I am pleased to be introducing you to the book you hold in your hands, The Sales Boss: The Real Secret to Hiring, Training, and Managing a Sales Team, as I have experienced first-hand the financial results possible when an organization’s sales team is led by a skilled person operating at the highest level of sales management. My hope is that after you read the book you’ll understand all of the nuances involved in leading a high performance sales team and that you’ll agree with the statement Nothing happens until someone sells something. This is a statement I only fully understood after leading and being responsible for creating profit at for-profit organizations and a lesson I believe is critical to pass on to leaders at today’s companies. I’d like to briefly share my journey on the path to understanding the truth behind this statement.

Starting my corporate career as an industrial engineer working on the manufacturing line of a GE plant in Middle America, I could have sworn then that nothing happened if someone didn’t make something. I quickly learned, however, that a person or a business can make anything it wants, at whatever quality level it chooses, and price it however it sees fit. But there is simply no guarantee that it will sell. And if it doesn’t sell, then there is no business . . . period.

After a few years of working on the line, I decided to continue my education and was accepted into Harvard Business School’s MBA program. Over the next years, I rubbed shoulders with the global business elite and the who’s who of management academia, including the likes of Michael Porter. The interesting thing was, though, that while we spent a lot of time learning about strategy, leadership, and even marketing, neither sales nor sales management was ever discussed.

It wasn’t until I went back to corporate America as a marketing manager in a medical equipment business that I began to realize that sales was likely the most important function never taught in business school.

In my new role, I noticed a great deal of management time and financial investment being devoted to managing our customers’ increasingly professionalized purchasing function. From better selling techniques that refocused our sales force’s efforts from feature/benefit-based to value-based selling, all the way through significant investments in sales automation technology, the amount of energy and resources being pumped into better selling was hard to miss.

Even so, only a few teams and individuals met their increasingly challenging goals. Even fewer exceeded them. One thing, however, was common among those individuals and teams that were consistent top performers: They were led by a remarkable sales manager. The old adage noting that there are indeed no bad soldiers, only bad officers, began to prove itself over and over, every year that I observed what made top performance in sales happen.

Patterns quickly became obvious in those sales leaders who were consistent in their results. They were individuals who seemed to have a special kind of rapport with their teams and who made no excuses. When I asked their team members what made their managers successful, the answers I received were almost always consistent:

“We know what they expect, and we are happy to consistently hear about it.”

“With [insert manager name here], every week we have to show up and answer the same questions, and our answers better be right.”

“I want to be the best, so I want to work under the best.”

“XYZ is about as maniacal about our rhythm and cadence as he is about being accurate in our forecast.”

There were other answers that I did not expect, however. They were more subtle distinctions in how these managers operated. But, as I quickly learned, those subtleties made a huge difference in results:

“We know our manager has our backs and cares about us.”

“They always take full responsibility for our results. We always want to make them look good, because they make us good.”

“They make me a better person.”

Nothing really magical came up, however. No especially noticeable skill or interpersonal characteristic such as an unusually high level of charisma ever reared its head. This made it clear to me that, much like every other function in business, sales leadership is much less art and much more science. It is a process and, as such, has recognizable variables that, when managed and controlled for appropriately, produce consistent results.

Over the last decade, I’ve spent a large portion of my professional time learning about these variables from more than a dozen experts and consultants. I’ve even been personally trained and certified in well-known selling methodologies, including Miller Heiman’s Strategic Selling and SPIN, to further develop my own selling and sales management skills. It has been time well spent. My companies’ results have always spoken for themselves.

This is how I originally came across Jonathan Whistman and his Sales Boss framework. Based on the results we achieved, Jonathan has trained several of our teams, and his company evaluates all of our employees before they are hired. So I was delighted to read this book, as it provides readers with a framework to recognize all of the key variables that I’ve identified over the years as being “the difference that makes a difference.”

It offers great potential to progressive organizations and individuals who are listeners and learners, not sandbaggers. I have used its concepts at every one of my companies, and they work. Most importantly, however, the framework elegantly highlights the fact that selling is not a stand-alone process. To borrow from Churchill, it only represents the end of the beginning. I encourage you to read with an open mind and be ready for the transformation into a Sales Boss.

Ruben Salinas
President and CEO
Parsagen Diagnostics, Inc.

If you have ever been on the inside of a top-performing sales team, you know it can look like magic to an outsider. The revenue piles up, in what seems like an effortless process. Everyone— vendors, suppliers, marketing prospects, customers, management, and the sales team—is entwined in an elegant dance, the result of which is increasing revenue. The truth is, it only looks magical.

It is the result of a carefully orchestrated plan. My belief is that at the center of that successful plan is the sales manager. If the company is underperforming, it is always the sales manager. Unfortunately, the opposite isn’t always the truth. If a company is performing well, it is not always the result of the sales manager! I know this seems like a harsh view.

If you are the sales manager, you get the blame when things go wrong and only partial credit when things go well. I’d suggest you get used to it, as that’s the reality in every company and if you are to succeed you must be up to this challenge. You must believe that if things are not going right, you and only you are to blame.

• If the marketing department isn’t getting the message out correctly in the right places or with the right tone, it’s your fault.
• If the customer service department is failing to deliver great service and your company’s reputation is suffering as a result, it’s your fault.
• If your company’s product is out of date and not meeting the current needs of the market, it’s your fault.
• If your company doesn’t pay enough to be competitive, it’s your fault.
• If your company isn’t [insert anything here], it’s your fault.

The power of taking full responsibility for your company’s results cannot be understated. It is critical. If you can’t adopt this mindset, save everyone a bit of trouble and get out while you still can. You will never deliver results at the highest level. There are much easier ways to make a living than managing a sales team. The rewards are great, but so is the task at hand. In fact, I call the sales manager operating at the highest level the Sales Boss. The Boss isn’t content to manage. The Boss gets results. In this book you will find the real secrets to hiring, managing, and training a sales team.

A Sales Boss’s job is to deliver revenue that sufficiently and meaningfully exceeds the cost of delivering that revenue. If you want to be a Sales Boss, you must learn the art of getting the best results through other people. Sometimes these people will be directly on your team, but in many cases they will exist in other areas of the company, such as marketing, customer service, finance, and product development. Your success hinges on the ability to control and influence all of these spheres, as all of them impact the results of the sales team. A Sales Boss will never say, “That’s not my job.” Sales Bosses always ask themselves: “How do I influence this area that is impacting my team?”

Arguably, no other job is more critical in the success of a company than that of the Sales Boss. When a company is smaller, the salesperson is of central critical importance, but as a company grows, the importance of the individual salesperson diminishes and having a skilled manager in the role of Sales Boss becomes central and of critical importance.

In any business, nothing happens until somebody sells something. Nobody pays his or her mortgage, no kids get sent to college, and no retirements are funded until the salesperson is able to close business and get revenue coming in the door. In a company with a sales manager, the hiring, training, and success of the salespeople lie directly at the feet of the manager. The importance and significance of this role can be illustrated by a recent study that shows that 95 percent of the CEOs in mid-size companies have at some point in their careers filled the role of sales manager. Clearly, this job matters. The hopes and dreams of the entire company depend on the Sales Boss doing the job well.

In this book, we’ll start by looking at some key truths that apply to managing people. It will be critical that you dedicate yourself to becoming a student of human nature, because no sales forecast, plan, or report will ever actually result in something being sold. Selling is done by people, and people are messy. I remember an early business mentor telling me: “Business would be easy if it wasn’t for the people.”

Next, we will walk through the process of building a world-class sales organization: what to do in your first 30 days on the job, how to write a sales job advertisement, best practices for interviewing, and how to select superstar salespeople. We’ll discuss the specifics of coaching and mentoring your team as well as how to think about systems, reports, compensation, and the other moving pieces you’ll need to master in the role of Sales Boss. We will largely focus on the team directly under your control, the sales team, but the best sales leader will always remember the need to have influence throughout the company. Remember that if it needs fixing, you must find a way to fix it, even if it falls outside the official boundaries of your team. This book will prove invaluable to someone who wants to improve as a manager of the sales team, but will also serve the head of the company who wants to evaluate the performance of the company’s sales manager or who might want to add a sales management position to the company.

If you are looking for a quick checklist to evaluate how great you are as a Sales Boss or you need to evaluate the manager of your sales team, then understand that you might be oversimplifying what it takes. Read through the pages of this book and spend thoughtful and honest time asking yourself whether the portions related to being a Sales Boss describe the person you are or the person you currently have in the role. We have included a Sales Boss Scorecard on page 243 that you can use both to preview and later review each of the areas that are included in being a Sales Boss.

While I recommend reading the entire book for a full overview on all of the key components to being a great Sales Boss, you might also choose to move directly to the chapters on topics that you know you currently need help with as you build your team. Realize though that best results come from an application of all of the concepts presented in this book working in concert together. This is the secret. Why should you heed the advice in this book? Primarily, because it works. I’ve built, operated, and sold a number of companies that all depended on the ability to sell and build a sales team. I’ve “eaten my own dog food,” to borrow a phrase. I’ve kept a sales journal and recorded my personal sales metrics daily for the last 20 years.

I am writing this book after having worked directly with sales teams as a sales consultant for the last 15 years, working with some of the top brands in each niche. I have personally observed over 2,500 individual sales calls and participated in the coaching and training of these salespeople. I’ve attended many hundreds of sales meetings and observed the skills and abilities of the managers running these meetings and also helped them develop their coaching and management skills.

I can tell you that I have seen some of the best coaching and selling in the world, and I’ve also had a front-row seat to some of the worst. I’ll be able to give you real-world examples of both and share the impact that each has on the performance of a team. This knowledge doesn’t come from academia. It comes from having been involved on the front lines of management.

While working with my clients, I have had the opportunity to look behind the curtain at these companies and see how they utilize their customer relationship management (CRM) systems, how they develop their sales funnels and marketing, and how they approach the hiring, training, and on-boarding of new salespeople. I’ve seen how companies struggle to implement tracking systems and get the team to use them, and then how the team reacts to various tactics to get them to utilize a system. I’ll share these insights.

Outside of the business arena and prior to my work with sales teams, I was deeply involved in a religious cult, being raised inside the group from birth and breaking free from its control as a young adult. I won’t go into the details, as that would be another book entirely!

So why do I mention this detail of my life here? Despite all of the wrongs of the cult, it did give me an insight into how people’s beliefs about themselves and their environment can be shaped. I was able to witness the power of belief in the daily actions of people. I learned how to overcome and change deeply held habits—not only my own, but also those of the people in my group. The cult was a gigantic laboratory of human nature. I learned a lot about motivation tools outside of money or the threat of unemployment, as the entire group, including the leadership team, were volunteers who chose to be involved.

I spent over 10,000 hours voluntarily knocking on people’s doors and giving them the cult’s sales pitch. I also recruited, trained, and mentored many others to do the same. I spent many thousands more hours in one-on-one coaching sessions.

In many ways, building these “religious sales teams” and managing their activity was much harder than building a team for a company. I wasn’t paid, and neither did I have any money to offer converts. To join the Cult Team, you’d be an unpaid volunteer, give up many of your family and friends, and live as an outsider! This was not an easy sell, but I admit I had a pretty good conversion rate! Many of the lessons I learned as I witnessed human nature have shaped the insights I have utilized in helping companies find, train, coach, and mentor a top-performing sales team. While I rejected the teachings of the cult, I believe this experience has given me some unique insights into what it takes to create a winning sales team or to turn an underperforming one around.

In this book, I will describe all of the key areas that a Sales Boss should be focused on in performing at the highest level and building the best team. First and foremost, if you want to have a superstar sales team that wins consistently and demolishes the competition, then YOU as the sales manager must be a superstar. No superstar works for an average boss for long. Are you a little fluffy? Or are you game-ready? We’ll look at mindsets and specific actions that must be taken consistently for top results.

As you read, mark up the pages identifying the ideas that you can apply. When you read something familiar, the question should not be “Have I heard this before?” It should be “How good have I been at applying this?” When you read something new or something that you might initially disagree with, ask yourself: “What would this mean to my results if it were indeed true?” You might also ask: “What makes me disagree with this statement?” Perhaps you’ll discover that it is some past experience with a previous manager or your personality preference that is causing you to dismiss the suggestion.

I would recommend that before you dismiss an idea or thought I’ve presented here you fully understand the “why” behind your dismissal. I know that not all of the thoughts I’ve presented here will serve every manager in every type of company in every situation. I do know, however, that what I will describe works when skillfully applied. I won’t have accomplished my goal unless something in these pages makes you uncomfortable or makes you acknowledge that you could be better than you are today as a leader of your team. I believe that real change only happens with a bit of discomfort. In some instances, I will give you actual wording and phrasing so that you can visualize yourself having effective conversations with the people on your team. Adapt the phrasing to suit your personality, but first make sure you understand the impact the words are intended to have as you craft your unique style.

As you take on the role of the Sales Boss, you will be leading the sales team, but remember which team you are on. You are a member of the management team. You can’t just be “one of the guys” on the sales team. A good relationship with every department head and other managers will be essential to achieving the best results. Because tools utilized in the field of sales change rapidly and to offer you additional resources, we’ve created a place for you to download these tools. Please take a moment to register at www.jonathanwhistman.com/thesalesboss.

Let’s get started.

I love jazz and think the jazz club is a perfect metaphor for a top-performing sales culture. Think about what happens when you enter a great jazz club. In fact, imagine going to the club after a hard day’s work when you aren’t in the mood to have a good time. What happens? Isn’t it true that before long you are tapping your foot to the rhythm? Pretty soon your body starts to sway, a smile lights up your face, and as you look around the room, everyone is moving in time to the music. Usually you end up staying longer than you intended!

What’s happened? The rhythm has infected you and you can’t resist. The beat tells you what’s happening and pulls you along for the ride. The beat also informed the members of the band of the structure, and so a great jazz ensemble can allow an individual musician to riff over the top of the beat, adding his individual gift of expression, and then land back with the rest of the musicians right on the beat. As the musician takes off on his journey of notes, you can feel the rest of the musicians falling in line behind to support the beauty, and the audience relishes each surprising note. A great performance always takes you on a journey, even when you enter the club “not in the mood.”

This is what you are striving for when you build a great sales culture. You create an environment with enough motivational power that when a new member joins the team he or she is infected with the rhythm of your team and can’t resist getting in sync with the group. It is almost effortless. New members can express their unique talents “riffing” over the top and adding their gifts, but in the end landing right on the beat of the team. The rest of the company supports them and effortlessly integrates them into the team’s successes. You create an environment that carries even the seasoned salespeople through the times when they are not in the mood to perform at their best. Does this describe your sales culture today? Or are you more like a grade school band struggling to find the beat?

I’ve seen sales organizations that have rhythm, and you can see the transformative effect it has on people. I was interviewing a saleswoman inside of one such company and she said with excitement: “There is an energy inside the building as the month draws to a close. Everyone just seems alive with the certainty that we’ll exceed the sales target, just as we do every month. You can’t walk through the halls without noticing the tempo.” That’s magic.

If you were to walk through the halls of this company, you’d notice large TV screens with all of their sales results by individuals being continually updated for everyone to see. You would find screens that highlight which customers they’d recently lost to competitors and who were on a win-back list. This team didn’t like to lose, and they didn’t often lose as a result.

Imagine walking into this company as a new salesperson. What would you be thinking? You would instantly know that you were about to play on a great team and would perform better as a result. Any smugness you had about being a star player at your last company would disappear in your desire to prove that you deserve a spot on this A-team. This is the environment you will design for your team when you are a Sales Boss. It makes everything easier.

It’s all in the rhythm. What rhythms have you established for your team that inform them about how the game is played at your company? A great Sales Boss has well-established “Sacred Rhythms.”

What do I mean by sacred? One typically thinks of sacred in a religious context, but the word means that we hold something as highly valued, deserving of respect or devotion. To have Sacred Rhythms within your sales department, you must have established rituals that the team can depend on to be used consistently. We’ll talk throughout this book about what some of the rhythms might be. For instance, your monthly, weekly, and daily communications with your team form the foundational rhythm. The format and expectations of what happens during these meetings become another rhythm. Your team comes to depend on this rhythm for informing them what the beat is of your company and how they sync up with it.

Here is a challenge I see in many underperforming teams: the manager doesn’t have any rhythm! The manager will put a monthly meeting on the schedule, but a few days before will move the meeting for some unexpected travel or another event. Pretty soon the monthly meeting is a quarterly meeting, and this sloppiness seeps into every aspect of the sales team. The weekly coaching sessions become weakly done sessions, if conducted at all. There is no excitement in the halls and no cause for celebration. The month ends as though the team has been running on a treadmill set one setting higher than they can sustain and then, just as they get to the end, they start a new month already drained.

The sales manager makes bad hiring decisions. Sales roles are filled, and then the people are let go, impacting the cohesiveness of the team and sucking out the willingness of the team to get behind the next new salesperson. As a result, the rest of the company treats any new hire with a “wait-and-see” attitude before jumping in to help the person be successful. The manager loses any credibility. That’s not magic. It’s the kiss of death—indeed, a slow painful death. A Sales Boss doesn’t have that problem.

You are responsible for the energy, music, and rhythms in your jazz club. Would they make you want to dance and stay longer than you intended? Developing Sacred Rhythms means that you decide what needs to happen and that those items are sacred. They don’t move, alter, or change. Your team understands that’s the way it happens. They understand the beat, and they start to depend on it.

Not everything can be sacred; you’ll need some flexibility. But some things must be highly valued, deserving of respect and devotion, or nothing will be. Your role as manager is to decide what is sacred and communicate that clearly to your team. I’ll be offering some suggestions within the pages of this book, and you will want to pick the ones most important to you for the stage of development of your team.

Before we move on, how would you rate your rhythm? Better yet, how would your team rate your rhythm?