The RESPECTED Sales Management Formula That Builds Loyal Teams
Adam Bensman breaks down how sales managers build teams that actually stay. He covers communication patterns, meeting schedules, clear expectations, coaching, and reporting systems that create respect instead of turnover.
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Successful sales management starts here. There's been a growing trend. I've received messages from roofing company owners, some of which are in rsra, asking for help to support sales managers. These are people that they've brought in. They may be great people, great company culture. The team looks up to them, trusts them, and is confident in them. What they're struggling with is holding the team accountable and really driving the company forward. And I remember when I became a sales manager, it was almost embarrassing for me and. And I'll tell you why. I was the youngest person in the company with the least experience, and I was thrown into a sales management role. Now, I shouldn't say thrown in. I earned it. I worked my way up. Why? I took initiative, I took accountability, and I was a student of a game. I spent literally hours every single day studying and learning. But it was a challenge for me especially. I mean, I look like I'm 12 years old now, especially if I shave. So imagine me trying to run a sales team. So what I'm going to share with you are the five secrets of successful sales management. To give you an incredible foundation to develop a rock star team. Have a team that looks up to you and respects you, a team that's excited to go to war for you, and most importantly, a team that does what they're there to do, which is to drive sales. My name's Adam Bensman, and I am so excited to jump into this video with you. I've learned a lot since 2011 and now working in the trenches alongside just some incredible companies, hundreds of roofing companies in 42 states and Canada, and being able to do it every day. So I'm going to be sharing these five with you. Let's rock and roll. All right. Let's hit our foundation. Five things. Okay, now, number one on the list is daily communication. And this, this actually came up in a topic, one of our leadership roundtables that we had of sales managers wondering how often do I communicate with my team? Do I do daily meetings or daily huddles or not? And the answers are different. And the cool part is that there's so many different ways to do things. And what I'm going to share with you, you may not need to say, well, Adam said this. Do it. I'm not, I don't. I'm not dogmatic. What I want you to do is take these concepts and be like, well, he said this, but, you know, if I actually massage, it'll fit better if we do it this way. That's. That's the goal, right? So we had, we have some folks that run a daily huddle in person. Every day their teams come to the office. We have others that do it on zoom and have a quick 15 minute huddle. Others that don't do a daily huddle, but what they do is a weekly or twice weekly sales meeting consistent. And that is the need to have daily communication. And the daily communication. What I mean, and I cover this in another video which I'm going to link to at the end of this is very important to know who's working and who's not. The group accountability for a morning check in and then a end of day report. And imagine if you're trying to lose weight, if you got on a scale and just thought to yourself that's my weight versus getting on your scale and having to write it down versus getting on the scale, writing it down and reporting it to the group that you're all trying to lose weight with together, which one's going to drive better results? The one where you report it publicly. Right. So that's what I mean by a communication channel. And in the video I'll link to at the end of this, I'll share with you the structure and the different channels. But the big idea is a morning check in where everyone states their big goal for the day. You know, what time they're checking in, what they're doing, what their goals are, who's working, who's not, who's sleeping in. Okay. And at the end of the day, how many sales they got. The well, I'm going to give you retail, storm retail, how many appointments they ran, sales that they closed. This is a number like I ran, I got two deals and then the dollar value of those, if you're in the storm damage environment, how many doors you knocked, how many inspections you had and then how many deals you ended up closing. Okay. So that those three are reported. And as everybody is doing this, you have visibility on who's performing and who needs help. Alright, Number two is your actual meeting rhythm. Now when your meetings are designed to help your team succeed, they're excited to show up. If your meetings are alright, everybody you guys are sucking, we need more sales. Pick it up. And by the way, you need to do this. Like that's not a meeting where people want to come together. People want to come together to feel part of something bigger, to feel like they're investing their time for you to pour into them so they can achieve their goals. So having a meeting rhythm, and I'll tell you mine at Least a weekly sales meeting and it should be about investing in the team. Now many of the companies in RSRA leverage our we do two to five interactive sessions per week. So they'll often rely on us to provide the content, whether it's from me or John Cenac or Daeshun Bryant or Cody Landals. That's who they use as a foundation. You don't need to. You can. And then they'll have deeper conversations about it when or another example, the team will be required to join one of our sessions and then talk about it as a team where they bring their big insight to share as a group similar to like a book club. So having a cadence where you're investing in the team regularly is mission critical. The other thing that's mission critical is having one on ones with your team. So I know what it's like. At my peak I was one sales manager with 30 salespeople. I couldn't do it. It was chaos. It was too much at the time. And I wouldn't recommend one for 30 people to anybody. Let's say you're in charge of sales. Seven, 10 salespeople. You know, it's three. You set a one on one and create an agenda. In fact, in my free training center which you can click the link in the description, I give you my one on one coaching agenda. What to say the questions to go through, how the rep scores him or herself, you score them and it's really designed to help them perform at their best. So that's what I mean by your rhythm again weekly and then your one on ones. Okay. Number three on the list is having expectations and accountability. This is huge. I ran a session in RSRA to teach people that you get what you tolerate. So if you have the guys like oh man, every time we say we're going to do this now and he doesn't. If you're tolerating someone who is not performing, doesn't do what they're supposed to do, how do you. How are you ever going to grow? So set clear expectations. And this goes into starting in the interview in the onboarding. But when you have clear expectations, you can hold a team to those accountable to those expectations. But I need to just get real clear into the weeds for a minute because the word expectations can be interpreted differently. My coach, Devin Bandison sent me this incredible training which I've shared in our community. The difference between expectations and agreements and the difference like I expect you to do this and I expect you like no one wakes up like can't wait to start my day, I get to meet my boss's expectations. No one thinks like that. But if we create an agreement like, hey, listen, our agreement for you to stay employed here is that you will earn at least $75,000 a year or you're not going to work here. Because we're going to be providing you everything you need, alright? I'm going to be giving you the training you need, the support you need, and it's up to you to do the work. Now I'm going to coach you and support you. But our agreement is we need X amount of sales per week or per month, whatever it is, and that's our agreement. Can we agree to that? Yeah. So that's what I mean by having expectations. It's actually, and I should have used that language in agreement of what the standards are to be part of the team. And when we actually hold them accountable to the agreements that you make as a company, you're not having to be the bad guy. It's like, hey, we had an agreement, you're not holding up your end of the agreement. What's going to change? What do you need from me? What do I get from you? And if we can fix it, we will. And if we can't, then we just got to part ways. So there's also a phenomenon, by the way, called the Pygmalion effect, which it's the rising or falling of standards based on others in the area. So if you, if you have everyone on the team that is like lazy, complacent, not self generating leads and they're lead babies, the entire culture will lower to that. Meanwhile, if you have everyone that's like out knocking doors, they're pushing daylight hours, they're hustling on the weekends, anyone who joins, they're going to rise to that level of expectations. That's a Pygmalion effect. All right. Number four is ongoing coaching. Ongoing coaching. People that get into sales are addicted, the good ones addicted to learning and bettering themselves. If you have someone that's like, I'm good, I've learned it all, you need to get rid of that person. The difference again, I heard Devin say this, my coach. The difference between a student and a master is that the master is always a student. And I may have butchered the exact language, but forgive me, Devin. So anyway, my point is people that are really into sales understand that sales is an art. It's a lifelong art. You may get really, really great at it, but there's always new things to learn and things to improve. So spending time to actually coach your people and to give them the one on one help they need. The best way to do this is through role play or if you're using things like Ciro and you have call recordings and you can provide coaching in there. But I don't mean training. This is different. Training is one to everyone, but coaching is one on one. And one of the things that a great leader does is they coach individual personalities. Because I know what motivates you is different than what motivates you. And I know that the roadblock you're having, maybe you're a perfectionist and you're just so in the weeds. And I got to know everything I can before I can sell is very different than this guy that's a bull in a china shop and thinks, I've learned enough, I'm hungry, I'm goal driven, I'm going to go get it. But he needs the brakes to learn. Meanwhile, this person needs the gas. And that's what I mean by coaching is learning how to interact and support each individual personality on your team to really work on their head, on their mindset so they can perform at their best. All right, that brings us to number five on the list, which is reporting and analyzing. Reporting and analyzing. Now this idea, reporting is understanding the numbers so you can coach the team by analyzing it. We're going to use the, what's called constraint theory. We're always looking for the easiest way to improve sales and we want to do it with the least amount of effort and then it continually improve, make continual tiny improvements. So I'll give you an example. And by the way, at the end of this, I'm going to link to a video to kind of give you this idea like coaching your team to close even more. There's a great framework I'll teach you in just a minute. Now when we look, if I'm talking to a sales rep and let's say my whole team is out knocking doors, but we don't have a whole lot of sales. Now instead of working on closing, I'm going to just break it down. How many doors are they knocking to? How many inspections are they getting? And if that number doesn't add up, you're like, man, I got to knock like 80 doors again. Inspection. What's the problem? It's the pitch at the door. So don't go training them on closing. Work on what they say at the door. That's what I mean by looking at the numbers. If you're looking at the numbers and all of a sudden you're like, man, all the average sale price is like $12,000. Last year it was 15, 7. And then you're like, wait a minute, we're in the wrong neighborhood. Or let's start offering upgrades to our customers. So when you have benchmarks to look at, and those KPIs, by the way, these are things like your set rate. So how many doors are knocked to how many appointments are set, your close rate, your average sale price, your customer acquisition cost. And then if you're in the retail world, you might look at revenue per appointment. There's a lot of different metrics that you can look at. It almost doesn't really matter. So start with some and you can make data driven decisions. But this way this will lean back into coaching your team, communicating with them, getting your rhythm, and then fine tuning the performance based on the key objectives you want to hit. If it's raising the average transaction price or increasing the close rate based on one of the three things that I'll be teaching you in this very next video, so jump into this one right now because I'm going to help you take what you just learned, then apply it in a way that's going to help you coach your team into increasing their close rate by focusing on one of the three things that you're going to learn in this video. Enjoy it and I'll see you in the next one.
