Sales Leaders Rule #12: Manage Individuals, Lead a Team.

There's no substitute for personal attention. Humans want eye contact, they want one-on-one time, and they want other people to pay attention to them.

Unfortunately many sales leaders violate this desire for individualized attention by defaulting to managing a team rather than a group of individuals. Why? Most often it's because they don't feel that they have enough time. Managing the team as a whole appears to be a more efficient way than managing each member of it individually. But it's impossible to effectively manage a team all at once. You can only manage individuals who make up a team.

Managing a whole team is often done through group communication with little focus on any particular individual. Sending out a memo expecting everybody to read it whether it pertains to them or not is unrealistic. Worse, it conditions the team to expect that your messages will not relate to them individually. So even when a message is intended for one of the team members they are likely to disregard it because the meaning isn't clear. Even if it's appropriate to send out a memo with new information or that you want things changed in your group, then expectations still need clarified for the individual.

Sales leaders need to regularly assess whether they are focusing in on individual team members or if they are providing blanket guidance to a group. If you find that you aren't making time to manage your sales team one-on-one, do a quick status check on your level of involvement with the individuals by asking:

• What is his/her preferred communication style?
• What are his/her business goals?
• What's his/her cookbook to meet those goals?
• What motivates him/her?
• What are his/her personal goals?
• What are his/her gaps, skills, and/or experiences that I can help with?

Any of these questions that you can't answer need to be an area of focus.

Some managers will resist the need to manage an individual saying, "It's going to take a lot of time and I simply don't have that time." But putting in the time with the individual will help free up time spent on handling mistakes from misunderstandings and miscommunications.

You can't manage a team as a whole because the individuals that make up that team have different issues, skills, and experiences. Managers owe it to themselves, their team, and their company to speak to each individual as if they were the only person on the team. Once you do that, you'll realize each team member will start producing more and more.