a good thing. I do better under pressure myself and I think most good salespeople do. The people that don't want pressure are coasters. And I don't do coasters. I don't do coasters and I don't do part timers. Sorry, if there's part timers in this room, I don't do part timers. They're a waste of my time. Go all in or get all out. That's my view. Sorry for the people I just pissed off. And hopefully that's the people that said, why am I doing this part time? The rare exception, I work with a lot of firefighters that refuse to stop firefighting because it's like their passion and love. But it's funny because the couple that I work with are multi million dollar salespeople. And it's like part time. I'm like, you could stop risking your life every day. But anyway. And then every Friday everyone's required to do a weekly report. So these are different channels in Slack, the wig sales. And then it's called weekly reports. And everyone does an after action report that goes like this. What did I do? Well, this week forces them to look back and coach themselves. I do them after every single event. Every event I do, I do an after action report when I'm on my flight home. So I write down what I did. Well, I wrote down what I could do differently. Which will tell you the common themes. Stop cursing so much on stage. Stop saying stupid things on stage. Make sure I'm set up and prepared. Oh, I forgot to hit this piece in this order. Number four was my after action report from last time. I failed to go into some of the depth and detail of why people, why we need to say yes. So it was a correction for this time. Okay. And then what I can I'll do for what I can do better. I pick one thing and that's my action plan for next week so the team has something to focus on. So Melissa, for example, on my team her action item was to have more energy on her calls and more enthusiasm. Matt's was to follow the system. Kennedy's I can't remember but I just gave her feedback on it. So what this ends up doing is raising the bar. And I realized I got pissed when my team wasn't performing and I realized that it was 100% my fault. So the mistakes I made was not having clear expectations, not getting in the trenches with them and then tolerating subpar performance. The fix have structure, have group accountability, tolerate nothing but that and then the right people will join your team. Does that answer your question? Sweet.
