FLIP Your Management Style

SEC’s current research on Driving Sales Transformation highlights why sales organizations must empower their reps to Insight Sell, and allow them to exercise judgment in order to compete with more informed buyers.  However, this shift cannot be limited to the senior leadership, its effects must marble throughout the organization. Our research shows that first-line sales managers have tremendous leverage in helping to allow for rep judgment and must enable a judgment-oriented climate at the team level. The benefits of establishing this type of climate are significant, as our research finds that a judgment-oriented climate leads to a 23% increase in rep adoption of Insight Selling behaviors.

Our research found that managers actually have a large amount of leverage in creating this climate for reps, and when effective, can actually create a high-judgment micro-climate within a low-judgment organization climate. In order for this to occur, managers must FLIP from a directive style of managing, to a supportive style of facilitating. Directive management style consists of delivering rote directions and emphasizing adherence to the sales process. Instead, supportive managers enable and empower their reps to think independently, allow for collaboration across their team, and leverage knowledge to make more informed decisions during a sale. In order to enable judgment, there are four key activities that a supportive manager must do to establish a judgment-oriented micro-climate. 

Managers should:

Facilitate—Collaborate and connect team members with one another, and externally throughout the organization. This serves to improve information sharing, and encourages reps to leverage firm-wide resources.
Long-Term Focus—Encourage long-term pipeline growth, prioritizing smart growth over short term closures. This enables reps to not only have a healthier pipeline, but provides opportunities for reps to exercise their analytical and critical thinking abilities.
Informal Communication—Establish regular and informal 360-degree communication with the team around all topics. This creates trust between a manager and reps and facilitates joint-decision making, while reducing typical micro-managing activities.
Participatory Decision Making—Involve the team in business planning and to jointly tackle and overcome commercial challenges. This encourages collective decision making and increased confidence and trust in the team.

The FLIP model serves to help establish judgment-oriented climates by providing actual examples of these effective behaviors. It can help managers better understand what supportive management looks like in action, and allow them to target specific situations where they can help to enable rep judgment. FLIP can also benefit reps, who can use the tool to identify warning signs that their manager isn’t being supportive. It provides a framework to help reps “manage-up” and ensure that they are operating in a judgment-oriented micro-climate.

CEB Sales Members, utilize our Judgment-Based Coaching guide which provides managers with sample questions to help guide reps through situations that require judgment. Also access our Ideation Toolkit, which contains exercises, guides, and tools to assist FLSMs innovate and our Insight Selling Manager Competency grid to learn about differentiated manager responsibilities needed for Insight Selling.