I long ago accepted the fact that I’m a slight freak of corporate nature when it comes to sales or marketing. Like my left-handed writing and right-sided everything else, I’m eminently comfortable in seeing the world through the eyes of sales or the eyes of marketing.
Most individuals in those respective professions aren’t as open-minded. It’s a lot like Cubs versus Sox or Bears versus Packers. There aren’t many that get away with cheering for both.
A neighbor was out walking the dog a few nights ago and stopped to chat, which offered a welcome break from trimming the hedges. Friendly conversation turned to business and he offered his own encouraging news about his recent sales results. It turns out that he had just completed his best month ever in an industry and an economy where those words are seldom heard.
When I asked what he attributed his “best month” to, he thought for a moment and said, “Quite honestly, I think it’s because corporate finally left us alone. I’ve spent so much time over the past year forecasting and updating my pipeline and then forecasting again, and writing reports on competitors and clients, that my selling time was severely impacted. I don’t know if everyone was out on vacation or they just got tired of hearing the same story, but they left us alone to sell and the entire team had a great month.”
While there may have been many contributing factors to my neighbor’s great month, his words should echo through the halls of corporations staffed by people trying to justify their existence by sucking the life and time out of the field in an attempt to accurately explain that times are tough!
“Let my people sell!” should be the rallying cry of sales managers everywhere, as they throw a protective cover around the precious days and hours of the people engaging with current and prospective clients.
In particular, my marketing and financial friends seem to like to suddenly get close to sales reps during tough times. And while I’m all for everyone having an accurate view on reality, the interactions should be done in such a manner as to minimize the demands on the sales representatives.
As for reporting, I’ll leave it to the sales manager to be bright enough and relentless in pursuit of understanding how his/her reps are doing and what they are doing. A good sales manager does this through interaction, not through pushing paper and e-mail. A good sales manager also keeps the other groups appropriately informed, and takes the brunt of the pain and time for explaining what is going on in the market.
The Bottom-Line on the Top Line:
A wise sales manager once taught me that the only thing that sales representatives have to manage is time, and how they spend it determines their results. Help your salespeople find more time and you might just find a surprise in your P+L at the end of the month.
Classic. As someone who has worked in the field as a pre-sales engineer most of my career, I agree with you 100%.
I don’t begrudge HQ people from seeking to understand what’s going on in the field. But when they institute systems that require massive data entry on a constant interval, they are trading off sales time in the hope of a more accurate forecast, which never happens.
Let me add another requirement that people at HQ foster on people in the field — mandatory education. I’m all for education, but based on my own experiences and conversations with my colleagues, the idea has been taken way too far. Perhaps its because education can now be rolled out to the field quickly and, most importantly, it can be measured easily. I’m not sure. Regardless, the time spent completing the courses and taking the tests consumes precious time.
I laugh out loud thinking about the dashboards that people have at HQ that show all the information they collect. I imagine the impressive graphs and reports. They “prove” that everything is under control. But do they show impending problems? No way. Why? Just data isn’t enough to find problems. And the data in the system is being gamed by people in the field so they have more time do their job.
You are right that the sales manager should intervene and tell people from HQ to “Let my people sell!” Although they should, they rarely do. I think they would like to say those magic words, but organizational cultures make this topic undiscussable.
I believe there are two key measurements for sales. 1. the number of sales calls and 2. the quality of each sales call. The number of sales calls doesn’t matter if the calls lack quality. High quality sales call is critical, but it takes a large number of them to make a sale. Both measurements require that sales people invest massive amounts of time and energy into the calls. And that can’t happen if their time is constantly being diverted to less important times.
What’s the solution? Seeing the system. The organizational leaders benefit from seeing how these HQ imposed activities are impacting the revenue stream of the organization. If they see what’s happening, changes will happen.
Steven, your comments/suggestions are tremendous. Thanks for out-posting the post! Best, Art
Art,
I think it was Moses who originally said, “Let My People Sell”, but I could be wrong about that.
You’ve raised a universal issue that hits home with me. As a former sales manager, the thing my people hated most was anything–anything–that kept them in front of a prospect or customer. They were right in feellng that way. Eventually I figured out that my job wasn’t managing them as much as it was managing the corporate folks.
Keep writing. . .
Great Post Art,
As VP of sales for most of my career, I can admit now that one of my roles to serve my internal customers (my salespeople) was to provide air cover for my team. Everyone wants time with them and yet we were measured (and paid) to deliver revenue.
Sales people should be experts at how to listen to buyer problems and start as well as keep conversations going as buyers move through their buying process. Calls from product managers wanting feedback, calls from AR wanting help collecting past due invoices, calls from the CEO wanting my team to investigate something all fail to support our main objective: drive revenue.
I have two challenges to your post, first I am also a big advocate of “inspect what you expect.” So leaving salespeople alone, so they can sell does not mean not observing them selling, sharing best practices, and identifying training needs.
For example, what used to drive me nuts is if one of my team used “our competition sucks selling” I just ran into one of my old reps last week who reminded me of a discussion we had about this and I posted a blog about this poor behavior at http://nosmokeandmirrors.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/our-competition-sucks-selling-one-of-the-signs-of-a-market-loser-versus-a-market-leader/.
Secondly the sales VP must stay close to his team and listen for places in the buying process that sales seems to stall. Once identified, they can work with marketing to develop tools to keep the buyers moving to a close.
Don’t mean to rant…great post about how the company should let salespeople sell.
Mark
Steve, thanks for chiming in. You are right…I shamelessly borrowed and adapted that phrase for my own use! Keep writing as well…your blog/posts are great!
Mark, always great to gain the benefit of your wisdom. I agree w. your points…and believe that my post reflects the sales manager’s role in knowing in detail what his/her people are doing.
-Art
A lot of the interaction from headquarters tends to revolve around ‘if you would only do what we say cause we’re so smart…’ type helpfulness. Interaction would probably be more appreciated if it flowed from the ‘help us understand what’s working so we can support you there…” direction.
Great post, Art. The phenomenon that you describe is not unique to HQ-types (also known as Idiots from Corporate) making busy work for sales people. Many managers feel like they must prove that they are in charges by creating things for their people to do. The irony is that the most effective bosses I studied all believed in only getting involved or asking for things that actually helped move things forward. They were quite content to let productive people be productive without intervention. The best bosses manage less, not more.