Archive

Archive for January, 2011

Managing Salesmen

11.01.2011 No comments

With salesmen, you pay for results through commission.  What is there to manage?

I made the transition to management while an engineer.  At that same time, my main outside activity, sailboat racing, also made a transition from racing crew with a small role to starting my boat and taking on captain responsibilities.  With both, I made lots of mistakes.  Later, I started to educate myself in less damaging ways through reading and classes.  One surprise, was that the problems I was facing on the job, were nearly the same that I was facing with my unpaid racing crew, and even more remarkable was that the management books would often describe the techniques that I discovered through painful trial and error.  Engineers and volunteer sailors are difficult groups of people to manage effectively, but far easier, in my experience, than managing salesmen.

We pay salesmen almost exclusively based on results (not effort), yet they do not control markets, don’t make the products they sell, and have few control points within the customer.   Read more…