[E80] Management Week: Part 5 with Donald Meador

Fifth and final part of the conversation with Donald.

In Part 5, we talk about:

• When the manager doesn’t agree with a new policy/change
• The Bargaining Stage with Sales Managers
• How to disagree with your boss

Make sure to subscribe and catch all the episodes this week to hear the full conversation.

Donald’s Info:

Website:

https://thecorporatemiddle.com/

Book:

Surrounded ByInsanity: How To Execute Bad Decisions

Bio:

Donald has survived mergers, promotions, re-organizations, and downsizing. Throughout his career he has led multiple teams of varying sizes consisting of both on and offshore resources. He has successfully led multi-million-dollar projects and was selected to complete a two-year program to become a lean six sigma certified black belt. Donald has a degree in Computer Engineering and an MBA. In-addition to his corporate experience he has co-founded multiple companies. Donald is an award-winning speaker and the host of the podcast “The Corporate Middle” where he answers the most common middle management questions. He is the author of the book “Surrounded by Insanity: How to Execute Bad Decisions”.

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Episode 80 – Transcript

Welcome to another episode of the sales experience podcast.

This episode ends the Management Week and the conversation that I had with Donald Matter, if you’ve been following along for the whole week, I appreciate it. Thank you for being here. I’m so glad that you wanted to listen to two crazy guys, two business nerds, a sales nerd and a management nerd talking about this stuff and hopefully you got some value from it.

Hopefully you’re learning from it. This episode is part five where we kind of wrap up our discussion. I know that we could have kept going and it’s very possible just knowing me that I may book another time for Donald and me to talk and record it and just literally see what happens because it was so valuable.

It was so fun and I know it covered a lot of different aspects. Again, if you’re a salesperson, if you’re a manager, if you’re an owner, like all of this information can apply to you were either it helps you be more empathetic to everyone involved so you understand what’s going on.

It could help you as an owner with how you implement change and what makes sense or how to roll things out or what to do when everybody’s not doing what you require, what you need for the sake of the business and maybe you’ve got to make some bigger changes.

Also, if you’re a salesperson and you’re seeing changes come your way, understanding the concepts, the logic and everything behind it, especially that sometimes decisions we don’t like are there for the sake of the whole company surviving the ship surviving.

It doesn’t do any good if the company runs into an iceberg because nobody wants to change direction and everyone ends up dying. That doesn’t do the company or its employees any good. So sometimes there’s changes in place that are only seen from the really high level and we’ve got to accept those changes or leave and pick a different organization that operates more of how you want.

But this is episode five. Again, make sure you go to the cutter consulting group.com website. Go to the podcast link, find this episode or any of these episodes this week to find all the information on Donald where you can find him.

He’s going to mention some stuff at the end of this episode, but just make sure the whole transcripts there as well. So if you’d rather read all this again, if there’s some things you missed, you can go in there and find that as well. I appreciate you listen to this.

I appreciate you hopefully putting these things into practice in your professional life and maybe even your personal life and I’m so glad that you’re here and for now enjoy the final part of my conversation with Donald.

All right, one last thing that I want to go back to talking about sales managers, so what do you think or how have you dealt with in the past for any sales major you’ve dealt with?

Here’s the challenge that I have with them is I’ve got a new policy I need to roll out or there’s a change or there’s something going on. Going back to the five stages of grief and what I’m going to get it from that manager when I’m rolling out a change and whether they agree with that policy or not.

So say I’m at the VP level, I’ve got a sales manager, I know they’re not going to like it. Here’s the challenge I have, sales managers are generally really good sales people who have been promoted to managers, so they try to sell and that’s what they focus on and so they are always trying to sell me on why it’s not going to work and they’re using every tactic. So what do you do about that when your managers are selling you on the not accepting it, right?

Like what’s the five stages? The bargaining stage, right? Absolutely. Denial. Anger. Now they’re bargaining and there, but they’re using their sales skills and that just hit your heart. What do you do about that? One of the biggest challenges is people hang on to that bargaining stage way too long.

They hit that dead horse as much as they possibly can and that’s where people get tripped up. And guess what your perception of them is now that they’re high maintenance. Yep. They don’t even realize what they did. They have no clue what they just did.

So it’s really, this is what I had advised them. You have the one rebuttal rule. That’s what I focus on. And I tell my team, you get one chance to change somebody’s mind after that move on. You’ve got one rebuttal, you get one shot and I promise you 9% of the time it’s not going to work anyway.

Take your one shot and move on that it by that one rebuttal as in like, I’m going to roll out a change. So I’m changing the sales script for example, and they’ve got one question they can ask me and hit me with and try to fight it or I’m going to only risk no, usually what a, so what I mean is that they have one chance to change your mind, Got It.

So they’ve got one chance to say, I don’t believe this is going to work and here is why, right. And if you don’t agree with it you’re done. You move on that’s it. They don’t get to come back to the well three, four, five times. Right.

So that’s actually one of the things I talk about in my book is you know how to disagree with your boss because it is a, it is fraught with peril if you do it wrong.

So one of the things I talk about is the right way to do that. And if you’re dealing with somebody that doesn’t get that right, they’re doing it the wrong way you know, you’re the boss and they’re coming in and disagreeing with every single thing you say.

You basically have to take them aside and let them know what’s going on and just say hey, I respect your opinion. You’re right, there’s definitely some challenges with this decision, but here’s what we’re doing and this is the path forward and I need your help to make sure we can implement this, Right and that’s it.

So you know, the more they do it, you can start talking about some other things, but that’s the right way to handle that is to take them aside and say, hey, I appreciate your opinion. A lot of the stuff you’re saying is right, right.

You don’t want to just dismiss people’s concerns because a lot of times they’re valid, right? Anytime you implement something new, there’s going to be challenges. That’s the point, right? We’ve already talked about that and so you just got to make sure that one, you address them, you understand them, you can say that’s great, but you’ve got to pull them aside and say, Hey, listen, you’ve got one rebuttal.

This is it,you can’t keep going on and on and on. Right? It’s not productive for anybody. Let’s, let’s move on and get going. And when that happens, too many times it starts to move into, and this is back to your perception. It moves into the, maybe this isn’t a good fit for you type of conversation,exactly.

So the thing is, I think most people don’t even know it, right? They don’t even realize they’re being acquainted sales people who just get into that automatic sales mode because they’re trying to convince their manager, their manager gets into sales mode.

People are just unconscious, and again, they’re doing what they think in their brain. And what’s interesting is when you have that sales manager who’s doing that, they’re rebutting and they’re fighting against change and then when their salespeople do the same thing to them, like they agree with them because that’s how they operate.

So they invite those arguments basically. Yeah, and I think that’s the challenge is that again, people don’t even realize what they’re doing and it kind of goes back to some of the things we’ve been talking about, right? The gut reaction is to fight, right? They want to fight.

They want to convince, especially with the sales, right? That’s what they like to do anyway. They will, you know? Yeah. They’re like, all right it’s a debate time. We’re ready to go and so you have to make sure one part of the way you head that off is what we talked about earlier is make sure all the company Mumbo jumbo and try to figure it out. Right?

You have to make sure and do it the right way to help head off some of that and you have to make sure it’s communicated ahead of time. Here’s what’s happening here’s the effect it has on you personally. Here’s some of the challenges that we may have because that’s the thing you can do as a leader too, right?

It’s okay to point out the flaws in your own plan, right? A lot of times we like to just say, hey, here’s what’s everything amazing about it. It’s okay to say, here’s the challenges I expect to happen. I need you guys’ help to figure this out, and that’s okay.

Like it’s okay to point that out. Yeah. Like I said, early on in our conversation, I’ve always done that just by default because that’s also how I sell. Not everything you sell like as a sales person is 100% perfect.

There’s always some downside. There’s always a negative, you know even if it’s the greatest thing on the planet, but it’s a 12 month contract and somebody may not like that or it’s the greatest thing on the planet, but it may affect your credit a certain way and it’s still going to help you.

There’s always a negative, and I have always brought up those negatives because I know that transparency is super important for getting the sale done the right way. Long-term, not just in the moment but long term. So they’re still a client.

So when they wake up at two o’clock in the morning, they’re not freaking out about something they didn’t know about. They remember I shared with them and I think that’s the same way with management, change management, dealing with sales teams, sales managers, is to also share that that good and bad, hey, we’re changing the comp plan.

You’re going to make more money, however it’s going to take more work or you’re going to have to focus on x, Y, and z instead. Yeah, that’s different. But you know there’s good and bad with it. And Ben, it’s up to you. And I’ve always said that, and this is totally up to you whether you want to go with this change or not.

I think most salespeople, especially the really, really good ones, understand people. They get it, they understand empathy, they understand perspective, they understand what motivates people. But for some reason when they get into some sort of leadership role, they throw all of that out the window.

They just throw it out and either they become a dictator or they just try to apply their own personality to everybody across the group. As we talked about, you already know the skills needed to be successful as a salesperson, you literally use them every single day.

People are the same. Whether you’re customers, employees, your peers, teammates, they’re pretty much the same. If you actually would look at it that way and understand that and apply it, you’re going to be successful or there we go.

I think that’s a good way to end to this episode. Donald, thank you so much for being here. In case people don’t check out the show notes and the transcription, where can people find you get in contact with you, find your book? Yeah, absolutely.

So my book is available on Amazon surrounded by insanity, how to execute bad decisions, which covers a lot of the stuff that we’ve talked about today is how to function as a manager. When you’re asked to do something you may not believe in, and even just as an individual, you know how to have that leadership and be successful in those types of environments.

You can also find me on Donald [inaudible] dot com and I also have a podcast, as you mentioned, called the corporate middle, which is available on any of your podcasts providers where I talked about a lot of these topics on how to be successful as a leader in a corporation and its Donald meter, m e a d o r.com. Right.

You’ve got it, Perfect all right. Thanks Donald appreciates it. This was fun absolutely, Thanks Jason.