The dog and I were out in the field this weekend. She’s a Flat-coated Retriever, and she just lives to get out there and hunt. Not go hunting with me, mind you; no, she loves nothing better than hunting on her own. That old dog has great hunter’s instincts, doing her best work off in the brambles, where she knows the hunting is best. While she loves to hunt alone, she also loves to bring back what she’s caught, to show it off and get her reward. She’s really good at what she does, and when it comes to hunting, I'm probably more of a distraction than an asset to her work. Kinda like a lot of sales managers I've seen lately.

Well-trained hunting dogs know how to take direction and take initiative. While I realize I’ll catch some flack equating well-trained sellers with well-trained dogs, the analogy works. Well-trained sellers do know how to take direction and take initiative. If only there were more well-trained sales managers out there to offer the right direction and encourage that initiative.

Many of today’s top groups have a bad enough record in training sellers (just dismal) but their record of training their sales managers is way, way worse. Let me take the dog/seller analogy one step further: There are few things more disconcerting than seeing a well-trained hunting dog being handled by a less than capable handler. The scene is invariably the same: the dog waits, excited and ready to go. The handler gives a command, the dog is released, the handler yells a correction, the dog tries to respond, the handler yells louder, the dog tries to respond again, the handler yells even louder (with a tone of voice that drips anger) and the dog either sits down, confused, or just takes off. Everyone is embarrassed and nobody is happy. Think how many times you've seen a sales department go through that same scenario: The sellers are ready, the command is given, the corrections are made, the volume increases, confusion reigns and everything stops. Everyone is embarrassed and no one is happy.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The very best sales managers and the very best sellers combine into a high performance unit where expectations are clear, direction is precise, authority is used with a light touch and the seller is allowed to do their job without undue interference. The high-performance seller has earned that right. When top sales managers are combined with those who are less than top sellers, authority must begin with a firmer hand, until increased performance from the seller grants them a looser “leash.”

The problem comes (and it comes constantly today) when ill-trained or even untrained Sales Managers are turned loose to wreak havoc. It is no secret that our industry is one that has long been guilty of taking top sellers and making them sales managers, as if top sales numbers equate to management ability. Over and over again, we've seen that this is just bad management. Sales managers must get good training as both managers and trainers (and those are very different tasks) or they seldom become good at their jobs. However, it is a lesson we have failed (miserably failed) to retain.

It’s “déjà vu all over again” watching some of our largest Radio groups continually go through the same litany of errors. Hire lots of sellers, but allow no budget for training for the sellers or their managers. Announce lots of new initiatives that demand training and management skills from the sales managers. Watch the new initiatives fail to hit corporate targets. Fire some sellers and have more leave in frustration on their own. Hire more sellers. Fail to train them. Replace the sales managers… Many of you have lived (or are living) this story, so there’s little need to describe it further.

Of course, we need to train our sellers better, which is an on-going process, not a single event. It is part of the cost of doing business. But, more importantly, we need to support our sellers with a much, much higher level of sales management talent. One needs only to combine today’s on-going, difficult sales environment with the constant introduction of new sales concepts, products and initiatives, to realize that there has never been a more critical need for better sales management in Radio.

Unfortunately, any objective observer would say that our industry’s overall sales management capabilities are often very weak. And that generally isn’t the fault of the sales managers. The fault lies directly at the top, where so many of Radio’s leaders demand high performance but fail to provide the tools needed to reach it. To those in our industry who would disagree, I'd point out that in the dog-training world “jerk” is noun, not a verb. There’s something else we can learn from the dogs.