We are convinced that he has mastered not one, not two, but (almost) all the tricks of the trade and that, with his leather tanned by years of meetings and negotiations of all kinds, he carries a guarantee of success and commercial performancea passport to exceeding objectives!
But what if things are not so simple? Is the senior salesperson still really successful? What are his weaknesses? What kind of power relationship does he/she bring? In short... how do you manage a senior salesperson?
Not necessarily competent, sometimes exhausted, often more reluctant to change, the senior salesperson is above all a specific profile that should be to approach them carefully to make them a real asset.
A senior citizen does not necessarily perform well!
In sport, just because you have 10 years of experience doesn't make you a Zidane or a Michael Jordan. On the other hand, you can be young and very successful. It is exactly the same in the commercial professions: "senior" does not necessarily rhyme with "competence" and "autonomy".
A sales manager recently shared an anecdote about a 45-year-old salesman with 20 years of experience who was quite successful. The salesman was transferred, at his request, to another region and there, disaster struck: he was no longer successful. No more prospects, no more appointments, no more sales. Despite his knowledge and experience, the person is in dry dock!
The mistake is to believe that a senior citizen knows how to do everything and to hide behind this certainty ("beware of belief beds") without seeing the reality of the situation. It is necessary to take the time to evaluate their skills, to identify what is missing, to see how the person works. They do not necessarily know how to organise themselves, find their prospects, manage their time, or appropriate new tools. A senior employee always has areas that can be improved, but perhaps sometimes less appetite to fill them, perhaps less motivation, which should push the manager even more to be attentive.
Worse, a senior salesperson will often find it difficult to share his or her difficulties. Where a junior is in the learning phase and shows an appetite, the senior will quickly feel illegitimate, questioned, and his self-esteem will be weakened. In the case of our transferred sales representative, for more than 6 months he took refuge behind a reassuring speech, using the pretext of discovering a new market. But that was not the problem...
Pure management
With a senior, we often find ourselves in a situation of pure management. To take the story of our transferred salesperson, after a period of careful observation and the results remaining poor, the manager applies himself to finding the solution. He analyses factual elements, remains assertive, treats the sales person as an equal and proposes a mirror effect. And after a period of exchange, he understands: it turns out that the methods in the new region are different. The senior member of staff was used to having appointments made for him, whereas in his new position he has to make them himself. He has to hunt, but doesn't know how! And the conscious and unconscious brakes linked to his senior position prevent him from expressing his difficulties. He thought he did not deserve his salary, had the impression that he was disappointing, did not dare to ask for help. Negative spiral.
In this example, the manager was able to reach out to his sales person with goodwill. Once the diagnosis had been made and the motivation validated, all that remained was to propose a corrective plan, put things into perspective and support !
Motivation is a particularly important point in the management of the senior salesperson. Sales remains one of the most difficult jobs. Motivation is attacked daily by rejections, and each prospect has to start from scratch, without any certainty. A senior salesperson, with his or her years of experience, can end up being demotivated. The manager must therefore know how to identify the problems of his salesperson and, more than with another, pay attention and know how he operates. He must determine what people are working towards: remuneration, recognition, challenge, etc.
But be careful, because one of the biases we often have when dealing with a senior citizen is to lose our objectivity, to let ourselves be impressed, to be afraid and ultimately to be unclear in the exchange. You end up communicating badly and causing a problem of commitment.
The senior salesperson, a champion of immobility?
The senior person, with his or her career behind him or her, is likely to be more reluctant to be challeng ed. They will tend to rely on certainties, on their habits, and will find it more difficult to make the effort to make up for their shortcomings (which they will find difficult to recognise). Over time, this can even become a kind of posture: "I've always done it this way, I'm too old to change! ».
A senior person will be able to compensate for a weakness more easily than a junior person by his or her strengths. These strengths are often real assets on which to capitalise, but they are rarely sufficient in the face of current developments in sales approaches. As for the points to be improved, the manager must work with the employee to bring them to the minimum required.
There will also be generational problems. Social selling, for example, can become a conflicting issue when a young person is comfortable with it and a senior person is lost.
Building on experience
Obviously, the manager must not neglect a successful senior salesperson. In this situation, the reflex is to stop following him, reassured by the figures, and therefore to invest time in juniors or salespeople who are having more difficulty: this is a mistake. In the long run, this can be experienced by the sales person as a lack of recognition, with a loss of motivation as a result. It is essential to remain attentive, precise, and to build on one's performance in order to spread it throughout the team.
In a sponsorship logic, we can rely on the seniors to accompany and reassure. Kestio I am currently working for a CEO who manages a team of 5 salespeople, one of whom makes 50% of the turnover. He wants to appoint him as a manager, which places an obligation on the salesperson to succeed, both in relation to others and to himself, but also for the CEO who would lose his best salesperson if he did not succeed in this development!
In this case, Kestio accompanies the sales person in order to develop his or her skills as a manager.
KestioWith its short and pragmatic mode of action, spread out over time, it facilitates this steering by small touches to maintain the right balance within the team between the generations. Kestio Kestio provides regular action in the right place.
The senior is also a bit of a memory. Their ability to provide anecdotes, stories, to create links and a common and shared knowledge will bind the team together. It is up to the manager to activate this dimension.
To stay competitive and maximise your chances of converting leads into future customers, it is important to optimise the return on your sales assets. Find out how by watching this webinar:
