Curiosity-driven Management

I spend a fair bit of time these days interacting with Sales Managers & Leaders at companies of various shapes & sizes, and I’ve noticed two styles of sales management:

Fear-driven Management — practitioners of this style use fear as the primary tool of managing a sales team.

“If you don’t update your pipeline in CRM, you’ll face consequences.”

“If your pipeline isn’t 3X of target, you’ll face another set of consequences.”

Consequences range from negative impact on bonus to public (aka team-call) shaming. I’ve been very surprised to learn that there are some companies who’re tying a portion of sales bonus to manual data entry in CRM even for AEs.

Managers who use this style focus primarily on data volume (their version of Big Data ;) and any shortage of that leads to higher levels of anxiety. It almost seems that they view data volume as a proxy of how solid their management & control of the team is.

Curiosity-driven Management — practitioners of this style grasp that life is non-deterministic and hence, their primary tool is curiosity. Every important deal is a strategy game and they’re curious about what potential moves could lead to what sort of outcomes. They are least concerned about that useless data is sitting in CRM. They’re more interested in what can’t be captured in an “activity update”.

They don’t care about getting excoriated from their management if the team misses because it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is trying to proactively change the course of what might happen. And if the results are bad, these folks are happy to take it on the chin instead of blaming reps.

There’s a subtle but significant difference between the two styles and the impact of each on a sales team.

Interestingly for us (note — our software automates and analyzes sales trajectory data) we’ve found way more interest and excitement from sales leaders who practice curiosity-driven management because they want to relieve their sales team from mundane tasks and don’t get any joy out of seeing more data in CRM. They’re curious about solving the non-trivial problems and they know that enterprise deals are non-trivial. These folks don’t care about Big Data — they care about about influencing outcomes.