Chris Lytle - The Accidental Sales Manager. How to Take Control and Lead Your Sales Team to Record Profits

CONTENTS

Copyright 2011 by Chris Lytle. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Lytle, Chris

The accidental sales manager : how to take control and lead your sales team to record profits / Chris Lytle.

p. cm.

Includes Index.

ISBN 978-0-470-94164-5 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-06391-0 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-06392-7 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-06393-4 (ebk)

1. Sales executives. 2. Sales force management. 3. Success in business. I. Title.

HF5439.5.L98 2011

658.8102dc

222010053519

To Sarah McCann/Zola Gorgon

My two favorite characters in the world

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For every sales manager, VP of sales, and CEO who agreed to talk to me for this book, I am forever grateful. Your stories and willingness to share your best practices make this a much better book than it would have been had I gone it alone.

To everyone who has become a customer and a friend over the past three decades, I appreciate the trust youve shown in our products and programs. Whether youve purchased a book or audio product or flown me half way around the world to speak to your sales organization, it means a lot.

Thanks to Cliff Albert, Gary Buchanan, Tom Clevidence, Michael Draman, Phil Fisher, Ed Fratz, Ken Greenwood, Jay Leonardi, Jim Lobaito, Trey Morris, Dan Manella, Gary Miles, Tim McMahon, Sarah McCann, Garfield Ogilvie, Mark Peterson, Jeff Sleete, David Snodgrass, Kent Stevens, Richard Williams, Lowell Yoder, and Rod Zeke Zimmerman. I asked you a few questions, shut up and recorded your answers, transcribed them and all of a sudden half the book was written.

To the team at Wiley: I owe a big thank you to Dan Ambrosio for picking up the phone and asking me if I didnt want to write another book. Ashley Allison has been a patient and very fast editor, and Deborah Schindlar has kept the composition process going ahead of schedule despite my sometimes erratic writing patterns. Thanks for staying on top of things and challenging me to do the same.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Lytle, the best-selling author of The Accidental Salesperson , had a lucrative but increasingly frustrating career as a professional speaker. He had an obsession with finding a better way to drive real behavior change.

He understood that adults learn by doing, not by hearing about how someone else did it. He was frustrated with the start-and-stop nature of training seminars and the limited results that an occasional learning event creates.

Unfortunately, thats what his customers thought they wanted.

Undeterred, he set out to reinvent the way he delivered his own training programs. Identifying his biggest competitor as the do-it-yourselfer, he decided to partner with sales managers who train their own people.

His website Fuel contains knowledge bites (digestible sales ideas) that can be consumed in five minutes or less and discussed for 25 more minutes in a meeting. Lytle coined the phrase The Honors Class in Selling Instant Sales Meeting. Sales managers use his content to spark lively conversations about sales issues.

Along the way, he discovered how to add the missing ingredientaccountabilityto the mix. Teaching managers how to add accountability to their training translated into immediate, bottom-line impact for tens of thousands of salespeople at every level of their careers.

Lytle is the president and product developer of Sparque, Inc. the Chicago-based company he runs with his partner/wife Sarah McCann. He still speaks on sales and sales management topics to a select group of clients. Increasingly, he delivers his content on his website and through short Webinars.

You may have had a gut feeling there is a better way to develop the people who develop your profits. Trust your gut.

You can get a free trial of Fuel by going to or calling 1-800-255-9853.

INTRODUCTION

Congratulations on Your Promotion

If you like to solve complicated puzzles, a career in sales management will keep you perpetually challenged. If youve just become a new sales manager, youre probably excited, a little nervous, and pretty curious about what to expect. Fortunately for you, this book will slash several years off of your learning curve. If, on the other hand, youve been at this sales management thing for a while, the information here will refocus and reenergize you.

This book will introduce you to some very successful sales managers who have made plenty of mistakes and chosen to share their experiences with you.

Being a sales manager in a time of continuous innovation and destabilizing change is challenging enough, and can even be quite overwhelming for many. But for those professionals who get their kicks from solving problems and furthering the skills and fostering the success of other people, sales management is a gratifying and rewarding job.

I dont know your story, but I clearly remember howand whenI got my first sales management job. I was just 18 months into my current sales job, minding my own business and selling up a storm, when I got called into the general managers office one day. Upon my arrival, two of the owners were sitting there.

Were making you the sales manager, one of them said to me.

I was too young, startled, and flattered to refuse.

I had gotten into sales accidentally three years earlier. Now, I was being promoted. They werent grooming me to move into management; as of the next Monday, I was The Accidental Sales Manager .