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.

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?

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?