What does A-player even mean?
“A-player” means different things to different people.
Most agree it’s someone who excels, is hungry to learn and who gets the job done –well. It’s someone who owns, and learns from, their mistakes. In sales, it’s synonymous with someone who exceeds sales targets and creates revenue. In short, an A-player (or, even better, several A-players) is a sales team want-to-have.
Steve Job noticed that A-players self-propagate. They like working with fellow A-players. Thus, A-players within your team will tend to attract A-players outside to join it. A-players inside will want to recruit A-players. Win win!
How to find and keep them
To get your sales team to reach this self-perpetuating state of sales utopia, read my tips on building a sales A-team.
But what if, rather than winning, your business keeps losing its A-players?
Below, I’ve listed five pitfalls I’ve seen Sales Leaders make and I advise how to avoid these.
Get in touch to explore how I can help you to propagate or recruit your team’s A-players.
1. Trusting (only) your gut
Guts are great but they have their weak spots. Unconscious bias (both positive and negative) is an obvious example. Others are subtler.
Firstly, an assessment process can never be 100% fair. One candidate might have paid to have their CV professionally written. Another might be a whizz at interviews (but less confident at selling something other than themselves!). One might talk your industry’s talk. Or be bringing in the big bucks for someone else.
You might be so blinded by these lights that you neglect to properly consider whether they’d be a good fit for your team. And whether they have the right skills-set.
Secondly, it’s tempting to instinctively hire (only) people like yourself. That strategy might work to a degree, but it comes with its own risks.
For starters, you probably don’t know what made you successful. If you trust only your gut you might hire mini-mes, or hire based on personality, or because of a shared background, or due to the name or kudos of a candidate’s previous role. When what you should be looking for are skills, sales competencies, and a candidate’s suitability for both the role and your team.
Using an objective methodology like Objective Management Group’s Sales Candidate Assessments gives insight as to a candidate’s key competencies and their suitability for your role, giving you more confidence in your hire. Learn more here, or get in touch with me for a free trial.
2. Inability to spot an A-player
Sales candidates don’t come with ready-made score cards marking them as A-, B- or C- players. Yes, with enough experience you’ll usually spot the Cs. At the other end of the spectrum, some A-players will have already risen and be ready to skim from the top of the pile (though you may pay a premium for the privilege).
But other A-players will be hidden. Perhaps suppressed by their previous managers, roles, and/or teams (see pitfall 3, below), otherwise occupied with non-career responsibilities, or not given the opportunities or support they needed to fully shine. They might not even have worked in sales before, despite being “made for it” in every way. You might have non-sales employees in your wider team who’d make excellent sales people, if only given the chance.
Again, Objective Management Group’s tools can help (read this piece on role misalignment). Their Sales Candidate Assessments for new hires and their Sales Team Evaluations for existing sales people on your team, can help you to pluck these hidden gems from the rockface, ready to polish so that they, and the rest of your team, can sparkle brightly.
3. Unsupportive environment
If you hired someone whom you thought was an A-player, but who then didn’t perform as well as you’d expected, a number of things could’ve gone awry. You might have selected them based on the wrong criteria (see points 1 and 2 above). You might have assumed that they had transferrable skills, whereas the company they came from had a much “easier sell” than yours (see point 5, below), or the individual was lucky with their wins or accounts.
If it’s neither of the above, it’s worth asking whether the problem could be your team or business. Some things to consider in that regard:
- A-players will find it frustrating to work with C-players.
- A-players tend to be self-starters so probably won’t like being micro-managed.
- A-players like to set stretch goals. Do your team know what is required of them? Are they able to do it, or are people, or processes, hampering them? Are they being constrained by their environment? Are other team members holding them back (overtly or unintentionally)?
- Are their efforts being recognised? A-players often aren’t the types to seize the glory. Check that recognition falls where it is due.
- What motivated that particular A-player? Check that you met their needs in that regard (remember, it’s not always about the salary or commission package).
- Did your company support them to be their best (see point 4, below).
Finally, before you write someone off, check that you’ve compared apples with apples. A long standing sales person may look like your top performer. But that might be because they are sitting on the best (steady and big) accounts. In contrast, your new starter might be doing a sterling job eking blood from the stone given the target account dregs with which they’ve been left.
4. Bringing down the grade
Are you polishing your diamond and letting them shine in their own way, or are you burying him/her in pointless paperwork or process, and forcing them to do things “your way or no way”?
Are you developing all of your sales team to be A-players or the best B-players they can be? How? By: Training (sparingly); Coaching (generously); Challenging (optimistically – you believe they can get there).
How are you enabling and supporting all of your sales people (and non-selling support staff) to perform? I provide sales training and individual or small group coaching. Do get in touch.
5. Right person, wrong role
Sometimes I see the right person (an A-player) but in the wrong position. Whether that’s a sales person in a non-sales role, vice versa, or someone who’s simply not free to play to their strengths. Coaching can help most people to improve across the board. But if your team is big enough to allow for breadth as well as depth, positioning people in roles that best fit their natural skill set can often pay dividends.
Evaluating all your team’s players, both to establish a baseline, and to see where coaching should be focused, can really help to flush out role (mis-)alignment. It can also help to highlight wider managerial or cultural issues.
Sometimes, a person just isn’t the right fit for an organisation. For example, someone who worked well in a large multinational brand with wider support teams on hand, might struggle in a high growth Private Equity-funded start-up (different: pressures, brand, and skills needed to access the clients).
An A-player should be an A-player wherever they are; but the world doesn’t always work that way. If you think that person could or should be great, it’s worth considering whether a different role (within your organisation) might suit them better.
As noted above, sales team evaluations will highlight that. Objective Management Group’s data discovered that role fit contributes to an almost 2x difference in quota attainment, so it’s well worth getting right. I’d love to help you to evaluate your whole team. Get in touch for an obligation free quotation.
Finally, if your team has a few B-players, that’s ok. B-players have their strengths and their place in your team too. Making each team member as great as they can be is a worthy goal.
Progress, not just pure perfection, is an achievement for all your team’s players. You included.
Keep on growing. Get set to thrive. Get in touch!