Sales Productivity and Hiring the Inexperienced

In my last post, Sales Productivity And The Tower of Babel, I discussed Sales Managers that believe they should only hire candidates with experience because it relieves them of the need to train. In this post I'd like to visit the Sales Managers at the other end of the spectrum that are so frustrated with training seasoned professionals that they will only hire inexperienced sales candidates.

They tell me, "I never hire someone with experience, because they have too many bad habits to unlearn. It's easer to train someone from scratch."

Is that true? Is it really easer to train someone with no experience than someone with experience?

Lets think about this.

The new hire with no sales experience has to develop the following knowledge and/or skills in order to become productive and effective:

• the industry
• the products
• competitors and their products
• value proposition(s)
• sales terminology
  
• sales process
• buying process
  
• sales methodology
  
• prospecting/marketing
• setting appointments
• opening the initial meeting with prospect
  
• evaluating the prospects situation
• asking high impact business questions
• the decision-making process
• who has power and influence
• what's the sense of urgency
• prioritizing the objectives
• putting together the solution
• constructing the presentation
• presentation and demonstration skills
• handling objections
• negotiating
• preparing the proposal
• preparing the contract
• following up to build satisfaction
• obtaining referrals
• managing the pipeline
• managing their opportunities
  
• managing the territory
• managing existing accounts
• organizing their day
• sales metrics and what they mean
  
• using sales tools
• navigating your companies internal departments and systems
• completing administrative requirements

Depending on your industry and how complex the solutions you're selling are, it may take anywhere from 6 months to 2 years to become a high-performance sales professional. Is this easier than training and developing a seasoned sales professional? More importantly, is this even a question we should be focused on?

Lets extend this logic into the future a bit further. So now its 2-5 years down the road. You have this crack hand picked sales team trained and developed by you. They're consistent quota busters and every year the company reserves a seat for you and most of your team at President's Club.

This year the national sales team is assembled in Orlando, Florida for the annual national sales meeting. The President/CEO walks on stage and thanks everyone for a good year in tough times. Then she drops the bomb, the company is shifting its focus to position itself for future growth:

• the target market is changing
• one of the main solutions has reached the end of the product life cycle and is being phased out
• new solutions are being introduced - with a new value proposition
  
• several divisions are merging, others are being eliminated
• implementing an enterprise CRM
• success metrics and compensation are being realigned with the new strategy

Of course this announcement is followed by presentations by the CFO and the VP's of Marketing and Product Development with all the graphs and charts to support the decision to change course. The break out session with the National VP of Sales delivers the bottom line... the sales team needs to be trained on the new products, sales process, CRM, methodologies, organizational structure, territories and success metrics. Of course you feel they expect all this to happen is some brutally unrealistic short time frame!

In short, the selling world that you and your team know so well just evaporated in a blink of an eye.

Now what?

Lets stop and think about the original premise that experienced sales professionals have too many bad habits (which were the good habits just a few short months ago) and its easer to train new inexperienced candidates. The solution to achieving the previous level of sales productivity and effectiveness in the face of this massive disruptive change, is to fire the sales team and start over.

The chances of senior management buying that strategy is slim to none. In fact, if you presented that idea the only one getting fired would be you.

If neither of the two hiring extremes (only hire experienced sales professionals so you don't have to train or only hire inexperienced sales professionals because they don't have bad habits and are easer to train) is not the answer to building a high-performance sales team, then what is?

Think long and hard about your answer, because the next person you hire is the future of your company and your career.

Sales Productivity And The Tower of Babel

Do you know what I find baffling?

The number of Sales Managers that believe the short cut to improved sales productivity and effectiveness is to only hire candidates with a lot of industry experience and a great track record.

I know your staring at your computer screen with that RCA dog look thinking. Ok, Martice finally snapped, he's lost it.

Stay with me and hear me out.

Why on earth would I question a practice that is obviously true. After all, isn't that what we're suppose to do?

Yes and No!

Of course, we should develop our selection criterion to identify candidates that have the most industry experience and track record. That's not my issue. What I find bewildering are the Managers that believe that this is the secret, magic bullet that relieves them of their responsibility to train and coach new hires.

These Managers tell me (with great pride I might add), "We don't need to train beyond covering the obvious differences in the product or service we sell". They bring these hot shots in, give them a little product training, tell them they're at the forefront of building a great company, so go forth and prosper.

Then six to eight months later they wonder why a good portion of them die on the vine and the ones that make it don't produce a super abundance of fruit (pressed down, shaken together and running over).

How about you?

1. Have you ever hired a person that had all the "right stuff" and they failed miserably?
2. Does each member of your sales team (and I use that term loosely) apply different sales processes, strategies, methodologies and techniques they learned somewhere else? A mixture of:

• Huthwaite's SPIN Selling,
  
• TAS Group's Target Account Selling,
  
• The Complex Sale's R.A.D.A.R Winning Opportunities
  
• Miller Heiman Sales System (Blue Sheets)
  
• Sandler Sales
• Richardson's Consultative Selling
• And to further exasperate the situation were you trained in a totally different system?
  

I can only imagine what account and opportunity reviews sound like in one-on-ones and team sales meetings. Everyone using different terminology, everyone describing where they are in the sales process using different definitions of the sales stages. And they're all speaking the different languages of the selling systems they came from.

How can this lack of standardization have a positive impact on sales productivity and effectiveness?

I remember a passage from the book of Genesis (11:6) about the Tower of Babel. The Lord said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have done all this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them."

Now I'm not trying to get all religious on you, and your objectives are probably not as ambitious as the Babylonians. I'm making the point that if working as one and speaking the same language got God's attention back in the day. Then working together more effectively by standardizing the sales process, methodologies and having a common language will get your clients and prospects attention today.

But Martice, "We can't standardize the process. You know how difficult it is to get experienced sales people to change their habits".

I know, I know, I've heard it all before and there's only one response to that. To hell with what the salesperson wants. This is about what your clients and prospects want.

They want the selling process to match their buying process. Which means they're receiving what they value at each stage. The buying process creates a solid business case for change and keeps the deal moving forward at its optimum pace.

A well designed sales process that delivers value at each stage will move prospects through the pipeline quicker and once that starts happening your salespeople will whole heartedly embrace it. That requires agreement on what the process is, how each stage is defined, and a common terminology to describe it.

As a Sales Manager you should have an initial training program that defines your company's sales process, strategy, methodology, and terminology to optimize your team's sales productivity and effectiveness.

Time Management - Sales Productivity's Black Hole

I spent a number of years as a consulting nuclear chemist and radiation protection specialist at commercial nuclear power plants. Which means I love physics!

I've always been baffled by the concept of managing time, because from a physics perspective time can't be managed. The proof is obvious when we consider... it's impossible to manage our time so effectively that we get 25 hours in a day, nor is it possible to manage our time so poorly that we only get 23 hours in a day.

We can't find time or make time.

The only thing we have control over is what we do in the slices of time each day.

A great deal of people manage their day by using a to-do-list. Stop and think for a moment, traditionally, how do we create a to-do-list?

The phone rings, emails arrive, clients or prospects call, boss assigns a task, a coworker needs a favor, sales calls to make, follow-ups to perform, demos to give, proposals and contracts to write, not to mention; market research to conduct and articles and white papers to read. If new tasks pop up while we're engaged in any of these activities, just add them to the list.

Yes, we can rewrite our task list. Yes, we can assign numbers or letters to denote importance, but what does that have to do with being effective?

So many people confuse their to-do-list(s) with their priorities. They run around with their hair on fire, adding tasks to and checking tasks off the to-do-list.

The gravitational attraction of the mountain of information and activities competing for our attention is like a giant black hole gobbling up space in our head and time in our day. Finally, our busy day ends without completing the key sales activities that add prospects to the funnel, move deals closer to close and increase our capabilities as sales professionals.

So what should we do?

Instead of trying to better manage our time, we should focus on managing our effectiveness. Sales effectiveness is a function of our ability to identify and prioritize high impact sales activities that are in alignment with achieving of our objectives.

Stop focusing all your efforts on planning your day and start planning your week, month and quarter.

1. Develop objectives for your territory, sales and personal development
2. Set objectives for each of the key phases of your sales process
3. Define the success metrics and targets for each objective
4. Create a rolling 90-day action plan and organize tasks by objectives
5. Create a model work week - your weekly schedule
6. Move your tasks off the action plan and onto your calendar
7. Measure progress towards achievement of the objectives weekly
8. Say no to everything else

I highly recommend Sally McGhee's book Take Back Your Life using Microsoft Outlook 2007 to Get Organized and Stay Organized (she even covers work life balance).

So how do we identify the high impact sales activities?

Start by answering three questions:

1. What does a great day of selling look like?
2. What do you have to do to prepare to have that great day of selling?
3. What do you have to do to string more great days of selling back to back to back?

I'm very interested in what you think so leave a comment.

9 Management Philosophies to Develop Teams Into Elite High Performers

I met with a prospect the other day and he asked me "What do high performance managers do differently than average managers?"

I paused for a moment, scanned the long list of behaviors in my mind; distilled my answer down to the critical few things and told my prospect...

High performance managers:

• clarify their understanding of their roles and responsibilities
  
• set non-conflicting short and long term priorities
• use a logical, transparent and duplicable decision-making process
  
• create a well thought out plan of action - they don't wing it
  
• create a realistic schedule for executing their plans

We discussed my answer in relation to the challenges his company was facing and agreed to involve the final person I needed to meet to close the deal.

I started the hour long drive back to the Atlanta airport and pondered a much deeper question.

Why do high performance managers behave the way they do?

I remembered asking my mentor and colleague Alex Nicholas, (the author of Applied Concepts Institutes' Sales Management Leadership Program), this very question.

Here's his answer - High performance managers have a set of management philosophies at the root of their priorities and decisions. This keeps them focused on achieving results through development of themselves, the team environment and the individual team members.

All management behavior is based on daily, demonstrable, non-negotiable standards, values and ethics.

• Personal conduct, decision-making and daily activities must consistently reflect the values and high ethical standards embodied by the company

Leadership skills focus on vision, strategy, values and spirit

• Leadership includes communicating a clear direction for the team, in concert with the corporate vision, strategy, values and goals. Leadership also entails developing and executing longer term business plans and promoting a strong sense of the importance of individual and team contributions.

Management skills target tactical, shorter term development

• Emphasis is on improving results by using proactive behavior, making sound tactical business decisions, improving near term planning, enhancing the daily work environment, and fostering developmental relationships with individual team members.

Focus on team development

• The most important priority for managers is the development of an elite, high-performance team. While accommodating individual employee's needs are important, business and employee decisions should primarily be made to support the greater good of the team.

Team performance improvement begins with the manager’s acceptance of personal responsibility for team actions and outcomes.

• Improving team performance starts with improving one’s self in personal management/leadership skills, job adaptability and business maturity.

The foundation of employee performance improvement is daily development that addresses their behavior.

• All employees are recognized as having unique personalities. Management focuses primarily on developing employee behaviors that are required to successfully perform the job.

Communication between Managers and employees become more effective through a collaborative communication style.

• Situations require differing styles of decision-making and communication, however collaborative communication and decision-making processes can be synergistic.

Develop employees using nurturing relationships

• By consistently using a collaborative coaching process, managers help employees take personal ownership of the job and their productivity. Managers treat employees as “major accounts” for development and coach in the areas of job skills, business maturity and personal adaptability.

Improved employee productivity results in increased employee tenure and sense of self worth

• Leading and managing employees to work through a focused, disciplined, high-energy, and consistent approach is the most effective way to increase results for the team and build employee job satisfaction and tenure.

So it all comes down to the congruency between your management practice and the value system that underpins the priorities you set and the decisions you make.

What are the management philosophies that underpin your approach to making the numbers?

What's The Difference Between Training and Development?

Yesterday, I completed another Sales Management Leadership Program workshop. As a facilitator and coach it's gratifying to see the lights go on when Managers realize the difference between training and development. So I thought I'd take a moment to discuss it.

Training is an event. Development is a process.

Training has a beginning and end. Participants are exposed to knowledge and skills associated with new concepts during the event. Many companies think, all we have to do is conduct some training and everyone will embrace the new: strategy, system, method, process, procedure, tactic or tool. They will go back to work the next day, use the new way and execute flawlessly within a short period of time.

In reality, what we see is a temporary positive change in behavior in some of the learners... but after awhile things seem to slowly drift back to the way they were. Maybe it doesn't drift all the way back, but the positive impact we expected fades rapidly and eventually falls short. In fact in some instances we experience an outright revolt as most of the team resists applying what was learned:

The list of reasons we hear from the learner for not applying what was learned is long:

• I don't have time to do it that way
• It doesn't work as well as the old way
• I don't remember how to do that
• I couldn't figure out how to do it under these circumstances
• I've gotten good results for a long time doing it the old way, why should I change now?
• The training was good in theory, but this is the real world
  
• The list goes on and on

But there is another often overlooked list... the Manager's list

• I've got production pressures so we can't focus on this right now
  
• It slows things down
• I never agreed with this
• I don't understand why this is important to the company
• I can't get everyone on the same page
• The information on how to apply this is confusing
• The compensation, recognition, and rewards system still reinforces the old behaviors
• I didn't get the training my team got
  

Why doesn't a training event create the sustainable behavior changes we're looking for? The answer is simple and straight forward.

There's no way around failing our way to success. This is an uncomfortable proposition, so people naturally resist change.

If that's true then how do we realize the return on investment as advertised? How do we effect sustainable positive behavior change?

Sales Productivity Secrete #3

We develop our people through our daily relationship with them in three areas: Job Skills, Business Maturity, and Adaptability.

Sustainable behavior change takes time. The more complex the new thing is the more time it takes to become proficient. The more disruptive the new thing is the higher the resistance to change. People learn and embrace change at different rates

Both scenarios require a focused communication strategy that continuously:

• communicates the value of the new way to the company and learner
• clarifies the gray areas to reduce confusion
  
• reinforces practicing and applying of the new behaviors.

How do we do that?

Through collaborative coaching, but I'll discuss that in another blog.

What are your thoughts?

The Marriage of Talent And Passion Leads to High Performance

Research on what makes a satisfying work life indicates that the most personally satisfying times in a person’s career are usually also highly productive in terms of meeting the organization’s goals.

If that's true the Sales Manager's strategic focus should be to build an elite high-performance sales team.

But how do you build such a team? I'm glad you asked because that brings me to

Sales Productivity Secret # 2

The only real improvement is self improvement

1. Align management systems and behaviors with the company's strategic focus and productivity objectives.
2. Assess the performance gap for the management and sales teams
3. Build a compelling business case for change – that aligns the team and engages emotional commitment to personally participate in improving individual and team performance
4. Focus on identifying and isolating the most relevant and strategic activities necessary to improve results.
5. Create tactical level development plans and implementation schedules to achieve desired results.
6. Develop success metrics, and accountability systems that link to development plans and schedules.
7. Focus on measurable results to revise plans and schedules

What do you think?

Top 6 Things A Salesperson Wants From Their Manager

A number of years back Applied Concepts Institute conducted a survey with their clients to find out what salespeople wanted from their Sales Manager. Several thousand salespeople with tenure of 1 year or greater participated in the survey.

The top six things (in order) Salespeople wanted from their Sales Manager were:

1. Build a positive daily relationship with them
   
2. Communicate effectively
3. Have consistent, logical behavior
4. Be a respected teacher and coach
5. Listen before providing feedback
6. Help create a sales strategy

I was wondering do you think that these are still the top 6 things Salespeople want from their Sales Managers?

Improving Sales Productivity Begins and Ends With the Sales Manager

So you want to improve your sales team's performance.

There are so many places to try and squeeze additional performance improvements out of your team. The question is...where do you start?

Do you start with better tools like Sales Force Automation (SFA) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM)? Maybe implementing opportunity, account, and territory management methodologies would work. How about improving sales skills? You could train them in value/relationship/consultative/collaborative/strategic selling or negotiation. The truth is if your company is weak in any of these areas you could experience improved performance by addressing them head on. I'll discuss this in future blogs.

I can hear some of you groaning already. I know you invested thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement new tools, processes, methods, and training before, but it didn't stick or you got marginal returns on investments.

Sales Productivity Secret #1


No matter what you choose to improve, if you don't focus on the Sales Managers first the improvement initiatives will only deliver short term results.

The Sales Managers are the key to sustainable performance improvement.

Why?

Because they are responsible for hiring, training, developing, directing, planing, coaching, communicating expectations, measuring success, and managing change on a daily basis. This is where the rubber meets the road!

I have worked with hundreds of Sales Managers from small businesses to fortune 100 companies over the last 5 years and the vast majority of them were great salespeople that got promoted to Sales Manager. Most of them have spent years struggling to develop the heart of a manager. Most have developed their management systems and skills through trial and error or imitating previous managers.

Each quarter brings constant pressure to hit the numbers and each year the pressure mounts as their companys' raise the bar. Sooner or later the relentless drive to bring in the numbers causes the Sales Manager to fall back on what they know created success for them in the past. Instead of leading and developing the sales team they become "super closers" that get the job done by setting the pace, directing activities and closing sales.

So what's wrong with that?

If your company does not require the sales manager to carry a book of business (they have a personal quota or list of accounts to call on) then they are doing the salesperson's job. The very skills that made the Sales Manager such a great Salesperson are the obstacles to developing an Elite High-Performance team.

The Sales Manager's role should be to develop a management system that continuously improves the performance of themselves, the team and the individual sales professionals, in addition to managing the business.

What are your experiences or opinions?