Why Your Sales Reps Secretly Resent You

…and what you can do about it.

“Sales is the best career option for people who hate to actually work.”

I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve heard various forms of that statement. It really is true. Selling as a profession isn’t about “work”.  It’s about relationships. It’s about connecting with another human, finding a way to solve their pain, and making yourself available to solve that pain in a manner conducive to increasing revenue. When I managed retail locations I was always keen to hire anyone who applied that was a musician. If you played in a band, you already had a leg up in my mind.

My logic behind that was this: 

People who create, record, and perform music do it because they enjoy connecting with people (for the most part).  They see things in their lives that others experience and they document it.  People share those viewpoints and they consume.

Wash.  Rinse.  Repeat.

Once I had a few managerial years under my belt I started noticing a trend. My best sales people absolutely hated anything that took away from them actually selling. If I wanted a push for collecting email addresses, I had to either bribe them or wax poetic about the virtues of data collection and how I (as their manager) would use the information they provided me to increase their lead-flow. My worst sales people were exactly the opposite. They fed me information to the point that my customer database resembled Jabba the Hut and was bursting at the seams with quality info.

Why did this happen? There are two clear reasons:

1. People who aren’t good at sales are great at gathering information because that information subconsciously validates their existence.  They could not get leads on their own so they felt providing me with more data would encourage me to hold their hand and provide them more easily closable leads.

2. People who were excellent at sales didn’t care about the information. They were getting paid because they were moving products.  Getting me good data didn’t increase their paycheck.  It just increased their workload.

Let’s look at the two major types of data that sales managers require.

• Call Reports:  I want to know which customers you called.

• Activity Reports: I want to know whom you met with.

I previously stated that selling is about relationships. As a manager, I wanted to have the details of those relationships. Good info creates excellent knowledge. Unfortunately my only option for gathering that info, and thus attaining that knowledge, was for my salespeople to provide it to me. So I, just as many others, created my own problem. I started requiring “reports”. Those reports ended up being the bane of my (and my employee’s) existence. I hated asking for them, and most of them hated doing them. Every time I found a new bit of information I could get them to report that would give us a leg up, I added work to their lives without adding dollars to their paychecks (directly).

Of course, in my mind I couldn’t comprehend why they gave me so much pushback!  I was paying them to do what I asked during the hours I was open for business. What’s so hard about just doing what you’re told? No matter how hard I tried to justify it to them I still knew they hated me for it.

CallProof quickly eliminates all of these problems.

Sales managers using CallProof don’t have to ask, “What did you do today?”. They don’t have to ask, “Who did you meet with?”.  CallProof reports calls, meetings, and events with customers in real-time! If your sales rep calls a customer, you see it right there. If they meet with a customer, you see it right there! The only thing that matters in sales is today and tomorrow. Yesterday can’t be changed. Granted, you can analyze yesterday’s data and forecast sales, but you can’t change it.

At this point, I’m sure you’re painfully aware of how you can solve the problem of your sales people resenting you. Stop asking for reports.  Don’t stop reporting data. Find a way to make it automatic. Create a great relationship with your employees and they will keep creating great relationships with your customers and your sales reps secretly won’t resent you.