“As a leader, should I do personal sales?”
I am frequently being asked the above question during coaching or training sessions with my clients. What do you expect my answer would be?
“It is your choice and depends on your circumstances!”
I think the first thing is – we need to understand the job title “Agency Leader”, and what is expected of you carrying this job title. The role and responsibilities of an Agency Leader are supposed to be recruiting, training, developing and supervising his or her downlines. The extra remuneration through overriding commission is to reward Agency Leader on the team performance rather than on personal production.
When a successful sales person is promoted to be an Agency Leader, he or she needs to acquire new skills in leadership and agency management, as well as to set up proper agency systems (such as recruitment, training and development, and performance management) for long term career and business sustainability.
In an ideal situation where Agency Leaders have acquired leadership and agency management skills and set up proper agency systems with a team of agents executing their daily sales-focused activities, they basically don’t need to do personal sales. The Agency Leaders would have the luxury of time, energy and choice to choose to pursue personal sales on their own will. On the other hand, without the right skills and proper agency systems in place, Agency Leaders would find themselves burning the candle at both ends, struggling to grow the agency by carrying the bulk of the sales budget on their shoulders, while ensuring they still have sufficient manpower to satisfy the requirements for contract maintenance.
If you are currently looking to break away from the vicious cycle of you contributing most of the sales in the agency, not being able to achieve steady continuous growth, or not being able to break through in terms of agency production and agency size, I do have some tips for you:
- Step back to evaluate your current situation: You need to assess your situation, and acknowledge that you have encountered a problem. To be more effective, go deeper to identify the root cause of the problem so that you could address the root cause and not just the symptoms.
- Envision the change you want and commit to it: You need to make up your mind and envision the change you want to achieve. Believe in yourself that you have the resources and capability to turn the situation around, and commit 100% to make it happen.
- Cover weaknesses by acquiring the necessary skills and systems: The reason you are in the current situation is largely due to lack of skills or capability in certain areas. Invest time, energy and resources to build up these areas so that you could leapfrog to the next level.
- Do things differently and develop new habits: You can’t expect different results by doing things the same old way over and over again. In order to achieve new results, you need to operate in a totally brand new way. Hence, you need to acquire new skills, build new operating systems and form new habits in your daily routine. It could be painful at the beginning to adjust to new ways of thinking, living and behaving, but the results will be very fulfilling.
You may also find that by engaging a professional coach with relevant experiences in agency building and manpower development could ease your agency and personal transformation process. A professional coach could guide you through the whole journey in developing the necessary mindset, skills and systems to help you achieve the outcomes you desire.
