-A book review-

After being a VP of Sales, consulting on sales management for 19 years and after writing four books on sales management, Max Cates, author of 7 Steps caught my attention in the first five pages.

Those of you that have read my reviews before know that I score a book by the number of pages that I fold over the corners that include something I found of value; this book scored 24 folded pages!

Recently, I’ve written a lot about the emotional side of sales leadership. Max begins the first chapter, titled First Step: Manage Yourself, with the question, “Self-Management Question Number One: Are you a trusted leader?” This emotional connection can only be built when the sales manager has personal control. The author encourages readers to reflect on themselves, highlighting that without trust, the emotional bond necessary for a manager to coach cannot form. Without trust, the relationship becomes unworkable. Max’s approach is to ask a question and then allow the reader to think about it using examples, case studies, and definitions. He focuses on “Adaptability, Mental Toughness, Bad Boss, Ego, and EQ.” And that’s all in the first 40 pages!

After that Max takes you into what is necessary to build an effective sales culture by giving the sales manager the specific framework on what someone needs to do to actually make it happen. His five steps with real world examples is terrific.

After laying the groundwork, he transitions into Chapter Two, High Performance Teams Begin with Hiring. This is the toughest challenge for a sales manager and the most crucial. In the book, Max offers the essential framework for any sales manager to build the “systems” needed to find the right candidate. In my recruiting book, I used the phrase “Hire the Best, Not the Best Available,” and Max does a great job explaining how to achieve this! A few of his sub-titles clearly support this book:

  • The Science of Selection
  • Hire for Traits, not Skills
  • The Sixth Dimension
  • Body Language
  • Seven Tiebreakers
  • Red Flags

After we have our teams, as Sales Manager needs to Build a Winning Team, Become a Successful Servant Leader-two more chapters that gave me additional insights into what many sales managers fail to achieve. Based upon Max’s past experience, he uses TQM as a cornerstone of this total sales management approach and specifically provides the reader 9 main components of “Flow”. I kept circling and noting the various points throughout chapter four.

In Chapter Five, the author will open your eyes/brain into the power of generating higher levels of performance by creating: Sales Empowerment: Beginning with Ownership. Again he takes a step by step approach to help the reader understand the issues as well as the specifics on how to-do each action:

  1. Give Control to Get Control
  2. Develop By-In
  3. Empowering Your Team to Success
  4. Developing a Self-Managed Sales Team

Max then closes the book on chapters six on: Success Through Performance Measurement and chapter seven on Continuous Improvement, maintaining Success.

What I really liked that many books tend not to do is provide a Conclusion. He summarizes many of his key points with five critical needs of salespeople:

  1. Structure
  2. Challenge
  3. Respect
  4. Involvement
  5. Support

Are you providing these to your team? I hope you are thinking about your sales management performance and what needs updating, I know I was after reading this book.

I highly recommend any sales manager or executive is also their organizations sales manager to buy this book and READ it. It offers insights into the psychology of sales management as well as tactical actions to take to create a high performance sales organization.