7 Things Salespeople are Sick and Tired of Hearing From (Bad) Sales Managers

Sales involves a lot of pressure. Pressure from clients, pressure from management, and the personal pressure we put on ourselves to succeed. Unfortunately, that’s just part of the game, and successful salespeople need to be able to handle the pressure and push through to become the top earners in their industry.

Dealing with management is a big part of that. Of course, the majority of managers are professional leaders who are doing their best to drive their sales team to victory. But there are also plenty of types of sales managers who don’t belong in their position, and the salespeople working under them have to handle the added pressure of management that isn’t helpful (or worse). Here are seven things salespeople are sick and tired of hearing from sales managers:

1. “Back when I was on the sales floor…”

Sales stories can be fun to listen to, but not when they’re coming from your manager who hasn’t sold a thing since the late 1980’s. There are many sales managers who were once excellent salespeople, and quite a few who were never very good. Being great at sales doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be a great manager, and being a sales manager doesn’t mean you were great at sales. But there’s very little that’s as annoying as getting sales advice from someone whose own sales reputation is questionable.

2. “This is the way we’ve always done it”

Great sales managers are open to new ideas, and don’t shy away from trying a new approach to see how effective it is. In today’s world, it’s becoming more important than ever to take advantage of technologies and emerging trends to succeed in sales. If a sales manager is stuck in the past and unwilling to look at his or her processes critically, because that’s the way “things have always been done,” then it’s very likely that they will get left behind while everyone else adapts.

3. “This is coming down from upper management.”

A good manager will take pressure from above, and effectively channel is in a way that gets their subordinates to perform the best they possibly can. A bad manager takes pressure from above and magnifies it as much as possible so that the people underneath them feel like they’re under twice as much pressure. If your manager doesn’t want to take responsibility, and instead asserts that they’re just the messenger, then you don’t really have a leader, you have a messenger guiding your team.

4. “We’re scheduling another meeting to discuss…”

Some meetings are important, but many are not. Sales is a time-consuming profession and any time spent on anything except prospecting and closing deals is usually time wasted. Meetings are need to focus on only the most important issues in order to be productive, and they need to be few and far between. Sales managers that constantly pull sales reps away from the sales floor to sit in a conference room for hours are shooting themselves in the foot, and driving their salesforce crazy.

5. “Drop what you’re doing and update the system/paperwork.”

Similar to meetings, updating paperwork and manually entering data into the CRM is important, but not as important as closing deals is. Process is great, and an organized and orderly process helps the company and sales team run efficiently, but not when it comes at the expense of keeping customers happy and keeping new deals flowing through the pipeline. A bad manager will have you stop everything you’re doing to update paperwork and systems, a good one will tell you to do it after you close the prospect.  The best sales managers utilize a CRM that does the data entry for their team.

6. “What do you have going on today?”

Ok, it’s understandable that a sales manager needs to know what’s happening in their employee’s pipelines, but getting asked the same exact thing, day after day is exhausting. Very rarely does answering this question yield any tangible advice or results one way or the other, it only serves to check off another box. Again, we can’t really blame management for asking this question, but we can definitely identify it as something salespeople are sick and tired of hearing.

7. “Taking time off is for the weak.”

Working hard is very important. But burning yourself out is counter-productive and will actually make you less successful. The mantra of skipping lunch and not getting any sleep and not taking vacations is not only outdated, it’s been scientifically proven to be detrimental to an employee’s performance. Great managers know that they can get more productivity out of a well-rested and content employee, while bad managers are stuck in the past, making sure that you get burnt out as quickly as possible for some short-term gains.