The Sales Café

Welcome to the Sales Cafe, our new name for the Random Thought Generator. Until now, this blog focused, as the title implied, on ideas of interest we wanted to work out in writing. The purpose of the Sales Cafe is to focus on sales and the universe that surrounds the people who practice and manage it. This is where we spend much of our time as well. 

We aim to fill a tall order here. The blogsphere does not lack for sales blogs, but then the real world doesn't lack for cafes. Everybody has their favorites and some of them have something special going for them. That's what we hope to build; someplace special where you can stop in on Tuesdays and Thursdays for thought provoking information. Think of it as your drive-in, take-out sales blog, where you can come by to learn something, change something or try something. 

Our writers sell, market, manage, and consult for a living. They practice in very interesting and challenging environments, large and small, simple and complex, mainstream and cutting edge. We think there's a lot to share. Between us, we've covered just about every industry and just about every position in sales and marketing, so we think the perspectives will be refreshing and most of all get you to think. 

Here at ELA, we're driven by our mission to make people smarter about their business, and we hope on your trips through the Sales Cafe you will walk out feeling smarter than when you came in.

By Jim Horan

It must be something about my background or upbringing. When I hear “supervision” and “accountability,” I go to the negatives. When I think of supervision, I think of hall monitors, playground supervisors and prison guards. When I think of accountability, I think of disappointment, warnings, bruised egos, reprimands, enforcement, retribution and big brother.

If you find yourself obsessed with accountability and supervision, I question five things:

1. Did you hire the right people?
2. Do your managers know how to lead?
3. Are you focusing on the right things?
4. Does everyone in your business understand who the customer is and what benefit the customer is expecting from your products and services?
5. Does everyone in your organization understand his or her role, responsibilities and outcomes?

These are big questions. Few of us, if pushed to answer honestly, would be able to give a resounding yes to all of them. So the question is, do you have processes to assess these issues, and action plans for continuous improvement? If not, are you just hoping the problems will go away?

So how do we manage a sales force we don’t see eight hours a day? What is the proper role of supervision and accountability in this 21st century?

My philosophy is simple: Help people be the best they can be and find the right work! I believe when people find the right work, in the right environment, properly encouraged and supported, they need little supervision. They manage themselves and hold themselves accountable to a much higher standard than you or I ever would. Your top producers do this; you just wish everyone did.

This type of relationship, in my opinion, starts with ensuring the people you select truly understand the nature of the work they are going to do and know it’s a good fit for them. How do you do that? Explain the job, the role, the work. Explicitly describe who your business serves and what your clients expect. Be very clear about the outcomes and results you expect, and share stories about people who have been successful and why.

Now here is a radical suggestion! When you think you have found the right person and you’re ready to make an offer, ask him or her to write a business plan — concise and to the point — for the new job. Buy a day’s worth of his or her time at market rates, and don’t be cheap.

Here is what you will learn from this process. The individual will either embrace this process or not. That alone will tell you a lot. When you read the plan, you will learn if he or she heard, understood, agreed and knew how to pursue the opportunity. You will also learn a lot about how he or she thinks and plans to act. You will be able to make a much more informed decision about whether this person is a good fit for your company. And you will have a much better idea of how much energy you will have to spend supervising and holding this individual accountable.

Enforcement is a drag; leave it to the police! Encouraging, supporting and watching your people grow and prosper is the ultimate work. Make better hires, and maybe “supervision” and “accountability” will drop from your vocabulary.

Jim Horan is the president and CEO of The One Page Business Plan Company.

Setting up a Business Architecture helps solve unwanted mysteries

How well an organization performs in and across locations or departments can be a mystery to many. Business leaders have to assume that each person is doing their job well and that local leaders will course correct when that is not the case. However, there is a nagging awareness that something important - something slithering in the dark spaces beween the departments - could raise its ugly head and cause corporate misery. Rather than hope an antidote will be available when needed, you can dig deep inside the organization before a crisis hits and take positive action to prevent these kinds of unfortunate surprises. 

Using the following checklist is the first step in creating a Business Architecture that will help identify hidden issues and immediately improve system-wide best practices. 

Do you know the answers?

1. Aim for the future:  What’s changing and how does that impact your business?
2. Identify the big changes:  What do we have to do to be successful in the future & how is that different than today?
3. Pinpoint focus:  What are the few key things we have to do to move to our future state?
4. Prioritize actions:  What are we working on today and how does that relate to what we will need to do?
5. Measure effect:  How will we know if we are making progress to our desired state? What can we measure?
6. Repeat:  Change is the only constant. Repeat the five steps to make sure you are adaptive to the inevitable changes.    
   

Once you've tackled these questions, assign a dollar value for each answer or situation. How much does your organization stand to lose or gain if the worst or best were to happen? 

Set up a structure using Business Architecture

The first way to put your arms around these issues is to map your business and create an architectural plan. Business architecture explains the structure of an organization in terms of its capabilities, governance structure, business processes, and business information. The business capability is what the organization does; the business processes are how the organization executes its capabilities. The business architecture takes into account all of an enterprise's external stakeholders (including customers, suppliers and regulators) and captures all pertinent and critical data and information.

A business architecture helps you understand the impact that change has on the business environment. Ensuring harmony between goals and objectives, programs and initiatives, and the underlying information systems and processes enables managers to adapt to dynamic - and inevitable - business change.

Example: Preventing micro-managment after a merger

Organizational leaders often micro-manage, not because of character flaws, but because they don't know what's going on. An incoherent structure, misaligned processes, and poor reporting systems try even the best managers.

In a post-merger environment, these problems are magnified. Very often, the goals for the newly combined organization are stated before the path to reaching them is built. The leaders of the acquiring company manage without knowing exactly what the workers from acquired company do. New managers don't know what the new reports are doing - and the new reports don't want to tell the new managers what they are doing! Both sides are afraid for their jobs. 

Creating a post-merger business architecture provides managers with a deep current understanding of the business - the "as-is" state, and tools to visualize and create the path towards "to-be" state: what the teams do, the processes they use, how current workflow affects other areas of the business, the results produced by the work processes, and how processes and people are managed. 

With a deeper understanding of the business and how it runs, leaders and managers can make rational decisions without having to micro-manage. 

Business mysteries are dangerous and certainly unwanted. With a business architecture in place, leaders can know what is happening throughout the business, how managers and workers are addressing challenges, and how to create successful solutions.

Guest blogger Dave Batt, CEO and Founder of StreetSmarts, Inc., discusses the challenges in sales effectiveness in a Sales 2.0 environment.

I reviewed some interesting findings from the Corporate Visions Inc. Quarterly Sales Messaging Report Q3 FY09 (www.corporatevisions.com) which surveys thousands of business to business marketing and sales professionals. The survey highlights the continued challenges around sales effectiveness, in that 74% of salespeople publicly admit to rewriting messages and tools created by marketing. There still seems to be a divide amongst many sales and marketing teams and the fact that selling time is being absorbed by sales people recreating marketing assets is not only inefficient but potentially dilutes or even damages a brand. It means sales professionals don’t feel confident in the messages they are being asked to deliver or don’t feel they are credible or compelling enough within the rapidly evolving competitive landscape.

Another key area of concern highlighted in the survey findings is that a staggering 87% of salespeople are looking for more coaching from their managers. The key area where sales teams felt there were gaps was how best to differentiate the company and communicate what makes the company’s solution different. Clearly classroom training alone is not the answer as things change quickly and most people will not contest that what is learned in the formal training environment is not used indefinitely or quite quickly forgotten. And one on one coaching is not really a scalable answer either. How can sales managers hold the hands of each and every sales person though each and every stage of the sales cycle?

The key to better enable sales teams and drive higher overall sales effectiveness is a more holistic approach to the whole sales and marketing function. What is needed is self help in an ongoing manner for sales and empowerment of the sales force to continue to learn and develop at their own pace. Marketing and sales are so often considered as separate functions in many organizations but customers assume they are dealing with a company and not a set of departments. What is needed is better collaboration to close the sales and marketing divide, where marketing assets are ranked and rated by the sales recipients so marketing have the insight from the field to make corrective action and build stronger business alignment. Though the use of enabling technologies this is now entirely possible and also means that consistent market messages are achieved, rather than recreating assets and creating several versions of the truth.

About StreetSmarts

StreetSmarts^® 5.6 is based on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that unites company-wide knowledge and enterprise social networking components to deliver business value for enterprise wide knowledge based and line of business initiatives such as sales effectiveness channel enablement, training reinforcement and transforming intellectual capital into actionable knowledge through information management.

Because of its adaptive, lightweight nature and built in usability features, StreetSmarts^® is able to provide a working solution specific to each client’s business requirements in a matter of days, rather than months of complex software deployments.   In addition, this also allows clients to quickly react to changing new business practices and external market conditions without the need for massive customization or programming. For more information on StreetSmarts^®, visit www.streetsmarts.com.