When you started your day in the office yesterday, one of your fellow sales professionals steps to your desk and says “We are supposed to meet in the conference room in 10 minutes.  Something is up!”

While sitting in the conference room, you are informed that your current manager is taking a different position, and a new individual will manage your unit.  The new manager will be meeting with each of you individually within the next two weeks to get to know you, and to stimulate sales in the unit.

There certainly is nothing unusual here.  If you are fortunate enough to be in a sales position for any length of time, you are likely to get a new sales manager.  A new manager might come as a result of a promotion on the part of your current manager, or possibly a termination.  Regardless of how it happens, it moves you into a special mode that will force you to prove up!

The new manager who might be from the outside, or might be a peer, yet they would be “new to you” in terms of managing you and your team’s performance.

What does this mean?  For many of you, this is the chance you need in order to start over.  For some of the others, it is time to prove yourself all over again.  Getting the opportunity to show your worth, and your ability to “make rain” is important when you remember that it is your career and your near-term future at risk.

Politics or Good Business?

Job moves come as a result of a number of factors, including office politics, lack of results, promotions, transfers out, or even death.  When they happen, the ripple effect that they cause can be either a shock, or a benefit to sales professionals as it signals not only change, but a new order as well.

This type of change can have a positive effect on the careers of some, or a negative jolt to those who thrived under a particular manager, or type of management.  If the management change is a good one you may even have an equal amount of positives and negatives to the new order.

Overall, it is good to have change, and you as a sales professional can benefit from the “new order” if you take a few measures of preparation.

Always be Prepared

You know that this is going to happen, so let’s plan how we benefit from this inevitability.  Your new manager could come from your own sales unit, a neighboring sales unit, or from the outside of the organization.  The tenets of what I am proposing will work regardless of the origin of the new manager.

• Treat the discussion like an interview.  Be prepared to discuss your sales process (Black Sales Journal 9/12, An Interviewing Essential – Communicate Why You are Successful).
• Discuss your short and long term plan.
• Admit your shortcomings, if any. Be prepared to admit your shortcomings and how you are remedying them.
• Discuss key prospects and customers in depth.  Remember, that is the job of a sales manager, and they will have to answer questions from their superiors on these important issues
• Set-up your follow-up meetings. As you know open communications with your manager are important.

Make the New Management Work for You

Arrange as early as possible to do the following items:

Tap the knowledge

Here is your opportunity to get something you might of value.  Seize upon the knowledge and skill base of the new manager for any benefit you can get.  Learn anything and everything that you can from the new manager – this includes product specialties, sales skills, and prospecting tips.

Involve the new manager

As early as possible invite the new manager to go on some good sales calls with you.  You choose the calls and clients, and thus the situation.  Show them that you are the sales professional in front of the client.

Ask for advice

As difficult as it may be to do it, ask for advice.  A new manager that formerly was a peer might be the last person you want to ask this question, yet it serves to show what they are going to suggest in the future.  Swallow some pride and ask questions.

There is something to learn from any sales professional, and it is your job to pull from those areas that can give you benefit.

Keep In Mind

You are powerless to do anything about a change in management, but you’re not without the ability to make the change a positive.

Spend some time and effort in establishing the communications, and realize that anything that you can take from the new manager that will increase your effectiveness is a dividend.

This gives even more credence to the fact that you must always be the professional, as you have no idea who your next manager will be.  He or she could be sitting next to you.

We welcome your comments.

Any sales professional looking for that new sales position recognizes that their success is based on a process.  The sales process includes your understanding that each sales professional is different, and each product is different.  The most important part of that is realizing that each sales professional needs to be able to determine and articulate what gives him/her success based on their own level of skill.

In Black Sales Journal 2/28, How Many Prospects Do You Really Need we discussed knowing your metrics.  This was a wake-up call to some who do not necessarily agree with the sale process fundamentals.  I assure you those fundamentals exist, and the variable for each sales professional is based on individual effectiveness, product, and industry.

The most important item to know is that you need to be able to articulate the basis of your own success.  This is powerful in an interview, and you need to be able to do it cogently and clearly.  You will find, that if it is well rehearsed and documented, it will put you to the front of the line in getting that new sales position.

You Are the Expert on You

You have heard me cite the phrase “You are the expert on you!” as it is obvious that you should be able to define yourself better than anyone else.  Nowhere is it more important than in the interview process.  Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is one thing, and your benefit will potentially be that you may be able to sell someone on them and get past first base.

Knowing your process, and being proficient at articulating it can be the shot that you need to impress that hiring manager.  What is more important, two things can happen on that next interview:

1. You could be asked to define your sales process
2. You could be asked to define why you are successful

Either way, you will need to be good at explaining it, yet not glib or slippery.  You will want to show that you are successful because you do the things that make you successful intentionally, consistently, and systematically.  You will want to show that your routine is solid, and not responding to what happens on a particular day.  Your respect for the law of large numbers and volume will come through in your characterization of your daily effort.

You can give the best presentation of yourself possible, as well as the best display of your mastery of your own “process” by practicing it in the mirror and with a caring listener.  Someone who cares enough to listen to you drone on and on until you have mastery of this important piece.

A Practical Example

The interview would lead to this statement and comment:

“Jerry, from what we can see your sales results are admirable, and enviable in terms of your percentage of goal attainment, and your ability to do this year after year.  Will you share with us what makes you successful?”

Jerry responds “Bob, I would attribute the consistency of my success to the regimen that I hold myself to.  In addition to that I wholly subscribe to the law of large numbers and their effect on prospecting and quoting.  I measure my success against my continuous activities and results and adjust my prospecting efforts based on my call (prospecting) to appointment ratio, my appointment to quote ratio, and my sold to quote ratio.  I track them and utilize them in determining my effectiveness and my level of future activity.”

Jerry expands:“I make 75 prospecting calls a week religiously by phone, and 20 in person cold calls per week.  I believe that if I do this, I give myself a realistic chance of increased success and earnings.   I reach all hard to get prospects by phone after hours, which means the hours of 5:00 to 6:30P, as I have found that to be a time when the “gatekeeper” is not on duty, and the decision maker has to answer the phone on their own.”

Then Jerry pulls it together: “What I do works for me and I believe in it.  My results are in the portfolio that I just handed to you.”

Why does it work?

Every sales manager wants you to have a system that works.  It makes management easier.  Your sales statistics are yours, and others have their own.  Believe me, if you cite you discuss your process like I am suggesting, and you are able to back up your claims, you will be a primary candidate.

When I was a sales manager, I knew my role was to get the most out of every sales candidate.  A candidate with the basics well in hand was one who would be ready for advanced sales techniques, as opposed to me pressing him or her for the rudiments.  Knowing your plan is more than rudimentary though; it is the start of being the true professional.

We welcome your comments.