Top Producer, Top Salesperson or Good Account Manager?

Guest post by: Dave Kurlan
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Everyone Can Sell. Not Really. Top 10 Reasons Why Not - By Dave Kurlan

You know the quote from the bible, "and the meek shall inherit the earth"? Well I think it applies to many top salespeople that are not also top producers. I'll explain. A top producer helps the company grow by finding and closing new business while a top salesperson often lives off of business that has already been brought into the company, many times, not even by the salesperson that currently owns it. You can call it residual, reorders, repeat, call-ins, contract or ongoing business, it is still the same - the salesperson as account manager - and probably a good one - but still account manager. Or you can call it major accounts, national accounts, global accounts, or key accounts but it's still the same - account manager. Both are way different than producers.

When top management is unable or unwilling to recognize the difference between top producers and their good account managers, mistakenly believing that their good account managers are also good salespeople, the company is probably not experiencing very strong growth.

And many of those good account managers who are mistakenly called top salespeople are, well, meek. We have the data to prove it! And so, the meek shall inherit the best accounts brought in by the top producers. Hardly seems fair.

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Everyone Can Sell. Not Really. Top 10 Reasons Why Not - By Dave Kurlan

About the Author: Dave Kurlan

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Dave Kurlan is a best-selling author, top-rated speaker and thought leader on sales development. He is the founder and CEO of Objective Management Group, Inc., the industry leader in sales assessments and sales force evaluations, and the CEO of David Kurlan & Associates, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in sales force development. Dave has been a top rated speaker at Inc. Magazine's Conference on Growing the Company, the Sales & Marketing Management Conference and the Gazelles Sales & Marketing Summit. He has been featured on radio and TV, including World Business Review with General Norman Schwarzkopf, in Inc. Magazine, Selling Power Magazine, Sales & Marketing Management Magazine and Incentive Magazine. He is the author of Mindless Selling and Baseline Selling – How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know about the Game of Baseball. He created and wrote STAR, a proprietary recruiting process for hiring great salespeople, and he writes Understanding the Sales Force, a popular business Blog and is a contributing author to The Death of 20th Century Selling (Dan Seidman), Stepping Stones (Deepak Chopra and Brian Tracey) and 101 Great Ways to Improve Your Life, Volume 2 (David Riklan).
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