The Sales Café

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.

ELA's lead generation survey results are in!  Nearly all respondents are from or with sales organizations where they are responsible for the relationship or partnership with their customers. Everyone expects salespeople to generate new leads, every month.

The best return on time invested included local networking/public speaking and asking for referrals.  Over 80% thought the lead generation approach used was vital or important to developing trust.

Respondent advice on lead generation ideas sorted into four primary buckets.

• 1) Reward lead generation activity as part of overall sales process
• 2) Focus on the Customer in all interactions
• 3) Be professional including making and keeping commitments to prospects
• 4) Always provide value by knowing your product and value proposition

Since relationships are based on trust, then the lead generation approaches like asking for referrals, networking, and public speaking must cultivate trust between the prospect and the sales person.  Let's create a list of tips for each approach that are both effective and build trust.  I will post a short ELA RTG blog entry on each approach over the next few weeks.  You can enhance the approach by adding your comments and ideas. 

Thank you to all who participated.

There’s nothing like $4.50 gas, $600 plane tickets, $300 hotel rooms, and $14 hamburgers to make you think twice about bringing your salespeople together for a training session. Although high costs are nothing new, travel has inflated much more quickly in the last few years. The business “about face” that General Motors and Ford announced this past month regarding the shuttering of truck plants and ramping up of small car production should be a clue to all of us. There is no reason to believe the inflation will abate.

Yet your market remains complex, your offering keeps evolving, and you must continually find ways to hone the skills and capabilities of your salesforce.

Sales VPs across the US have clung tenaciously to the old methods of salesforce development: bring people together for a weeklong workshop for skills and product training; do a little motivation; and send them on their way. The venues are invariably processed-air, windowless or view-challenged hotel conference rooms that induce stupors in your overwhelmed, jet-lagged, and (sometimes) hungover salespeople. Amidst this uninspiring backdrop, billions are spent every year on change initiatives, new product and service rollouts, and behavior training - and that’s before you’ve paid for the facilitator and training company!

The good news is VPs of Sales can realize big benefits from distance learning methods and technologies that have proven themselves over the past decade to be quite effective for training and communicating with far-flung populations of salespeople.

ELA and our partners have kept involved in the development of digital platforms and new methods of education over the past six years and have used them to effectively train salespeople and sales management.

Here are some things to consider:

Use the Internet. Most corporate sales training is designed to help salespeople build some type of interpersonal skill - sales flow, relationship building, needs identification, strategy execution, negotiation, etc. It is widely assumed that the only way to make these things happen is in a live event. After all, anything interpersonal requires you to learn it in-person, right? Wrong. With today’s electronic learning platforms - from highly interactive computer and internet-based programs to dynamic web-casting - salespeople can learn just about anything online.

Be creative. Today’s electronic learning platforms need not be static, dull, PowerPoint lectures that predominated on-line learning in the first half of this decade. Leading universities and corporations have continued to push the development of distance learning technologies. Today it is possible, for a reasonable cost - especially when compared to the cost of live training - to deliver knowledge and skills through interactive formats that include lecture, discussion, breakout practices, and individual learning experiences. Training is delivered by teleconference, Skype, webcasting, e-learning programs, and even sites such as Second Life. Chat rooms function as breakouts for group practice. Office hours are held by the facilitator for further discussion and coaching. Nobody flies anywhere.

Measure effectiveness. It’s still important to track and measure your training success using these technologies. In fact, it’s easier. We measure effectiveness by sales increases.

Training can still happen, be highly effective and help improves sales efforts. We just need to take advantage of the technologies available—right in our own offices.

Additional links:

As Travel Costs Rise, More Meetings Go Virtual, New York Times, July 22, 2008