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Remember the day you hired him? He was one of the many graduates aspiring for a pharmaceutical sales job. He did not have a great academic track record and had no prior experience of selling. But there was something in him which appealed to the manager in you. He had the urge to learn, the commitment to put in more than a day’s work and an insatiable desire to excel and succeed. You instantly knew that he would one day be a star performer.
The intense product training polished the raw diamond in him. And when he set out for his first sales meeting with his Area Manager, he was all praise for him. Over the next few months, he improved his art of building rapport with the doctors and pharmacists. He instantly connected with the opinion leaders that mattered most to you and also got them to prescribe your drugs.
You were right. He was what you call ‘a star performer material’. He consistently achieved his targets and his managers sang hosannas about his performance. He was adjudged the best medical representative of the year and also the year that followed. His sales were soaring and you felt it was high time his career graph did too.
He had proved that he was a great salesperson. And you were sure that he could roll up his sleeves and groom a bunch of young boys like him through on-the-job coaching. After all, he knew how to sell and that’s what matters at the end of the day. You gave him the much deserved promotion. You made him an Area Sales Manager and assigned a few bright medical representatives to work in his team.
Here comes the twist in the tale. His team was not among the best performing sales teams at the end of the quarter. You felt it is too early to judge him. He needed some more time. On the day of the annual sales meet, the story was no different. His team turned out a mediocre performance. As for your hero, he wasn’t even in the reckoning when it came to the Best Area Sales Manager Award. What went wrong?
Probably, there was nothing wrong with your Star Performer. And his team wasn’t perhaps at fault too. Well, are you prepared to face the harsh truth? Was he the only one in your whole career whom you thought had the potential to make it big in the sales ladder and then your well scripted sorry of success bombed at the marketplace? I’m sure you would have had a few more cases too. What happened with our hero in the story could happen with many other promising salespersons in your team. Realize before it is too late. You killed your star performer!
You promoted him because he was a high achiever. But great performance is just not good enough. Why? Selling and managing are two different ball games. Just because somebody is a great sales person doesn’t necessarily mean he would turn out to be an equally good sales manager. By promoting him only on the basis of his performance track record you transform your star salesperson into a lousy manager.
Am I saying that you should not promote your best salesperson as an Area Sales Manager? Am I saying that performance should not be the criteria for promotion? You got me right. You need to delink performance and promotion. Reward good performance with incentives. Recognise your star performers and honour them with awards. But don’t use promotion as a reward for performance.
You can make a good sales manager out of your star salesperson. But for that, you need to revisit your script. Why did you recruit him in the first place? He didn’t have a great academic track record. Neither did he have any prior experience in selling. However, he had the competencies needed to become a great salesperson viz. the urge to learn, the commitment to put in more than a day’s work and an insatiable desire to excel and succeed.
Every role calls for a different set of knowledge, attitude and skill sets. Before you make your star salesperson an Area Sales Manager, you need to assess whether he has the potential to be a good manager. He can sell well but can he coach others? He executes well but can he plan, organize, direct and control his team equally well? He is self motivated but does he know how to motivate his team? He has consistently achieved his targets but that doesn’t mean that he will be good at assigning targets to his team and ensuring that they achieve the same.
Managers are not born. They are groomed. When you recruited him, you knew he was good but you didn’t test him in the marketplace on the very first day. Remember, it was your intense product training that polished the raw diamond into a jewel. Don’t you think it would be a good idea to give management inputs to your star performers before making them a manager?
A manager straight out of a MBA school may not connect as well with his team as a star salesperson can. He has been there and done that. He can share his own experiences in the field and coach his team on how to plan their sales calls, do a good detailing with the doctors and do an effective analysis of their sales calls. However, you need to coach him on how to sit with each of his team members and help them decide their targets. He needs to learn how to stretch the targets given by his team members and while doing so how to give them a roadmap and make them own their goals. Give him inputs on presentation skills, how to facilitate meetings, leadership skills and how to analyze the sales MIS. He will also need a structured training on how to track performance and motivate low performers.
Let’s face it. Not all your best salespersons may have it in them to be good sales managers. Those who have the competencies will make the cut. So be it. Your mandate is not to make every star performer a manager. If you do so, you would have blood on your hands. It’s high time you stop killing your star performers.
Srinivasan Iyer writes management column in Express Pharma. This article is featured in July 2010 issue.
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