How Do You Treat Your Salespeople?

I’m going to share the BIGGEST mistake I made as a sales manager! I treated the people on my team, the way I wanted to be treated when I was a salesperson.

Along the way I realized that some of it was working and other pieces of it weren’t. Plus, that what worked and didn’t work seemed to be different for each salesperson I had on my team. On top of that, it changed over time for each of those individuals.

Much later in my sales career (after resigning from being a manager… twice), I heard Marcus Buckingham talk about The Platinum Rule.

“Remember the Golden Rule? “Treat people as you would like to be treated.” The best managers break the Golden Rule every day. They would say don’t treat people as you would like to be treated. This presupposes that everyone breathes the same psychological oxygen as you. For example, if you are competitive, everyone must be similarly competitive. If you like to be praised in public, everyone else must, too. Everyone must share your hatred of micromanagement.”~ Marcus Buckingham

Now ask yourself a the question; How do you treat your salespeople? Is it the way you wanted to be treated when you were a salesperson OR is it the way they need to be treated to be the most successful salespeople they can be?

Will this mean more effort on your part, because each individual salesperson probably has different things they need to be successful? YES

How will you know? Conversation & Observation. Have a conversation with them, talk about their goals – challenges – obstacles – strengths. Observation, begin with what they say is important to them and see if that helps, then continue the cycle of conversation & observation (forever).

To get top performance from each person on your team – you are going to have to understand what motivates them as individuals, where you have to lead vs. manage and vice-versa, plus what areas your strengths will give them the most assistance.

Where did the idea of the Platinum Rule come from?
Although I first heard of the Platinum Rule from Marcus Buckhingham, when learning about StrengthFinder. When I did a little research; I see it attributed to many people, so I have to say I’m not sure who coined the phrase first (which, if you’ve been reading the blog for a while you will not be surprised, is DRIVING ME CRAZY).

If you want to do the research to figure it out – please please please let me know where the phrase came from! Here are a few places I’ve seen: Dr. Tony Alessandra, Someone else has registered it as a trademark, plus it appers in the Erica Goros novel, The Daisy Chain (2011) “Unfortunately we treat others as we treat ourselves. We should try being genuinely kind to ourselves and the rest will come naturally, like a Platinum Rule.”