If A U.S. Marine Was Your Sales Manager

Every week, at least, I get an email from Harvey Mackay. You will too, if you subscribe to his newsletter, like I recommend you do.

Harvey may be my favorite business genre author. I love all of his books. Not some, all.

This particular email had leadership lessons from the ‘Guidebook for Marines‘.

I’ve adapted it to sales managers, but I wanted to give credit to Harvey for engaging my brain and for a great newsletter.

His newsletter is all content and no fluff, so do yourself a favor and subscribe.

The bolded part of each lesson is from the Guidebook, the word after the bolding are mine.

1) Know yourself and seek improvement. You’ll never be all you can be ( I’m former Army and proud of it ), unless you continue to study your profession and your craft. Look for your weaknesses and improve them, do not practice your strong points, improve the areas where you’re weak. Be real and be honest or you won’t grow.

2) Be technically and tactically proficient. If you don’t know your products better than all your salespeople, shame on you. If you can’t plan a campaign better than your salespeople, shame on you. Know your job and work to broaden your horizons.

3) Know your Marines and look out for their welfare. Know what your salespeople face in the field and work to make it as easy as possible for them to do their job. Work with them individually. Sales meetings are passe. No salesman worth his salt will talk about his problems in front of his peers. Take him to lunch or dinner and never, ever share the info he reveals.

4) Keep your Marines informed. Never, ever let information get to your people by any means other than you. Never. The damn phones are there for a reason. Do not let me find out company news from a customer. Or a supplier. If I do, your credibility is gone. Shot. Ruined. Forever.

5) Set the example. You’re the standard, whether you like it or not. Sorry. Never ever let me see you sweat, unless it’s beside me in the trenches. Set the bar high and conduct yourself as a professional … at all times.

6) Ensure the task is understood, supervised and accomplished. Make it simple and clear what you want me to do. Check to see that I did it. Tell me you checked and tell me what you think of what I did … in a constructive manner. Simple.

7) Train your Marines as a team. Make sure we all know our roles and do not let the parameters get blurred. Make us accountable and make it a matter of record. Get us together as a team and make some of our goals ‘team goals’.

Make sound and timely decisions. All I have out there is my credibility to my customer. If I can’t get the necessary info from you to give to them, I can’t be held accountable to you for my goals. Make yourself as accountable to your salesforce as they are to you.

9) Develop a sense of responsibility among your subordinates. Give me enough rope to rope the damn steer. I can’t go to battle with a shoelace. Let me do the job and we’ll talk about it afterwards, not during the process.

10) Employ your command in accordance with its capabilities. Enlist me, equip me and then empower me. You will be the reason I succeed or fail, according to how you prepared me. If I fail, you should have known beforehand that I wasn’t ready.

11) Seek responsibility and take responsibility for your actions. Just like the point above says, a sales manager is responsible for the salesforce under him. If we fail, it’s your fault, not ours. Period.

Those 11 points are a good starting point for sales managers. There are plenty of other points that could be added.

Feel free to do so here in the comments or on your blog.

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