When considering the allocation of your managerial time, how do you view your individual salespeople? As cattle, needing to be prodded along and herded to a destination? Or perhaps you think of them as plants, requiring your tender cultivation skills to grow and prosper? Or maybe instead as a series of small and large fires constantly demanding your attention before they rage out of control?

Jeffrey J. Fox, author of Secrets of Great Rainmakers: The Keys to Success and Wealth (Hyperion, 2006) suggests that the best approach is to look upon each of your sales reps as if they were investment opportunities. Then, from an investor’s perspective, you need to decide whether to put your money in the stock of a growing, high potential company (your top performers) or the stock of a stodgy, low-performing company (your more average salespeople)?

When the decision is about investing in stocks, the answer is obvious – you want the investment opportunities with a proven record that show unlimited growth potential. Yet as Fox points out, when the issue is time spent with members of the sales team, this seemingly simple answer often eludes even the best sales managers.

“Every day bosses spend more time with low-performing, problem employees than they do with their best people,” Fox says. “Every day sales managers invest their time with the bottom salespeople and practically ignore their superstars. Every day managers cut the marketing, selling, and training budgets of their strong businesses and growing product lines to ‘offset’ underperforming parts of the company.”

This would never make sense from an investment standpoint, Fox says. Yet studies indicate that most managers spend as much as 50 percent of their time with “problem reps.” Instead, he suggests, sales managers need to reverse this trend and give their priority to the top salespeople.

“Managers should over invest in businesses and products that have big potential,” he says. “Sales managers must spend 60 percent of their in-the-field time with their superstar salespeople. They must spend 30 percent of their field time with their high potential salespeople. They must invest no more than 10 percent of their time with low performing salespeople.”

Hearing this, some managers will no doubt balk, saying something to the effect of, “But my top reps don’t need or want my help.” Not so, says Fox.

“Even when superstars say they don’t need anything, and prefer to go it alone, it is rare that superstars really mean it, and it is always a sales management mistake to allow it,” he says. “The best salespeople use their managers to close deals, to give approvals to customer requests that the salesperson can’t. The best salespeople are learners. If the sales manager has something important to teach, the good salespeople will learn it. And high performers appreciate the recognition of an attentive sales manager.”

By taking this approach, says Fox, whether with stock opportunities or salespeople, you will no doubt improve your return on investment.

To read Jeffrey L Fox’s sales management newsletter, visit www.foxandcompany.com.