Zach Selch recommends Mike Weinberg's Sales Management Simplified for anyone stepping into a management role. He divides managers into three groups: those who read and apply it, those too comfortable to try, and newly promoted ones who can transform their results. Unless you're hitting double-digit growth, Selch says, you need this book's framework.
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Hi, I'm at SVO Airport in Moscow. It's one of the 2 big airports, and I'm not quite sure how to pronounce it correctly, and it's 4 in the morning, so I'm not even going to try. I want to talk about Sales Management Simplified by Mike Weinberg, which is a really good book. It's one of those books that I read and I think, I could have written that, or I would have liked to have written that. Let me tell you 2 things very simply. One, nothing in there that I disagree with. And 2, if one of my kids or one of my friends was entering into sales management for the first time, I'd buy them this book. And going forward, I probably will. It's a great gift for a new sales manager. It covers everything you really need to know to be a starting sales manager. Now, I don't mean to sound like it's an elementary book. You could probably make a very, very good solid living for the rest of your life as a top-performing sales manager just from the tools you're going to get out of this book. What I'd say with sales managers, and I know a lot of sales managers, a lot of my friends are sales managers. I divide sales managers into 3 groups. One is people who are going to read this and go, yeah, that pretty much makes sense. I do most of the stuff in this book. I try to do all of it. I learned 1 or 2 new things. Then there's a group of people who read it and go, oh yeah, that makes sense, but boy, I don't have time to do that. And I make a good living. I took my wife on vacation last year. I don't really have to hit numbers every year. I'm fine. And they won't implement any of this, right? That's the group that— it's a very common group. And then the third group are going to be the young people or the new people or the people who don't really understand, who got into it because they were an engineer or they were a family member or something like that, and they fell into sales management. And they're going to really be able to use this and improve their performance. Dramatically, I think. You know, you know a lot of sales managers who just don't try. I had a friend, or I know a guy, and I heard a couple of his reports talking a while back. And they said, "Oh, it's great. He's having a he's going to be hosting our sales meeting this weekend. That way, somebody will keep track of who wants a tuna sandwich and who wants a chicken sandwich." Right? Because they had absolutely no respect for him as a sales manager. Sales manager. He wasn't doing any work as a sales manager. He was basically just doing things like taking attendance and that kind of thing. And a lot of sales managers fall into that. And a lot of companies, that's what they want from their sales managers. This book will give you some tools to really perform. And again, I'm sure there are people looking at this and they're saying, oh well, I've grown 3% to 5% a year for the past 10 years. I'm pretty good. I don't need anything. Nah. If you're not a top performer, if you're not growing, you know, certainly double digits, maybe even triple digits every now and again, you should read this. Certainly read it. You know, if you want to come back to me and say, I read it and I do everything here, good for you. But you're probably not. If you're not a top performer year after year, you're probably not doing this every year. Remember, when you're ready to grow your international sales, reach out to us. We can help.
