Leaders and Managers, Why Are You The Problem?

"Expose the cracks, don't paper them over", says #TamaraMcMillen. She is a breath of fresh air in sales leadership. Until recently she was the EVP of Sales for Virgin Media, is a non-Exec with CSO UK and a relentless advocate for diversity and inclusion. Consistently helping her teams smash quota,We explore her journey as a woman in tech sales and leadership - the highs and lows, obstacles and prejudices, and the missed opportunity these biases represent. Her emphasis is on creating intentional, cognitive diversity to improve the quality and richness of thinking.

Tamara shares her insights and lessons to build, enable and develop high performing salespeople and teams.

We explore the challenges with the right and wrong pre-onboarding, onboarding, training, coaching, measurement and sales enablement of your team.

She observes that you must meet your new employee where they are in their life, and right from the starting gate have a transparent conversation about where their gaps are. She is passionate that you have a moral obligation as leaders and hiring managers to treat new employees as human beings. They join a company and hope to be successful. It is your responsibility to make sure you make no assumptions, you listen, you question and you understand the individual so you can tailor your approach to get the best out of them. If any one of your people fail in role, you are responsible for their failure. if your salespeople fail in role that is a teaching moment for the manager. How did you let your salesperson down?

We discuss why the Player/Manager/Coach hybrid role rarely works well for anyone. In start ups there is a brief window where that is a necessity but why you must quickly separate these functions to stop yourself from failing at all of them.  

We discuss the shameful statistic that the average turnover in sales is 34%. Imagine if you recruited and hired well, did a good job of onboarding and developing your people, how much faster you would get the right people up to speed and how much more profit you will have to invest in developing them and recruiting more A-players. It takes at least 2 years for salesperson to hit their full stride, so if you are turning over salespeople at 12-18 month cycles, you never achieve optimal performance and then you reset from scratch. Crazy and wasteful.

Symptoms like 7/8 first meetings don't result in a second meeting because of lack of pre-call planning, rehearsal, post-call debriefing, lack of coaching and ride-along coaching. She explains the importance of the partnership between sales management and leadership, L&D, HR and sales enablement. Tamara also explains the danger of letting people from the bottom 80% of your sales team spend time with new hires.

She highlights the critical importance of leaders having a growth mindset, understanding that selling is a team sport, and having the courage to stand up to investors to ensure that you can implement a long term plan instead of sacrificing longevity in favour of rapid, uncontrolled growth.

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#TheInquisitorPodcast

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The #ScaleupsAndHypergrowthPodcast

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