For those of you who are familiar with my series of articles about Bob - the worst salesperson ever - you can catch up by enjoying, laughing, and making fun of him here.  12 of the articles that show up on that page are about Bob!

Today, I reviewed the worst OMG evaluation of a sales manager that I have ever seen.  It was literally the worst because he was in the 1 percentile, meaning that 99% of all sales managers are stronger than he is.  

As I reviewed it, I said to myself, "If Bob were promoted to sales manager (I don't even want to put that thought out there), this is what it would look like."

There are so many reasons as to why he is so bad and I'll share the most important reasons below.

The first thing I noticed was his score of 19 on the Sales Coaching competency.  He lacks the skills and perhaps thankfully, he doesn't actually do any coaching but when his salespeople ask for help the only help they get is technical or pricing help.

Did you see the score of 15 for Pipeline Management?  Those 15 points are because he does pipeline reviews --- by himself!  Can you believe it? A sales manager that doesn't review the pipeline with his salespeople!

Even if he wanted to coach and hold his salespeople accountable, he wouldn't be able to because they don't even like him.  OMG's Sales Team evaluation showed that his salespeople don't trust his intentions, they don't respect him, and worst of all, he is focused on himself, instead of his team.  He takes credit for wins and points his finger at them for losses.  Trust, respect, relationships and team focus are prerequisites for coaching to have any chance of working - and that's assuming that there will actually be coaching .

His score for holding salespeople accountable was even worse, coming in at zero. All of his salespeople made excuses for their lack of performance and he does not challenge them on their excuses because he too is an excuse maker as evidenced by his Responsibility score of zero.

Then there is his Sales Management DNA.  For the simplest of sales management roles, a sales manager should have a minimum Sales Management DNA of at least 68 and much higher for more demanding roles, with minimums ranging from 72-82.  His Sales Management DNA is only 52 and it was skewed up because of his one strong DNA score of 83 for the Comfortable Discussing Money competency. 

Without that one strong score bringing up Sales Management DNA his DNA score would have been in the 40's!  I've never seen one that low before!

The two bright spots are that he scored 68 on the Sales Process competency, and 77 on Selling Value.

His Sales VP really likes him and she doesn't want to lose him. She is hoping and praying that he can be trained and coached up to be a more effective Sales Manager.  Unfortunately, his score for Commitment to Sales Management success is only 30.  With a Commitment score this low, there is very little chance that he will do the work, overcome his weaknesses or change.

Only 18% of all Sales Managers should be in a sales management role and only 7% are any good at coaching salespeople and this individual should not even be in sales.

Image copyright 123RF

I've talked a lot about excuse making and the powerful difference between using your index finger, which points outward, versus your thumb, which points inward.  Today, Brandon Steiner wrote a great little article about taking responsibility.

This video provides another perspective on Excuse Making and how bad that is for sales organization.

The big thing with Excuse Making is that until the excuse making stops, nothing can change.  So if you want to see improvements in effectiveness, growth in revenue, and a jump in profit, salespeople must execute in a fundamentally different way.  When they rationalize about what happened, accepting that allows them to repeat the mistake.  When they take responsibility, you can ask what they could have done differently.  Excuse Making = Status Quo.  Responsibility = Change.

In the past two months I have been a guest on several shows and the interviews were all quite good!  You might be interested in catching:

• The Smart Sales Pro Interview where I talked about Sales DNA
• The Growth Institute Blog where I wrote about Why Sales Training Doesn't Work
• Will Barron - The Salesman Red interviewed me about Why Salespeople Struggle
• Rapid Learning Institute featured me as the sales selection and hiring expert in this Webinar on preventing hiring mistakes.
• I wrote about the Benefits of Getting your Sales Process right on the Growth Institute Blog
• Will Barron recently interviewed me on sales weaknesses and it was a really good interview. You can watch or listen to it here.
• Lori Richardson recently interviewed me on similar topics too - another really good interview, that you can get here.