Leadership Caffeine-Need Market Insight? Ride with a Sales Rep and Learn
Filed under: Career, Customer Service, Leadership, Management Education, Professional Growth, Sales
I had just been hired on in a senior strategic marketing role in an industry new to me, and job one was acclimating to the market and industry dynamics and trying to understand what a customer looked like in this world.
After the obligatory round of meetings with company executives, division heads and as many of their team members as I could convince to allocate some time, I recognized that the context, while appreciated, lacked the depth you can only gain from connecting with customers and industry players on their home turf. No rocket science here, just good common sense.
The sales and customer teams were happy to schedule some client meetings with me, and I appreciated their courtesy, but I wanted to go about this in a different manner.
The typical “new executive wants to meet customers” meetings (or, as I’ve heard them referenced, “educate the idiot from corporate” meetings) many of us have attended or at least witnessed, are largely ceremonial and usually highly caloric. Long lunches or factory tours followed by fancy dinners are lousy ways to do anything other than waste everyone’s time and expand your waistline. I suggested an alternative.
I asked for the opportunity to ride-along/travel with the firm’s top sales representative from each region. I wanted to gain my insights through the windshield and eyes of the people out finding and serving clients and partners. I had the good fortune to be working with a sales executive who understood that the better educated I was, the better I could work with and serve his team. And to ensure that I was in for the full experience, he set me up with two week long trips…Sunday night to Friday.
5 Valuable Lessons You Learn Riding with a Great Sales Professional:
1. Success knows no shortcuts. There is no down time. Waking hours are working hours. From planning time over breakfast to strategizing in parking lots to setting up the next few days activities during the evenings. The only thing that a sales representative has to invest is time, and the best ones invest this time wisely.
2. Follow the money after you understand the real problems. You need to know both the people with the budgets and the people with the problems. We met with plenty of decision-makers on our tour, usually after spending considerable time with the people doing the work and feeling the pain points.
3. The best way in to a new client is usually not through the front door. When we found ourselves with rare time between scheduled meetings, I learned a few lessons in people skills and chutzpah as this rep pulled into a gated parking lot after saying out loud, “I’ve been meaning to get into this firm for awhile. Let’s try it.” He proceeded to talk our way through the guard gate. Instead of heading in the front door, we started at the docks and ended up eventually finding the person with the right title for a 30-minute introduction meeting. This person was so impressed with the creativity of getting in to see him, he agreed to give us time at his team’s monthly meeting. While security measures may have tightened since he employed that approach, the lesson was very real.
4. It’s impossible to know what’s really going on in a game from the skybox seats. After weeks of listening to glowing reports of all of the great things my new company was doing (and why competitors were flummoxed in the process), it was painfully clear that the market reality didn’t match the corporate messaging. Warts, bumps, bruises, bruised egos, the emotions from the customers and alliance partners impacted by the programs, and the true strengths of competitors suddenly became much clearer after talking with the people using and selling our systems.
5. After riding with a rep, your view on supporting the front-line team members will never be the same. Spend a few weeks total riding or travelling with your top representatives, and in spite of the early awkwardness, you will form an important bond with these individuals, and you will cultivate a level of empathy for the challenges of everyone in that role that will make you a better professional.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
I recognize that not everyone has the latitude to “ride with a rep.” However, you can foster relationships and seek out the insights and wisdom of the people carrying the bags and cultivating the clients. Find ways to provide help to the people in the field and show genuine interest in learning from and supporting these professionals, and they will repay you with insights and observations you can only learn in the trenches.
For those who come into senior roles, you will likely have the opportunity to gain access to clients and other staff members. Say “no thanks” to the ceremonial and mostly superficial client meetings at this level, and roll up your sleeves and help carry the bags for your top producers for a few days. The education is priceless.
Three Great Hiring Habits I Learned from a Remarkable Manager
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Making Decisions, Management Education, Professional Growth, Sales, Talent Management
One mis-hire can poison the workplace pond, tarnish your reputation and impact your team’s/firm’s ability to execute. Do this a few times and your mistakes will likely knock you out of the hiring game and potentially into the cozy confines of today’s crowded unemployment lines.
Unfortunately, the average manager isn’t very good at assessing talent and making the right call. Many managers receive little training in the hiring and evaluation process. Most of us are not psychologists, and let’s face it, it’s darned hard to get a good read on people and their true strengths, skills and attitudes during the interview phase. Throw in the need to assess cultural fit, and making the right hiring call truly is a daunting task.
If you are fortunate enough to have a strong HR pro or team supporting you, that’s great. Use them…they will help you do great things. If not, join the club. You own the hiring issue, and it’s important for your career and for your firm that you get this right more often than not.
Three Great Habits I Learned from a Remarkable Hiring Manager:
1. Great Hiring Managers are Relentless Talent Scouts:
A great former colleague of mine is the best talent scout I’ve ever met in a sales capacity. He worked relentlessly at industry events and during his busy weeks to identify, engage and get to know the sales talent in his area and in and out of his industry. In the rare event of an opening (almost always due to growth), he inevitably had multiple strong candidates teed up. His talent pipeline was always full, and served as an example for the rest of the organization. This sales manager cultivated a remarkable team and made us all a great deal of money.
2. Great Hiring Managers Understand the Job and the Key Success Factors for the Position at a Detailed Level:
My sales colleague above had such a strong grasp of the role that he was hiring for and what it took in terms of experience, skills and attitude, that his vetting process was honed to very specific behavioral issues from career and life.
In a two-hour meeting over coffee, this manager would walk away with a sense of fit, based on the very behaviorally focused dialogue. However, given his approach to building a pipeline of candidates, the first discussion was never the last. Most of his hires took place after a year or more of periodic interactions. The discussions were always framed as just that…discussions, and over time, both the manager and the prospective hire had a chance to get to know each other and to evaluate mutual fit on many dimensions.
3. Great Hiring Managers Look for Complementary Life Experiences: “What Position Did You Play?”
I can’t leave behind the story of this great hiring manager, without offering one anecdote. He once shared that he preferred to hire individuals who had occupied leadership roles in team sports. His favorite candidates were baseball catchers. He loved the fact that catchers by vocation scanned the entire field, directed much of the game and participated actively in every play. Pitchers on the other hand, had no chance with this manager. They only played every third or fourth game, were focused mostly on themselves and the batter, and didn’t have the leadership and field of view habits of the catcher.
Unique and maybe just a bit odd, but it worked!
His integration of other life experiences into the process was a nice extension of the behavioral evaluation process that all of us should apply when getting to know our candidates. His patient, let’s do this over a period of time, approach allowed these types of discussions to emerge, and added to the richness of understanding for all parties. And yes, life experiences count…often as much as the professional experiences we focus on during our evaluation processes.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Too many hiring processes are mechanistic in nature and lack the depth of the practices employed by my sales manager colleague above. While your circumstances may be outside of sales and slightly different, the take-aways, including: know the job intimately, take your time getting to know the candidate and look beyond the CV to life experiences, are applicable to all of us.
Now, what position did you say you played?
Management Excellence Toolkit-Part 4: Improve Your Estimating and Forecasting Effectiveness
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Skills, Making Decisions, Management Education, Performance, Project Management, Sales, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
Note from Art: Your decisions define you as a leader and a manager, yet we spend very little time in our busy lives finding ways to improve our abilities in this area. This Management Excellence Toolkit Series will help you recognize the challenges and pitfalls of individual and group decision-making and offer ideas on improving performance for you and your co-workers.
Part 1 of this series emphasized the importance of developing, updating and referencing a Decision Journal. Part 2, focused on understanding how we make decisions and how various traps and biases often derail us. In Part 3, we tackled the power and importance of framing situations properly to improve your odds of success. Part 4 focuses on improving estimating and forecasting accuracy by strengthening management and leadership practices.
Let’s kick this one off with the conclusion: poor management and leadership practices make a tough job tougher by introducing pressures and biases that directly impact estimating and forecasting activities.
If these environmentally imposed biases weren’t enough, human nature gets a vote as well. Studies in the field of decision-making have shown, “we are systematically over-confident in our own abilities.”
Consider the unscientific annual BusinessWeek poll results: “90% of managers believe they are in the top 10% of all performers in their firm.”
Another annual survey is taken for incoming freshmen at Harvard, where 75% of the students believe they will end up in the top 15% of their class.
I’m all for optimism. It’s most definitely a beneficial human characteristic and possibly a good defense mechanism for the trials and tribulations of survival. However, it can lead us astray, sometimes in life or death situations.
The Thin Air of Life or Death Decisions:
Professor Michael Roberto in his excellent material on critical decision making uses the Everest tragedies of 1996 to showcase a myriad of decision-making errors that started with an over-confidence bias and literally cascaded downhill into a disaster from there. (Roberto’s content in this segment is based on Jon Krakauer’s article/book, Into Thin Air.)
As a backdrop, several of the expedition leaders in 1996 had only experienced the relatively calm conditions of the past few years on Everest. The leaders had not experienced the worst of the worst on Everest, and we’re lulled into a false sense of security by these conditions and their own recent successes in reaching the summit (a recency effect bias!).
One of the expedition leaders, Scott Fischer, was quoted as saying, “We’ve got the Big E completely figured out, we’ve got it totally wired. These days, I’m telling you, we’ve built a yellow brick road to the summit.”
Another leader, Rob Hall, responding to a worried climber, offered: “It’s worked 39 times so far, pal, and a few of the blokes who summitted with me were nearly as pathetic as you.”
Both Fischer and Hall along with six of their expedition members perished under brutal conditions made worse by a nearly unbelievable string of bad decisions, not the least of which was over-confidence.
Our Own Mountains to Climb:
While most of us are not planning on climbing Everest anytime soon, we have our own metaphorical mountains to conquer in the form of projects, budgets, campaigns and business plans. And unfortunately, we’re every bit as susceptible to the many decision-making traps, including estimating and forecasting errors, that can lead to disaster in life or death circumstances.
Consider:
If the management culture is one that values strict adherence to schedules and reinforces this perspective by punishing those who miss schedules, people and teams naturally add significant padding to their estimates.
For complex projects involving multiple work groups, this padding practice across all of the teams adds up to significantly longer project estimates. And let’s face it, work expands to fill the time allocated for it. The cost, time-to-market (or implementation) implications are huge!
Alternatively, I’ve observed over-zealous executive teams declare a time-to-market mandate without consideration of the project complexities. The pressure on the project teams results in estimates executives “want to hear,” but that have no basis in the reality of the work. As time and cost estimates are missed, the environment tends to deteriorate into one of finger-pointing, excuse-making and general dysfunction
Fear Impacts Estimates:
While fear pushes project estimates out into the future, this same environment likely results in ultra-conservative sales forecasts on one hand and unrealistic cost estimates on the other.
For anyone accountable for revenue and/or expense numbers, you tend to take your cue on these numbers from environmental pressures. I’ve observed managers who felt pressure to inflate revenue forecasts out of fear of being viewed as naysayers and poor team players, while at the same time, deflate expense numbers out of fear of being viewed as not having control over costs.
Fear in the workplace creates estimating and forecasting gamesmanship.
Prior Performance May Be a Poor Predictor:
Much like the recency effect displayed by the Everest expedition leaders, we open additional trap doors for our estimating and forecasting approaches by relying too much on prior performance in spite of changing conditions. The past is interesting, but in times of significant change or distress, it is a lousy predictor of future performance.
Data, Bloody Data:
We live in data-filled world and it’s common to hear management talk about the importance of making data-driven decisions. I’m all for it. After all, that’s why your firm spent countless dollars and suffered through nearly endless schedule delays and cost over-runs to implement the latest business intelligence tools. However, even the best system and the cleanest data cannot compensate for our propensity as humans to seek out information that confirms our opinion and discount or discard information that doesn’t. This confirming evidence trap is a frequent contributor to estimating and forecasting errors.
Six Ideas for Minimizing Estimating and Forecasting Errors:
1. Commit to improving management practices that impact estimating. If you are struggling to gain reliable project or business estimates, chances are there are systemic problems created by poor management practices. To the extent possible, you need to cultivate an estimating and forecasting culture free from fear of reprisal and low in gamesmanship. This includes eliminating practices that encourage over-confidence or extreme prudence. It also includes minimizing fear as a factor that unduly influences estimate development. The best project managers and project sponsors work hard to create a safe environment for estimate development, often serving as buffers between their working teams and the pressures coming from top management.
2. Beware the group effect. Groups tend to be over-confident, and have been shown to take larger risks and offer more aggressive estimates than individuals working on their own.
3. Seek broader data sets and encourage the introduction of information that challenges existing confirming evidence.
4. Ask for objective, 3rd party review of estimates and the assumptions underlying the estimates. High performance project teams use this approach as a safety check against groupthink and over-confidence or over-prudence. A knowledgeable but uninvolved third party can ask tough questions, challenge assumptions and indicate when estimates just don’t make sense.
5. Build time for learning into estimating activities. Recognize the weakness of estimating new projects or programs based on prior results. And if you are doing something “new” and outside of the experience band of your firm, it’s critical to build learning time into the process.
6. Commit to monitoring estimating performance over a period of time. Build in the process of documenting estimate assumptions, reviewing results and identifying what worked and what failed. For many teams and firms, this is a distinct process change that requires a genuine interest in improving estimating performance.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Just about every firm and team struggles somewhere with estimating and forecasting. The root causes of these problems are found both in human nature…our propensity towards over-confidence, and in our managerial practices and the impact of these practices on the decision-making environment. Forewarned is forearmed on the human nature issue. As for the management practices, these truly are controllable by you.
10 of My Favorite Dumb Ass Management Mistakes
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Making Decisions, Management Education, Marketing, Performance, Sales, Strategy, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Talent Management
Note 1 from Art: this one is rated something or another for strong language and emotional intensity.
Note 2: In the spirit of my post, “At Least 20 Things to Stop Doing as a Leader,” which has grown well north of 50 thanks to a deluge of reader comments, I’m back with a list of some insanely stupid and all-too-common management mistakes. These focus more on the decisions, actions or inactions that contribute to creating even bigger problems. While I’ve remained on the positive side of the law here (felons, you’ve had your day!), some of these mistakes are truly criminal. Please feel free to chime in with your additions.
1. Locking the corporate strategy in a drawer. Hey, I’m all for security, but this wasn’t just protecting important documents. This executive didn’t bother to share the strategy with employees either. It was a secret.
2. Not rolling out the sales compensation plan until late March. The sales team was on a calendar year. Hmmm, what did everyone do for Q1?
3. This one is epidemic…sucking the value out of an acquired company by folding, spindling, mutilating, disrespecting, vanquishing and otherwise conquering and plundering the target. We’ve got a mountain of evidence of this, and still, dumb a@@ executives focus on the deal (the easy part) and forget the real work of properly and positively managing the new relative. Welcome to the family! Now bend over and cough.
4. Looking for cause in the effect. This is a daily occurrence in many businesses, where managers run around trying to explain the drivers behind company, competitor and market outcomes. “Hey, our competitor keeps putting up great numbers. They’ve gone to a formal dress code at the office. It must be the clothes.” OK, that’s a little far-fetched, but I double-dog dare you to find a few instances of misguided cause and effect in your workplace today.
5. Losing sight of the core issues in the heat of argument. The decision making process is complex. Add in a group of high powered and big ego managers and you’re certain to be pressured into a dumb a** decision. My favorite evil tactic, “Take of your (insert function) hat and put on your business hat.” You might as well have a lobotomy prior to making that decision, because that’s what your evil counterpart is essentially asking you to do.
6. Letting marketing define its own key performance indicators. Hey, I’m a lifetime marketer, and I still rankle at this one. If the marketing activities don’t specifically connect to the key levers that move the business forward, they are interesting to some but useless to many.
7. Sliding down the slippery slope of consensus decision-making. Everybody doesn’t get a vote unless we’re talking about ordering pizza. We’ve all seen the cartoon that indicates in a series of panels what various functions wanted in a new product development effort. The Rube Goldberg outcome looks nothing like what the customer wanted. Start looking for the moves away from smart and good in the consensus-based decisions on your teams. It should frighten you.
8. “It’s sunk cost. We can’t worry about what we’ve spent, we need to keep moving forward.” Ha! This rationale has derailed careers and destabilized nations. For the love of all this is good in humanity, quit burning money when all the signs say “Stop!”
9. Daily occurrence in this economy: failing to acquire the right talent because of cost controls. Yeah, let’s fix this one once we’re making money! (For 20 bonus points, identify the insane and inane thought processes that went into that last statement.)
10. Annual occurrence: putting a group of managers in a room one time per year and expecting that out of the collective group grope, market winning strategies will emerge. “Hey, great meeting. See you next year.” We’ll maybe…unless our competitors leave us for global road kill.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The common denominator in all ten of those very real mistakes is that they are controllable. We can decide to not make these mistakes. The sales comp plan can hit the street with the new year. We don’t have to throw good money after bad, and we don’t have to engage in practices like the annual strategy planning retreat (it’s a process!) that are just stupid. If you can’t go out and get the talent that you need now with what’s walking around on the street, you’re either not trying hard enough or you need to find some other people to work for.
Instead of thinking deep thoughts about making good decisions as part of your New Year’s Resolutions, why not resolve to simply not make the same bad old decisions over and over again. Now that would be progress.
Seek Out and Win Those Customer Moments of Truth
Filed under: Crisis Leadership, Customer Service, Life and Business, Management Education, Performance, Sales, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
It’s finally cycling season here in the Chicago area! After a long winter of not taking my road bike into the shop for a tune-up , I recently rolled it in on a busy Saturday, when the owner and crew were fully engaged at a break-neck pace selling bicycles and writing up repair tickets. Bad planning on my part, but I’ve not yet developed the habit of thinking about my bicycle in February, so here I was.
My need were simple. I plan on riding about 1,000 miles on the road bike this summer-a good target for me given my schedule and level of fitness, and I wanted the bike checked out for general mechanical integrity, wear and tear, the trip computer replaced and new pedals installed. The owner wrote up my ticket and promised that someone would call when it was ready.
About a week later, I received the call and drove over to pick up my favorite two-wheeled vehicle and was pleased to see it as the clerk rolled it towards the counter. My thoughts of jumping back in the saddle that night were quickly dashed however, as I looked over the bike and realized that the same pedal with the broken clip and the same intermittent trip computer were still present. The ticket was filled out…and signed, but not a thing had been done. I looked right and left and realized that the shop owner was not present.
The individual helping me happened to be the shop’s bike fitter and as it turned out a seriously sharp bicycle mechanic. She also understood to a “t” how to deal with what had quickly moved from a happy occasion to one filled with disappointment and annoyance.
Within seconds, she stepped in to defuse the situation. She admitted that she had no excuse for what had happened and she immediately grabbed another mechanic, put my bike on the rack, and for the next 30 minutes the two of them checked, tuned and tweaked and cleaned and lubed the bike from top to bottom. She showed me that my tires needed replacing…educated me on the different options and instantly installed the tires. She upgraded the trip computer at no additional charge..and suggested what I might want to do from a maintenance perspective after the riding season. Oh, and she pointed out the local riding group…got me to add my e-mail address and worked to convince me that I would not be the slowest rider of the group.
In a word, she was fantastic. Crisis abated, brand saved…and in fact strengthened. The bike performed great on my first ride, although I now know that I can use a bit of a tune-up.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The situation had the potential to go bad in a hurry. I’ve purchased at least 8 bicycles from this shop over the years. I buy all of my supplies and now that I’ve advanced into a new class of equipment, my annual purchases have increased. I’m in the market for a new car carrier, and I’m hopeful that one of my sons will pick up this hobby. This business is dependent upon a bunch of happy, life-time customers like me, and there’s no telling what damage a few dissatisfied ones might do to the shop’s top and bottom lines.
While it was obvious to me that there was just a mix-up, the way the situation was handled strengthened my relationship (yes, there is a relationship) with this shop.
Owners and managers, take heed and teach your people to seek out and seize upon moments of truth as golden opportunities to build loyalty and business. Celebrate these successes. Make them part of the legend and folklore of your business and hire and train people that get it and that want to contribute to this legend!
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