Lesson 55 - Leverage Your Manager

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Your manager is a valuable resource for your growth. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to effectively collaborate with your manager for call and presentation coaching, account strategies, opportunity progression, and career planning. Your assignment will involve scheduling and planning ongoing 1:1 check-ins with your manager that will be uniquely valuable to both of you.

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you're going to learn how to leverage your manager to become a better seller. Now your manager is not just there to approve deals and conduct pipeline and forecast reviews. They can actually be one of your best, most valuable resources if you know how to work with them effectively. So let's talk about a few ways that you can accentuate your relationship with your manager and build your career with them. So number one is you should be consistently seeking coaching and feedback from your manager. So many people shy away from this, but your manager is a great person to review your calls, to attend your demos, to review your sales demonstrations, right, your presentations, your business cases, and ultimately, they can give you specific feedback on communication, on your negotiation techniques, your deal closing, kind of repertoire, right? So making sure that you are working working with your manager, asking for coaching, asking for feedback that can be incredibly valuable, even if it's constructive feedback, you know, critical feedback, negative feedback, all of it is meant to help you improve, and your manager is in your corner. They want you to succeed, so make sure that you're working with them and taking that feedback seriously. Number two, have your manager review your territory plans and your account plans, not just when you first build them, but every quarter and whenever you iterate on these plans as well, they can leverage your their experience to help you focus on high impact activities, high impact accounts, and when they're reviewing your account plans with you, they can usually sniff out like, who are the key decision makers going to be? What would be a good next step in order to get to the right people? So brainstorming with your manager can be a great process. Another way to leverage them is to ask for guidance on your active opportunities. So developing strategies for navigating the politics of an account, or developing a champion in an account, or getting past an objection that was raised on a call, those can all be ways that your manager can kind of plug in and help you develop strategies there, and they can even join prospect calls with you, right, or write outreach messaging for you, right? We've talked about ghost writing outreach messaging to get in touch with the right people. And then finally, your your manager can help you with internal politics at your own organization. They can help you find cross functional resources or get the support or the resources that you need to succeed. So, you know, we mentioned in a previous lesson during your QBR, you should be asking for what you need, but you should always be asking your manager and raising your hand whenever you you need something that they might be able to get past the finish line for you. So, yeah, make sure that you're working with your manager to secure things like technical assistance, access to company leaders, additional budget for travel, you know, whatever you need there. Now I don't want you to just focus on short term success, right? Your manager can help you with deals, account planning, territory planning, coaching, all of that good stuff, but they can also help you in your long term career success. So ask your manager for mentorship. Talk to them about your personal career development, let them know what your long term goals are and the skills that you need to develop in order to get there. A manager who knows your specific career goals can ultimately help you look for opportunities to give you that experience, and they're more likely to send you relevant guidance, give you recommendations, write you LinkedIn, you know, reviews and all of that good stuff in the future. So make sure that you're building relationships with your manager. You don't want this to be an adversarial relationship. One of the best ways to ask your manager for help is during your regular one on one meetings. And what I would recommend you do is approach these meetings strategically. Don't ever go into a one on one with your manager without a specific goal in mind. Right? A lot of people are like, Oh, me and my manager are friendly. We just kind of talk. Or most of the time, they just cancel them. I love it. You shouldn't love that, right? You should want to meet with your manager. You should want to discuss your goals, and ultimately, it's really, really valuable time that you can use to further your success. So think about what are the roadblocks you're facing? What are the questions that you need answered? What is the assistance that they can provide you? What are you focusing on in the upcoming week? And my recommendation would be to keep an ongoing one on one document where you keep notes. So keep the previous sessions notes, that way you know, what is the manager going to do? What is your manager going to. Do to help you. What are you going to do? What are you committing to over the next week before you meet again? And that way, you can keep track of all the progress you're making together. By the way, this also makes it really easy when you get to your performance review, for your manager to be able to say all kinds of good things about you, because you'll have this giant running document of all of your accomplishments. And a lot of people, when they get to their annual performance review, they're struggling to write down all the things. They're like, wait what all did I accomplish over the last six months? When you keep an ongoing one on one document, it will make it super easy. And in fact, with AI now you can just ask chat GPT like, summarize my accomplishments from this document and and you can get that done very easily. So all to say, By leveraging your manager, you're going to become a better seller. You're going to develop stronger relationships with them, and it will benefit you your entire career. All right, now it's your turn for today's assignment. You're going to start an ongoing one on one document and share it with your manager. To kick off this document, I want you to write down any questions that you need to answer and any roadblocks that you're facing, what your priorities are for the week ahead, and three things that you need from your manager to help you based on the examples that we've shared today. So that could be like again, giving you feedback on a deal, prioritizing your pipeline, or viewing a customer call, strategizing your ongoing career development, whatever that may look like, your study guide is going to walk you through this, and that is it for today's lesson on the daily quota. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time bye. You.