John Maund, Virgin Media Business Sales Manager, Public Sector recently won Sales Manager of the Year at the British Excellence in Sales & Marketing Awards. John leads Virgin Media Business’ public sector sales team, and spoke to The SalesPro.
Tell us about your career to date. How did you get into sales and how you got to sales management?
My career in telecoms sales began 25 years ago. Over the years I’ve been a part of an organisation that has been through many acquisitions and rebrands and now find myself working for the most exciting B2B telecoms brand in the market.
I started in sales as a way to make some cash and have some fun when I was young, but it is something I have fallen in love with! By valuing teamwork and having years of experience under my belt; a sales management role was the next step in the natural progression of my career.
What’s the most important part of sales management, and what is the most challenging?
The most important part of sales management is delivering on commitments. We make commitments to our staff and to customers and then ensure that we meet these promises and at all times try and go beyond expectations. If you make sure your people are motivated and your customers are happy, then everything else will fall into place.
Managing outgoing, ambitious people and bringing them into a team environment, while still allowing them to express themselves and excel can be tricky. As a team we must act for the greater good of our customers and the business, not just individual goals. We have very low attrition rates within the company and our sales teams have become like families; the teamwork ethos is most definitely working.
What makes a good sales manager?
If you search Google for what makes a good sales manager you’ll find loads of irrelevant and impractical advice, like projecting authority and having expertise of theoretical sales techniques. These simply don’t cut it in the real world.
I believe that to be a good sales manager you need the ability to enjoy someone else’s success as much as your own. That’s the difference between a sales person and a sales manager. I also believe that a good manager creates what I call a ‘steady state’. By this I mean that at all times a manager remains calm, as a figure of support and motivation, regardless of the team’s sales performance. This calming influence will allow them to focus on success.
This idea of team success is something that should be promoted throughout a company. Productivity and morale are intrinsically linked and creating a real sense of value and self-worth is essential to motivation. Success breeds success and a team that can genuinely enjoy each others triumphs will soon gain a reputation that they will fight tooth and nail to retain.
What have you tried to do differently that has allowed you to become ‘Sales Manager of the Year’?
I’ve been constantly looking for truly innovative projects, the kind of thing that can only be achieved by ripping up the figurative rulebook and doing something new and exciting.
A prime example of these exciting new projects, and something that I’m particularly proud of is our support of a multi-channel citizen engagement network with Hampshire County Council. In Hampshire we’re linking over 1,000 council sites, from schools to the fire service, on one super-fast network. It’s allowing them to deliver shared services, facilitate mobile and flexible working, drive efficiencies and help organisations deliver better services to the community. It’s a massive project that will improve lives.
Going into 2011, what new challenges are there to face, and what will you be doing to try and overcome them?
The recent news of government cuts within the public sector presents us with a challenging market. With our customers facing tighter budgets, we need to rethink how we deliver value and find innovative ways to make projects fit into a public sector customer’s new needs. But that doesn’t necessarily mean selling less. We look for new technologies that will help our customers do their job better, deliver strong ROI and most importantly benefit everyone.
In addition there is the exciting work we are doing with the Public Sector Network (PSN). Virgin Media Business is a driving force in the future of UK Government ICT, with its expert team playing a central role in the Cabinet Office’s programme to deliver substantial savings and a seamless connection through a standardised ‘network of networks’.
How do you celebrate a good deal?
We have a fantastic motivational programme in place whereby we can nominate staff for excellence which is then presented in an internal newsletter. This allows us to share in the success across the entire company. Those who do their job above and beyond expectations get recognised and also have the opportunity to win days out to Virgin events.
With my team, we have a ‘good news Friday’ call to celebrate success and team work. We talk about what everyone has achieved this week, and discussion of any negative news is banned from the call. This gives everyone a buzz about work ahead of the weekend and come Monday, the team is prepared for another great week.
It’s vitally important to celebrate success at all levels of the business. Its basic human nature, if something feels good you want to do more of it. Simple.
What product / service would you most like to sell?
If you had asked me at 17, it would’ve been passenger jets. I always harboured a vision of jetting around the world presenting real ‘big ticket’ opportunities.
Nowadays, helping people and communities gives me a huge amount of satisfaction and puts smiles on the faces of my team. The work we are doing with public sector organisations is really making a difference and the power of that in motivational terms cannot be underestimated. It’s satisfying to know that our products and services help our customers to transform how they work in difficult times,
What product / service could you not live without (professional or personal)?
It would have to be the internet. This sounds obvious but over the last 15 years the internet has gone from being an intriguing way of showcasing your products to being intrinsically woven through the very fabric of our working lives. The internet has also allowed me to work from pretty much anywhere. With smartphones and laptops I can now operate on the move as effectively as I can if I was at my desk. We live in interesting times!