Often the CEO or VP Sales is “frustrated” with their sales teams (expletives deleted) and ask me to please come fire them all. They complain that their people “just don’t have it in them” to constantly cold call and keep a high rate of activity which of course will make everyone successful forever. “If only they’d do it my way!” I hear.

Everyone wants to hire that nearly-deranged person who lives for cold calling and rips through a call list just for the adrenaline rush. But even if you can find candidates with the right mix of experience, the good ones are prohibitively expensive and can be a management hassle. In my experience, someone who gets off to cold calling 100 times a day is usually deficit in other areas and can’t do much else. And they churn quickly.

Fine! you say. That’s what you want. But think about who your prospects are. If they are more than just meat for a boiler-room phone center, I suggest that you look at the way you currently go to market.

The days of picking up the phone and convincing a stranger to spend large sums of money with you are simply dead. The environment has changed. What buyer in their right mind (especially in IT) actually picks up random phone calls these days? Caller ID and email filters mean never having to speak to a salesperson.

Update your sales strategy and move your company into the age of collaborative new business acquisition. Utilize the amazing new sales and web 2.0 tools and hire awesome service-oriented sales talent – not phone weasels. This takes a new set of skills, new hiring approach, management style, which of course, starts at the top.

Jonathan Gilliam is a interim sales executive for OneAccord and is based in the Austin area. Jonathan has a deep background in business development, market analysis, opportunity development, relationship management and C-level sales. Mr. Gilliam welcomes questions at 512.775.7566 or Jonathan.Gilliam(at)OneAccordCorp.com. Jonathan also blogs at Business Developments.

Jeff Fisher, the coach of the Tennessee Titans, is not paid millions of dollars every year to manage wins. Wins and losses are both results; and results can’t be managed. Rather, it is his responsibility to manage the day-to-day activities of the players and coaches that will lead to the most victories for his team. By assisting his players meticulously implement those key practices, he helps his team win and earns his salary.

Just as Jeff Fisher can’t control the wins of the Tennessee Titans, a sales manager can’t manage the sales of his/her team. Sales, like lost sales, are results; and results can’t be managed. What he/she can manage, however, are the daily activities of his/her sales force that most often lead to sales. This is a core principle of revenue generation.

Whether in charge of a baseball team or a sales team, the first goal of any manager must be to understand the steps of the process and define success. For a sales manager, this means identifying all the stages of the sales process. Once this process is determined, he/she can then isolate those practices that consistently and predictably lead to successful sales. For a sales manager, there are two primary steps in discovering these unique critical success factors (CSFs). First, he/she must scrutinize the behavior of the top sellers on the team and determine what activities they have in common. Second, he/she should thoroughly test which of these practices has the greatest impact on the success of sales in the field.

These critical success factors vary greatly from company to company. They can be anything from the number of cold calls made to the number of proposals written or referrals obtained. For example, one company found that the most important commonality among its top performing salespeople was the quickness with which they identified prospects that were not interested in buying. The best salespeople averaged 9 minutes on unsuccessful calls, whereas the rest of the team took 20 minutes. These extra 11 minutes allowed them to contact more prospects every day, which eventually resulted in more sales. CSFs are unique to every company; what is important is that they are quantifiable, measurable, and adoptable by any member of the sales team.

Once these two or three critical success factors are determined, it is the responsibility of the sales manager to help his/her team employ implement behaviors. There are many ways to accomplish this step, though one of the simplest and most effective is through recognition. Salespeople love praise; a sales manager should use this to his/her advantage. He/She should think of creative incentives to give those team members who perform the identified CSFs the most often. Setting up games or holding weekly contests are examples of activities that can induce the practice of CSFs; even pats on the back or simple congratulations can be effective. Whatever practices are employed, one key factor is to give immediate feedback on these behaviors even before the results are in; this shows that these practices are important, in and of themselves. There are a few caveats, however. A manager should never publicly call attention to those employees struggling to adopt the new behaviors. This will only lead to dissatisfaction and a dysfunctional work environment. Likewise, monetary rewards should not be used to encourage these activities. Compensation should be reserved for results.

To reiterate, sales are results; and results can’t be managed. Only the critical success factors that most often lead to successful sales can be controlled. So sales managers, stop asking your sales team, “How many sales did you make today?” Instead start asking them, “What did you do today?” Measure successful days based on performance of CSFs, not on sales. Only when you are able to identify, implement, and encourage these critical success factors will you be on your way to creating a sales force capable of predictable and sustainable revenue generation.

Photo by Jake

Forward looking executives must routinely search for and consider the need for new management models. As Gary Hamel so accurately predicts in his book, The Future of Management your company will be challenged to change in a way for which it has no precedent.” He argues that our traditional, decades long way of making decisions, constructing an organization and approaches to employee relations will likely fail in their attempts to forestall restructuring and painful missteps.

The very organizational structure of many companies, perhaps even most companies, is based on historical models. The hierarchical model employed across a great many organizations was largely copied in the beginning of the industrial era of the 19th century from the great Prussian and Roman armies. It was largely designed to assure quality replication and reliability in the manufacturing process while the organization scaled its capacity and simultaneously increased efficiency. It emphasized the importance of labor and capital. In today’s world where globalization, the need for nimble adaptiveness, collaboration and wealth creation by talented “associates” rules, it may actually work at cross purposes and become an impediment to potential success.

The ability to innovate is the predictor of success for many companies today as they bring new products and services to the market. This means creativity needs to be applied to our organization structure and staffing.

The opportunity is both substantial and threatening. The impact of globalization, dramatic technical advancement, declining predictability from historic modeling practices, and the increasing lack of loyalty, both to and from the organization, all seem to mandate that only radical new approaches to recruiting, managing and organizing talent will provide companies with a sustainable and durable competitive advantage. Nearly every organization can boast of their “solution”, all can point to their commitment to quality with their 6th sigma, TQM, or Zero Defect implementations and all believe they have a competitive price. The fundamental difference will be their representatives. It’s not appropriate to refer to them as employees today, for too many tasks are rightly out-sourced, done by contract employees and other non-traditional engagements. But it is the people that make the difference in every organization. Many companies boast that their most precious asset is the people – but few realize just how critically true that statement is.

Today nearly 75% of all of the people who ever reached 70 years old are alive and leading vibrant lives. In 2005, Dustin, Florida had 14 drivers over 100 years old, with valid driver’s licenses! Yet may Human Relations departments still try of find ways to legally avoid interviewing, let alone hiring anybody in their mid-fifties or older.

This needed change won’t be easy. Innovation never is. And it won’t be without cost or risk. As historic models are challenged, even debunked, they will need to be replaced with flexible, innovative approaches that require balance and respect for the impact of change. Machiavelli had some interesting comments on the inability, even unwillingness, to embrace change which, unfortunately, is as appropriate for today’s culture as it was in his time.

In the past we talked about defined benefits and ways to foster loyalty and longevity. Today we describe defined contributions that are portable. The question for all hiring executives must be how to mobilize and monetize every employee’s commitment each and every day they are engaged with the organization. If loyalty and longevity are not to be rewarded, as they were in the past but largely are no longer, than we must create new approaches that will keep the work place a highly engaging and personally rewarding place to work. This simply cannot be done effectively using 19th century management models.

This new market and the new ways employees must be treated can be either be daunting or it can be viewed as a unique opportunity. We must react to a set of circumstances that simply didn’t exist just a short time ago, including the globalization of the market place, the impact of the internet and the sheer amount of data that is available to everyone all the time. Even the smallest and newest enterprise can effectively compete from their very first day in the international market place.

These new dimensions to business are phenomena’s that the executive ranks of most companies are struggling with today, and therein lays the opportunity. As Gary Ames, retired President of MediaOne International commented, “I never have hired for a season, but internationally, as we talk about it today, I realize they were all seasonal.” Most CEO’s and their executive management have yet to come to terms with the change that will be mandated in how companies organize, lead, allocate resources, plan, hire and motivate. This new reality will change the work of managing. Technological innovation has already forced organizational and management innovation. This is just another iteration in the long history of successful commerce. The difference is that we are on the leading edge, and we’ll have far less time to assimilate the needed changes before the competition will cause us to lose permanently. In the past we’ve worked to create organizations that encouraged people to serve the organization’s needs. We must now learn to build organizations that merit the gifts of creativity, passion, initiative and enthusiasm people will bring with them. These attributes cannot be commanded, as they are invoked out of a sense of desire. As Dr. Phil Nudelman, the retired Chairman of Group Health, one of the largest HMO’s in the country commented: “In the past we earned profits in order to deliver needed services. Now we deliver services in order to make profit. It’s a much different model.”

We are likely in the beginning phases of organizational design that will yield unforeseeable results. It will be critical for organizations to eliminate those barriers that stifle innovation. An example is the proliferation of tools that coordinate human effort, and those that support collaboration among those located anywhere. These tools in and of themselves will radically change the work of management and supervision. The young adults entering the work place have replaced the word “career” with word “authentic.” Their fundamental operating philosophy is that they should be judged upon the merits of their productive work, rather then on the basis of title, or credentials. Accountability will more likely come and come more quickly from a team member than a supervisor. In this emerging age of “stint-based” positions young workers continue to consistently report that a “lack of meaningful work” and “no sense of contribution” as the top two reasons for leaving a job earlier than they had planned or hoped.

Our traditional approach is not effective in directing the efforts of those involved in thought-intensive work, as so much of work is today. Self-directed people need to be able to make the subjective judgments that their own special knowledge prepares them to be proficient at making. These are the people who will create wealth. The ability to support collaboration as a fundamental hallmark of the organization, creating an environment that works as well horizontally as it does vertically, will enable self-directed professionals to work with their peers effectively, efficiently and continually.

While talented people are at a premium, they are available. Attracting talent is not the biggest challenge. The biggest issue before most companies is how to profit from the talented people they recruit. The ability to combine talent, technology and organizational design to create much higher profit per employee is the fundamental challenge. Highly talented people really don’t require, nor are they willing to accept overly hierarchical models. Increasingly, the directed behavior part of management will be relegated to embedded systems. The concept that this generation of skilled, educated self-directed thinkers will require a privileged class of overseers, bureaucrats and administrators is an example of how today’s organizations have created barriers and impediments that work at cross purposes.

The real challenge is to recognize that today’s worker is directed by their peers as much as by direct supervisors. Companies must create a system wherein their people can make the decisions their role calls for them to make within an infrastructure that makes it easy for them to do so. And easy for their management to have visibility and confidence in those decisions. The outline already exists in a number of companies. Decision making is peer-based, the tools necessary are widely distributed throughout the organization, management may be remote as often as not, perhaps even in a foreign location, and power will be earned from competence rather than position. The idea that strategy and direction are rightly concentrated in a very few people at the top is one of those enigmas that presents a barrier to change. Change in this kind of organization is bound up in those few senior executives’ willingness to embrace and adopt the change. Richard Florida, in his book, The Rise of the Creative Class argues that some of the most difficult organizational battles will be fought between the forces of creativity and the forces of traditional management.

The opportunity lays in a company’s ability to take control of their own destiny and consciously innovate. Much of the inspiration may very well come from looking outside the world of traditional organizational management. The truly scarce resources in nearly every company today are discretionary spending, talent and the ability to focus. It has often been said that today’s problems cannot be solved using yesterday’s methods. We may well have reached the point in the development of management that we will not for long effectively compete continuing to employ traditional methods and approaches.

Let’s consider a practical example, that of recruiting, hiring and integrating a VP of Sales. We admit to ourselves that we may be hiring for only a few short years, but we admit that even if we get just that we’ll be the better for having hired this particular talent. Research indicates that the VP of Sales role in most organizations has a life of less than two years. So, we know we are hiring for a season, but we continue to interview for a career. We talk about career progression and longevity with prior companies, and all of those metrics that really have little bearing on the capacity to succeed with a new company. The idea, the elephant in the room we all see but resist coming to terms with, is that both the prospective employee and the employer are thinking of the hire from a seasonal perspective. The employee isn’t committing to a career, nor is the company expecting him to, as evidenced by all of the other policies they have in put in place, especially those that effect benefits, which was the traditional way of locking employees to the company and ensuring longevity.

Sales leadership often requires a span of skills that very few possess. On one hand, creating a structure and process that can assure optimum performance all the time, predictably and consistently, requires a person well versed in the science of sales management. This includes the metrics, dashboards, CRM implementation, reporting, pipeline definition that can yield both accurate reporting, and provide a catalyst for performance. Once that system is in place and proven, the challenge migrates from one of transformation to one of transactions. It calls for a much different kind of personality, one who is empathetic, a coach, a mentor and tactician versus a strategic thinker. Very few excel at both ends of this wide spectrum. Some hire for competence based on historical experience and soon lose confidence when their expectations aren’t reached. Then the revolving door of trying to identify someone who can deliver the expected revenue results continues. An effort that is an unproductive diversion, and causes more lack of focus. Those highly skilled in one aspect will rarely be highly skilled in the other. The organization that will lead the way for accelerated performance may well be the one that can come fully to terms with the idea that there are seasons when certain skills and styles are necessary, and begin to recruit and hire against that criteria, forsaking the unrealistic notion of a career hire. Those in the organization that fail to see the wisdom of hiring for a season are likely those that need control and access, yesterday’s hierarchical model, and one destined for failure when competing against organizations who have embraced a new model.

Those recruiting “interim” hires at the senior level, hiring for a specific set of skills for a defined period of time, may well be the first to realize the enormous opportunity that lies within embracing a new model, that of yielding the best results from the best people for a specific task or period of time. They will likely be the leaders we study when we look to those companies who have created the most wealth, routinely turn in the highest productivity per employee, and are the most sought after companies for whom to work “for a season.”

Reference Materials:
Patrick Lencioni, The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, Wiley, 2007
Howard Stevens, Achieve Sales Excellence, Platinum Press, 2007
Joanna Barsh, Innovative Management; A conversation with Gary Hamel and Lowell Bryan, 2007
Glen Heimstra, Turning the Future into Revenue, Wiley, 2006
Nicholas Aretakis, No More Ramen: The 20-Something’s Real World Survival Guide, Next Stage Press, 2007

Michael Pearce is a principal at OneAccord Partners based out of Los Angeles and author of the sales management book, “Don’t Shoot the Piano Player” that has been used by educational institutions and companies alike as a model for building and maintaining successful sales teams. His corporate tenure includes domestic and international sales leadership assignments for North America, Europe, Asia, and the South Pacific while he served several of America’s leading companies including Citicorp, Boeing, Weyerhaeuser, Singer and EMC. He can be contacted at 425.830.4156 and michael.pearce@oneaccordpartners.com.

Image by lumaxart

by Sheri Osborn

What makes baseball a cultural phenomenon? Why do people get so fired up about their teams? Why do they sit for hours in the sun over a period of months and watch thousands of pitches and hundreds of hits when they know that only one team will win the World Series and the rest will not?

Maybe it’s the clarity of how the game is played. Clarity is something we don’t experience in very many areas in life. In baseball, both teams follow very precise rules. Hits and errors are tabulated. Having the best players at any position may or may not affect the outcome of a particular game. Who wins the World Series? Simple–the team that wins the most games. But to spectators and players alike, watching the game is thrilling and the winner celebrates for only a short time before preparing to start all over again the next season.

What if you could build the same kind of clarity that baseball enjoys into a business strategy? It definitely can be done, and it can impact your bottom line. Here’s how.

Step One: Define Your World Series

The first step in strategy development is to know the reward you are seeking and when it will be obtained. It may be a defined pile of money by a certain date or a specific stock price or it may be market leadership your category. Define a world series for your company so that your team will be working towards the same reward – focus.

Step Two: Define the External Game Structure

The baseball season doesn’t begin with the World Series, it begins with player recruiting and spring training. Next comes the seasons with many teams in the competition. Then playoffs determine who the best teams are. Lastly the World Series defines who wins the trophy.

For your market or markets, define the teams and players in your league. Analyze how the competition plays the game: their strengths, weaknesses, your own strengths and weaknesses. Review one game (one market segment or major industry) at a time. If this game was the World Series and they were the only opponent, who would win and why – analyze.

Step Three: Define the Scoring System

There are two scoring systems in baseball: one for collection of games as a whole and the other for individual play. The baseball season is composed of a fixed number of games. The four teams with the best of seven playoff games will make the semi-finals and the two that win there go to the final. Then only one wins the trophy.

In the business world, the market defines the season scoring system: stock price, revenue, profit margins. Many organizations consider “scoring” the business the territory of the CFO or CEO alone. But if you’re seeking a winning business strategy and organizational excellence, it pays to bring this scoring system to bear within each function of the organization. Players need to know how they contribute to the success of the organization in generating revenue, increasing profitability and if a public company, raising the stock price. Don’t be an organization that rewards the sales teams and the product teams and leaves the majority of the team to sit on the bench.

The individual “game” scoring system will prevent this. The team with the most runs wins. Simple? No. Underneath the team win/loss record there’s a game-scoring mechanism to measure the team’s performance and the individual’s performance. Just look at the number of statistics measured in MLB. Every strategy development effort should include the delineation of a strike, ball, out, base hit, RBI, home run or grand slam. Organizations often get caught up in one of two games here: “ship the product and collect the money” or “ferocious competitor” mode.

The dangers of not working through this portion of strategy are:

• Most employees won’t know how their own work advances the company effort
• The organization will miss the opportunity to know early enough in the game to adjust their strategy until it is too late to recover.
• The organization will miss the opportunity to reward your employees that indirectly help your organization succeed because no one knows what it means in their department to hit the home runs and grand slams.

Each department and individual employees should have clear guidance and specifics on how to score in the big game. Employees contribute so much of their lives to their work–help them know when they’re scoring runs, throwing strikes or getting outs for the team – measure the results.

Baseball is called America’s game. Something about the game causes people to root for their teams regardless of whether they win the season or finish last. Building this kind of loyalty into every function in your organization can transform your company into a competitive team playing at the top of its game.

So many areas of life are unclear. The clarity of baseball’s rules can give your people the expectation that hard work will be measured and rewarded, that everyone is playing by the same rules and that the team with the most runs at the end of the day wins. Clarity brings focus, and focus brings results. Who says business can’t be like a day at the park?

Image Source: Bob Jagendorf