We're convinced that he's 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's a guarantee of success and sales performance. a guarantee of success and sales performancea passport to exceeding objectives!
But what if things weren't so simple? Is the senior salesperson always a top performer? What are their weaknesses? What balance of power does he or she bring to the table? 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 needs to be approach with care to make them a real asset.
Seniors don't have to perform!
In sport, it's not because you have 10 years' experience that you become a Zidane or a Michael Jordan. On the other hand, you can be young and still perform very well. It's exactly the same in the commercial professions: "senior" doesn't necessarily rhyme with "competence" and "autonomy".
A sales manager recently shared an anecdote about a 45-year-old salesman with 20 years' experience, who was quite successful. At his request, the salesman was transferred to another region, and then disaster struck: he had achieved nothing. No more prospects, no more appointments, no more sales. Despite all his knowledge and experience, he's in dry dock!
The mistake is to believe that a senior can do everything, and to hide behind this certainty ("beware of belief beds") without seeing the reality of the situation. You need to take the time to assess their skills, identify what's missing and see how they work. They don't necessarily know how to organize themselves, find their prospects, manage their time or take on new tools. A senior employee will always have areas for improvement, but may sometimes have less appetite for filling them, or perhaps less motivation, which should push the manager to be even more attentive.
Worse still, a senior salesperson will often find it hard 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 undermined. In the case of our transferred sales rep, for more than 6 months he took refuge behind a reassuring discourse, using the pretext of discovering a new market. But that wasn't the problem...
Pure management
With a senior manager, we often find ourselves in a pure management situation. To take the story of our transferred sales rep, after a period of careful observation, and with results still poor, the manager sets about finding the solution. He analyzes factual elements, remains assertive, treats the sales rep as an equal, and proposes a mirror effect. And after a while, he understands: it turns out that the methods in the new region are different. The senior salesman was used to having appointments made for him, whereas in his new position, he has to do it himself. He has to hunt, but doesn't know how! And the conscious and unconscious obstacles linked to his senior position prevent him from expressing his difficulties. He thought he didn't deserve his salary, had the impression of disappointing people, and didn't dare ask for help. Negative spiral.
In this example, the manager was able to reach out to his sales rep in a benevolent manner. Once the diagnosis had been made and motivation validated, all that remained was to propose a corrective plan, put things into perspective and support !
Motivation is a particularly important aspect of senior sales management. Sales remains one of the most difficult professions. Motivation is attacked daily by rejections, and with every prospect you have to start from scratch, without any certainty. Senior salespeople, with all their years of experience, can end up demotivated. That's why managers need to know how to identify their sales rep's problems and, more than with any other person, to pay attention and get to know the way they work. They need to know what people are really into: remuneration, recognition, challenge...
But beware: one of the most common biases when dealing with a senior member of staff is to lose your objectivity, to let yourself be impressed, to be afraid and, ultimately, to be unclear in the exchange. You end up miscommunicating and creating a commitment problem.
Is the senior salesperson a champion of immobility?
Seniors, with their career behind them, are likely to find it harder to challenge themselves. They will tend to rely on certainties and habits, and will find it harder to make the effort to make up for their shortcomings (which they will have difficulty recognizing). 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 salesperson is more likely than a junior to be able to compensate for a weakness with his or her strengths. These strengths are often real assets on which to capitalize, but are rarely sufficient in the face of today's evolving sales approaches. As for areas for improvement, the manager must work with the employee to bring them down to the minimum required.
There will also be generational problems. Social selling, for example, can become a source of conflict when a young person is comfortable with it and a senior person is at a loss.
Building on experience
Of course, the manager must not neglect a successful senior salesperson. In this situation, the reflex is to stop following him/her, reassured by the figures, and therefore to invest time on juniors or salespeople in greater difficulty: this is a mistake. In the long term, this can be seen by the sales person as a lack of recognition, with a consequent loss of motivation. It's vital to remain attentive and precise, and to build on one's performance to spread it throughout the team.
As part of a sponsorship program, we can rely on seniors to provide support and reassurance. Kestio is currently working for a General Manager who manages a team of 5 salespeople, one of whom accounts for 50% of sales. He wants to appoint him as manager, which places an obligation on the salesperson to succeed, not only vis-à-vis the others and himself, but also for the CEO, who would lose his best salesperson if he didn't succeed!
In this case, Kestio supports the sales person in his or her managerial skills.
Kestiowith its short, pragmatic, time-distributed approach, makes it easy to manage this process in small steps, to maintain the right balance between generations within the team. Kestio provides regular action in the right place.
The senior is also a bit of a memory. Their ability to contribute anecdotes and stories, to create links and shared knowledge, will bind the team together. It's up to the manager to activate this dimension.
To stay competitive and maximize your chances of converting your leads into future customers, it is important to optimize the performance of your sales assets. Find out how by watching this webinar:
