One of the key roles of any leader or executive is to teach, coach, develop our people.  Our people are all too eager to learn from our experience, to learn what we did to be successful, as well as to learn what mistakes we may have made, so they can avoid them.

“Teaching,” whether formally or through coaching or mentoring is a privilege for any executive.  It’s a powerful way, not only to work on specific skills development, but to pass along values, to build the culture, to provide our people a broader context in which to position their contributions.  In growing our people, it’s our number one responsibility.

But often, we forget another key component of teaching/coaching/mentoring our people.  We forget the tremendous value we get in learning from them.

Today, I’ve been carrying on a couple of email conversations.  One with a sales manager in the Far East, another with a sales person in the Midwest.  With each, it became clear a telephone conversation would be valuable.  But each was reluctant to ask me to invest some time in it–not sure if there was a “business outcome” for me.  While I appreciate their sensitivity to my revenue generation, I told each, that I really value these conversations and learn a lot from them.  Each was overly humble in replying, “I can’t possibly imagine what you can learn from me.”

Learning–whether it is formal or through coaching or mentoring is really two ways.  I know what I can share as a sales executive or consultant — what people, whether they are sales people in my organization or clients, can learn from me.  But the value we get from them teaching us can never be over-stated.

It’s an opportunity for any executive to learn what’s really happening in the organization and the world.  We get the privilege to talk to people who are struggling to implement our strategies, to achieve the goals we have set, and who help make us successful.  We get an unfiltered view of what’s really happening–not the sterile numbers or text that may be in a report, but the context, emotions, and color commentary on what’s really happening.

We get much more than that.  For example, in the email conversations I was having with these two individuals, they were asking questions differently than had been posed before.  Each was asking about prospecting, demand generation, and sales process, but they expressed the questions a little differently–the questions were challenging and caused me to really think about my response.  They gave me the opportunity to look at what I thought I already knew, but to look at it a little differently.

The questions didn’t cause me to change my mind or point of view.  They didn’t create an “A-HA” moment, but they caused me to reflect and think about the appropriate response.  They forced me to consider something I thought I knew, but from a slightly different point of view.  It was something I could learn from.

Often, it’s the naive questions we may get from our subordinates.  We tend to think everyone understands things the same way we do, that just because it’s something we “get,” that everyone else does as well.  Then you encounter a sincere, but naive question, that causes you to sit back and realize you’ve been alone, that others simply may not get it.

Or, like any human being, we beome blind.  We don’t see what everyone else sees, we become a little disconnected from what’s really happening.  The questions and discussions with our subordinates or people deep in our organization are often a giant wake up call–but only if we are open to learning.

I, along with others, write often about how critical it is for executives and leaders to teach, coach, and mentor their people.  Almost always, we focus on the importance of it in developing our people and helping them perform at the highest levels.

One of the greatest values of teaching, coaching, and mentoring is what we learn from the person we are coaching.  It helps us grow and to perform at even higher levels.  When you are coaching, don’t cheat yourself of the opportunity to learn from those who you are coaching—that may be where the greatest value lies.

I sit in hundreds of review sessions every year.  Pipeline reviews, territory reviews, account reviews, opportunity reviews, call reviews.  An odd thing happens in about 90% of the reviews, they all become deal reviews.

Think about the last pipeline review you participated in.  It starts out with a review of the pipeline, pretty soon, someone–perhaps the manager, perhaps a participant, perhaps the sales person doing the review, focuses on a particular deal.  All of a sudden the conversation shifts and becomes a deal review.  Seldom do we get back to reviewing the pipeline, if we do, it’s only for a moment.  Soon another deal is highlighted and we get into another deal review.

The same thing happens in account or territory reviews.  We start talking about the account or territory plan, and within a few minutes, a deal pops up and we shift our focus to a deal.

I see this in review session after review session.  We start with one type of review and soon the review shifts to talking about deals.  It’s no wonder, as sales people or managers we’re continually focused on doing deals–chasing opportunities.  It’s natural that we shift, almost unconsciously into deal reviews.  We end up never completing the review we had intended.

Deal reviews are important–we want to look at what it takes to win, how we can maximize the deal profitability, how we can reduce the sales cycle.  We all gravitate to talking about deals.

But we can’t overlook territory, pipeline, account, and call reviews.  These are important–each serves a different function, each important to achieving our goals.

Reviews serve two important purposes–both for the manager and sales person.  First, they help us manage the business.  They help us understand what’s happening, whether we are going to achieve our goals, or to identify problems or obstacles.  The review process is a powerful coaching opportunity.  Managers need to leverage these reviews to help develop their people, sales people need the coaching, help, insight to help improve their performance.

Each review has a different focus and objective.

Deal reviews:  We spend a lot of time on deal reviews–rightfully so, this is where we spend most of our time.  The objectives of a deal review are to determine how we maximize our probability of winning, how we compress the cycle, how we maximize deal profitability.  As managers or sales people, we want to make sure we are positioned to win, that we are aligned with our customers, creating the greatest value possible.

Pipeline reviews:  Funnel or pipeline reviews are critical.  They enable us to look at all the all the deals we are pursuing.  Do we have enough deals to achieve our quotas?  Do we have good flow through the funnel?  Is anything getting stuck?  Are we feeding enough new deals into the top of the funnel?  Are there systemic things that impact our effectiveness.  A pipeline review looks at the overall state of the business, not at specific deals.

Account review:  In any account, we may have many things going on.  Lot of deals, projects, extending our relationships into new parts of the account.  An account review focuses on all aspects of the account.  In some cases, it is similar to a pipeline review–we may want to look at the number and quality of deals we are pursuing.  The account review also represents an a prospecting plan.  What are we doing to expand our relationships in the account, how do we leverage these activities to identify more opportunities to pursue.  An account review allows us to focus on the quality of our relationship—are we maximizing our value to the customer, are we important to the customer?  It allows us to look at is the customer good for us, are we maximizing the profitability of the customer.  It allows us to look at the strategic relationship we want to have with the customer.

Territory reviews:  Territory reviews are similar to account reviews, but rather than focusing on a particular account, we look at the territory.  Are we maximizing our penetration of the territory?  Where are there new opportunities?  What can we do to maximize our share of the territory.

Call reviews:  Call reviews are very closely tied to deal reviews.  We execute our deal strategy by making calls.  In a call review, we want to debrief a particular call.  In addition to the “to-dos” and next steps in the sales process, we want to take the time to assess our effectiveness in the call.  Did we accomplish everything we had planned?  Could we have accomplished more?  Is there anything we would have changes?  What did we learn and how do we apply it to future calls.  The problem with call reviews is usually we focus on the “to-dos” and miss the opportunity to discuss our impact and effectiveness.

Each of the types of reviews is very important to managing our effectiveness, performance, and impact.  We need to do each–generally we do deal and call reviews quite frequently, every week.  Pipeline/funnel reviews–unless you have very short sales cycles, don’t need to be conducted as frequently.  Territory and Account reviews–unless there’s a lot of change, usually need to be done once a quarter, sometimes even less.

To maximize the value of each review–keep focused on what you are trying to achieve in the review.  The temptation is always to talk about deals, but unless you are doing opportunity reviews, you need to focus on what you are trying to achieve in the review process.

As sales professionals and sales leaders, we are constantly focused on achieving the highest levels of performance.  We have to constantly improve–performance that was outstanding five years ago is deficient now.  What is outstanding today will become uncompetitive in the future.

Implementing performance improvement initiatives, continuing to improve and innovate is very difficult.  Sometimes, in looking at sales performance improvement, it’s important to break it into a couple of components:

• Are we being as effective as possible?
• Are we being as efficient as possible?

Sales effectiveness generally focuses on are we doing thing in the best possible way?  Are we doing things right?  We look at things like our sales process–is our sales process maximizing our ability to connect with our customers, to create value in their buying process and to maximize our ability to win?  Or we may look at our account/territory strategies—are we maximizing our contribution to the customer(s), are we aligned with their goals, helping them to achieve them, are we maximizing our share within the account or territory, are we identifying and pursuing every opportunity and maximizing our ability to win them?

Sales efficiency has a slightly different focus than sales effectiveness.  Typically it focuses on speed, time, resource.  Are we achieving our goals in the shortest time possible?  Can we reduce the time or resource required to execute our strategies and goals?  Can we reduce or compress sales cycles?

Effectiveness and efficiency go hand in hand when we are looking to achieve the highest levels of sales performance.  Doing things right–but at the wrong tempo doesn’t allow us to perform as well as possible.  Executing bad  processes in the shortest time possible doesn’t improve performance.

But sometimes, it’s very difficult to achieve both simultaneously.  Too often I see performance improvement initiatives fail because people are trying to change too many things at the same time.  People generally have the capacity to focus and execute 1-3 things very well, the more we pile on, the more difficult it is to excel.  People get confused, priorities are blurry, understanding what works and what doesn’t is impossible.

Often, it’s important to separate the performance improvement initiatives, focusing first on one area of improvement, then the next, then the next…..  Ideally, taking small, but very rapid steps.

As we look at sales effectiveness and efficiency initiatives, generally we have the greatest impact in performance improvement by focusing first on effectiveness—doing things right.  For example, making sure people understand the sales process and are executing it well–improving their deal strategies, creating great value with the customer, maximizing our ability to win.

As we as individuals or as our teams start maximizing their effectiveness or impact, then we can start working on efficiency–how to we achieve the same goals more quickly, how do we achieve the same outcomes with a smaller resource investment?

If you are struggling in making your sales performance improvement initiatives work, consider separating them–focus first on effectiveness, then focus on efficiency.  You’ll find you are accomplishing much more–faster.

As sales professionals, we’re all very goal directed and measurement oriented.  Managers leverage numbers heavily in managing and coaching performance.  But there’s a fine line in using the numbers appropriately in coaching.  Too often, coaching becomes about the numbers and not about what they mean.  The real secret to effective coaching is understanding is causing the results, getting underneath the numbers.

Most of the time the number are just symptoms of something else–an underlying problem of challenge..  None of us would feel comfortable if a doctor just treated our symptoms, rather than examining and trying to understand what creates those symptoms.  Yet too often, we totally ignore this in coaching our people.

The numbers are just symptoms or alerts.  They tell us that something’s happening, they draw our attention to a potential issue.  As managers and coaches, it’s our responsibility, with our people, to drill down understanding what they mean—what underlies them and what do we need to do about it.

Too often, the coaching goes something like this:

Manager:  “You aren’t hitting you numbers for prospecting calls, what are you going to do to fix that?”

Sales person:  “Make more calls????”

Manager:  “Absolutely, you need to hit your numbers!  Make sure you are making the calls!”

What an enormous waste of time!  What has the sales manager learned in this exchange? What has the sales person learned?  Absolutely nothing, yet the manager can “check the box,” having coached the person.  Too many coaching sessions look like this, with the discussion focusing on the wrong issues.  The manager takes no time to understand what’s going on, why the sales person might not be achieving the goals, what it means, or how to improve the ability of the sales person to meet the goal.  There’s no problem solving with the sales person, no conversation about what might be done, no skills building.  It ends up being a lost opportunity.

It is worse, the manager may not understand why the goal, in this case a certain number prospecting calls, was established in the first place.  The number was established for a reason, presumably a certain number of calls result in a certain number of qualified leads which result in more opportunities in the pipeline, which ……….  But too often,managers and sales people lose this connection, so the number becomes an end in itself, disconnected from why it was established in the first place.

Soon we have sales people and sales managers going through the motions, with no idea about what they mean and why there were established in the first place.

Metrics are important, they help us understand whether we are on target to achieve our goals or not.  For the most part, the numbers aren’t the end–they are indicators of whether we are likely to achieve our goals or not.

For managers, make sure you understand what you are trying to achieve with each metric that you are putting in place.  Understand how they contribute to the numbers that do count, understand how they link and impact each other.  Make sure you can explain explain all of this to your team.  Give them a context to understand what it means and how it fits into the attainment of their overall goals.  Make sure you can understand and diagnose the problems your people might be having in achieving the goals.  It’s important that sales people understand how everything they do contributes to achieving their goals.

In coaching, think of the actual attainment of the metric as in and indicator or alert.  If a person isn’t achieving the metric, it alerts you to looking at what’s happening and why.  You may need to take corrective action.  All of this is a terrific opportunity for coaching and problem solving with your sales people.  Engage the sales person in looking at the issues and diagnosing them.  Make them a part of the process so they understand and own their role in taking the corrective actions.

This process is very powerful–it not only enables you to identify performance issues with your sales people, developing strategies to improve performance, but the process of working with your people in understanding what the numbers mean, gives sales people greater ability to diagnoze and address issues by themselves.

Do you know what the numbers mean?  Are you managing to the number or are you leveraging these alerts in identifying performance issues and working with your people to develop solutions.

Coaching is critical to improving performance–regardless the role we are in.  Professional athletes rely on coaches to improve their performance, to help them achieve things they hadn’t been able to do before.  Musicians, actors, speakers all rely on coaches.  Listen to their conversations, though.  They are different than we might imagine.  These are people who are top performers, they aren’t looking for “the answer.”  At their level of performance, the answers don’t exist–the coaching ends up being a process of discovery–both on the part of the coachee and the coach.  They learn and grow together.

We talk about coaching in business as though it’s a natural thing—but good coaching is really pretty rare.  Most coaching ends up being disguised giving/seeking answers.

In a deal review, a manager listens impatiently—knowing what needs to be done to get the deal done.  After the sales person finishes, the manager says–”You need to do this and that.  Call on these people and present this….”  In a pipeline review, it’s “Some deals are stalling, you should look at this and that.  You need to get more into your pipeline, you should increase your prospecting activities……” 

Managers have all the answers.  We are so used to this kind of coaching, we come to think of this as the norm.  We do what our managers tell us, then we go back, review the outcomes, go back and do it all over again.  Pretty soon, we come to rely on our managers to help us come up with the next steps.  Our managers feel good, needed, and important. 

But this isn’t effective coaching.  Effective coaching is about growth–it’s about discovery.  Effective coaching challenges each of us to look at things differently, to think about new approaches.  Effective coaching increases our independence–we develop new capabilities to assess our strategies, to determine next steps.  We no longer need to go back to our managers for instructions on next steps.  We have the tools and capabilities to think about what we should be doing.

Effective coaching stretches the manager–it requires growth and discovery for the manager.  As we develop the capabilities of our people, as they become increasingly independent, we need to step up our own game.  How do we stretch our people (and ourselves) even further?  What’s the next step in their development?

Effective coaching is not about giving the answers–there’s no growth in that.  Effective coaching is about discovery and growth for both the coach and the coachee.

• As a coach, are you looking to help your people think, discover, and grow?  Or are you giving them the “answers?”
• As a coachee, are you looking to develop your capabilities?  To move your game to a higher level?  Or are you looking for the “answers?”

The difference is important–for both the coach and the coachee.

I’m amazed by many of the discussions I read about sales performance management.  At some point the “bell curve” is introduced, it’s sliced into “A’s, B’s, and C’s.”  Then the discussion focuses on how you shift or bias things to the right (the high performance side) of the bell curve.  There are endless debates about what you do, who you coach, how to hire, where you spend your time, how to maximize performance.  Taken to an extreme, the focus is “get all A’s, then everything is perfect.”

These discussions are good discussions, but the present a relatively static view of the organization, of sales strategies, and of performance management.   In reality, top executives must continue to shift the curve to the right, continuing to raise the bar on performance.  We have to look constantly at improving sales performance, effectiveness, and efficiency.  We must look at constantly improving and innovating, enabling each sales person to continue to grow in their abilities and in their contributions to the business.

Whether it’s “shifting the curve to the right,” or “raising the bar,”  it’s critical for sales executives to focus on this.   Nothing stays the same–what we do must continue to evovle and change.  It’s critical to have a clear picture of where we are moving the organization, and how we will achieve it.  It’s critical to have a establish and execute a plan to “move performance to the right.”  Our goals, strategies, structures, and sales deployment strategies will shift and change.  Our processes, systems, tools need to change to support our goals.  Our hiring profiles, our performance expectations, our metrics, our compensation and incentive systems will change. 

Outstanding performance today, may be just OK tomorrow, and unacceptable the day after.  Today’s “A’s,” may become tomorrow’s “B’s” unless we are coaching them and developing them to support our future needs.  Likewise for “B’s and C’s.”  We can’t afford not to address these performance issues today, because they will become bigger challenges in the future.

• What are you doing to shift the curve to the right?
• What does this mean for your strategies, organizational models, priorities, and programs?
• What does this mean for the skills and capabilities of your people?  Do you have the right people?  Do you need different people?  Have you changed your recruiting profiles?  What are you doing to prepare your people to shift to the right?
• Do you have the right processes, systems, and tools to support this shift and your people? 
• Do you have the right performance expectations, metrics, and incentives?
• Do your people understand the “shift?”  Do they understand their role?  Do they understand your expectations? Have they bought into it?
• What are you doing to coach and develop your people do drive the shift?  What are you doing with those that can’t?

Life and business never stands still.  We must constantly change and improve.  Are you shifting your curve to the right?

I’ve been reading a number of different posts on the topic of “Who Should We Be Coaching?”  There seem to be a variety of views, most of which I struggle with.  Some say focus on the middle, suggesting the return on coaching time for both high performers and low performers is not high.  Some focus on the high performers and middle.  In general the low performers lose out.

I’m struggling with some of the ideas, these ideas, frankly, I think it’s the manager’s job to be coaching everyone.  This doesn’t mean each person requires the same amount of time in coaching.  Nor does it mean we have a cookie cutter approach to coaching everyone on the same thing.

Also, I think too many people tend to view things as relatively static.  If competitive sales practices stood still and we didn’t need to improve or innovate, then perhaps we could reduce our coaching for top performers.  But things are always changing, everyone needs coaching and development to continue to improve and innovate.  Without this, top performers soon become mediocre performers.  The bar on selling is continually being raised.  In fact a large part of our job as managers is raising that bar–continuing to innovate and improve, consequently, helping our people develop new capabilities, skills and coaching them in these improvement initiatives.

It seems to me, that coaching needs to focus on several areas for each person:

• Top performers:  No one is perfect, top performers, in fact, always look for the little edge or the little improvement.  Managers need to spend time helping these top performers discover these improvements.  The world of selling never stops–leveraging your top performers for constant improvement and innovation is an important aspect of coaching–managers should be leveraging top performers to help innovate and improve, taking what these top performers discover and leveraging this across the sales organization.  Finally, part of the manager’s job is to coach people not only in maximizing their performance today, but to maximize their potential contribution in the future.  Manager’s need to look at developing top performers to take greater responsibility–whether it is moving to a higher level as a sales person, moving into management, or moving into some other role.  Coaching is not just about today, but it is about preparing people for tomorrow.
• Mid-range performers:  There’s no argument here, we want to see continued improvement in the performance of our mid range performers.  Unlike our top performers, there is clearly a need to improve what they are doing today.  As managers, most of our time will be focused on performance in their current roles.  At the same time, we must also prepare them for the future–if the bar is being raised, we have to prepare these people to meet these new challenges.
• Low performers:  We can’t afford to ignore them, we can’t write them off.  As managers, we need to coach them—getting them to improve their performance, meeting our expectations.  Alternatively, we have to move them into a job where they can be a top performer (sometimes that’s moving them out of the company).  All of this is part of the manager’s role in coaching, doing nothing is not an option, that is if the manager is doing her job.

As managers, we are responsible for the performance of all our people.  We have to make sure each person is performing at the highest levels possible in their current roles, we have to prepare them to grow in their job and to grow in their ability to contribute to the company.  If we can’t get them to reach the levels of performance required, we have to move them into areas where they can perform.  All of this is part of what managers do in coaching.

I wish it were simpler, but they aren’t.  Managers have to coach everyone.  The time we invest has to be appropriate for what we are trying to achieve with each person.  We can’t “schedule 15 minutes of coaching” for each person–it doesn’t work that way.  What we coach each person on is different–we have to coach to maximum impact for each individual.

What do you think?  Am I missing something?

I’m shifting gears a little, today I’m focusing on a key sales management metric.  It’s important for sales people to understand this–it’s part of the way senior managers look at organizations and how they invest in the sales function, sales people should understand this.

The other shift, is this metric is more of a trailing measure, like sales and order performance.  In previous posts, I’ve spent more time looking at leading measures.

Cost Per Order Dollar (CPOD) is actually a number of measures, but they really look at the cost of selling.  Depending on your company, this may be based on orders–which is where the acronym comes from–or sales/revenue.  If there is a wide separation between orders and revenue, I track both, but find the order based measurement a little more meaningful from an operational point of view.

This measure is similar in concept to Cost Of Goods Sold (COGS), which is generally a representation of manufacturing expense as a percentage of sales (or orders).  CPOD is calculated by looking at Selling Expense/Total Orders(or Revenue).  Generally it’s expressed as a percent.  For example if the total cost of selling is $10M and the orders generated during that time were $100M, the CPOD would be 10%.

So now that you have the foundation for how this is measured, let’s dive into it a little more deeply.  I like to track Direct and Indirect CPOD.  Direct CPOD represents the cost of your sales people as a percent of the orders they generate.  This could be for your field sales force or your inside sales teams–if they deal directly with customers and generate orders.  The costs include all their salaries, commissions, benefits, travel, cars, computers, and related expenses.  It does not include the costs of the people and organizations that support the sales people–including their managers, sales operations teams, pre-sales support teams and other functions that may reside in the “sales organization” but are not directly involved in generating orders.  Indirect CPOD is the costs of all those functions divided by orders or revenue.

By tracking both, I understand the cost trend of the people directly accountable for orders and revenue, as well as the “overhead” costs.  Generally in looking at these measures, since they are trailing indicators, I track general trends–I want to make sure the sales function is affordable, plus it gives me a very rough indicator of productivity.

I tend to track the trailing quarter (what’s been the trend over the past 3 months) and the trailing 12 months.  I want to see it constant–or even better declining.  If I see Direct CPOD declining over time, it’s probably a good sign, it’s an indicator that sales productivity may be increasing. 

However, too often, we see it going the other direction–CPOD is increasing.  Now you’ll see why I track both Direct and Indirect.  If Indirect CPOD is increasing–it shows my overhead costs are rising–sometimes it justifiable–for example we may have invested in a major training program, which temporarily may increase Indirect CPOD.  But if it starts increasing on a consistent basis, I start to worry about why the overhead costs are increasing.  Generally, we want to run as lean as possible, so unexplained increases in Indirect CPOD may indicate some real problems.  If Direct CPOD is increasing, it means the productivity of the sales people is declining.  Expenses may not have increased–the line item on the budget may not have changed (or could have even decreased), but the amount of business being generated is declining.  This is really worrisome, it’s something we need to dive into and understand–we need to keep spending in sales at an affordable level.

Too often, managers just track the overall budget and spending.  They don’t separate the direct and indirect views to better isolate where the spending problem might be.  They don’t relate it to business volumes, so they may see expenses declining and think budget are OK–but orders may be declining at a faster rate.

These are trailing or historical figures.  If your pipelines are not looking good, you should expect Direct CPOD to be increasing–it should not be a surprise.  But a healthy pipeline may not mean your CPOD will be decreasing.

Sales managers always have to manage a budget are constantly looking at increases in sales productivity.  CPOD is probably one of the easiest measures for any manager to track.  It gives you a rough indicator on productivity trends and spending issues.

“Rising Tides Float All Ships,”  a bit of an odd title, given the current economic uncertainty.  This term has been used to talk about the false sense of success many individual and  executives may have about their peersonal performance and that of their  organizations.

In great times, or robust growing markets, it’s hard to perform badly.   To some degree, regardless how sharp or well executed strategies are, how good your sales and marketing programs are, organizations may seem successful—even when they may not be performing as well as they could—or even when they are performing pretty poorly.

In bad markets, or poor economic times, what happens?  To some degree, the same thing happens.  We tend to compare our performance against others–our competitors and others.  We may cut back, reducing programs, spending, cutting back on people, matching our competition.  I read financial reports where executives speak of the belt tightening, but then go on to say, “Our entire industry is in a downturn.”  They may go on to make competitive comparisons, making sure to show that performance is comparable to the competition. 

In good times and bad, too often, we tend to hide behind comparisions with others.  In good times, with good results, we tend to think we are performing well if we match our competition.   In bad times, with declining results, we tend to think we are performing as well as could be expected, if we match our competition.

Industry data shows plummeting rates of sales people achieving quota. Earlier this year, CSO Insights reported roughly 52% of sales people were achieving quotas. I just saw an excerpt from an Aberdeen report, now suggesting only 38% of sales people are achieving quota, with only 26% in “laggard” companies.

Yet there seems to be no alarms–the tides are falling, all the ships are falling to lower levels, time to continue belt tightening and “toughing it out.”

But too often, we never look to see, “Are we performing at the very highest levels possible?”  In good times, too many tend to think the performance is a result of superb strategies and execution on the parts of sales and marketing.  We don’t assess performance to look at “should be be achieving more?”  We don’t confront the issue, “How can I make sure our organization is performing at it’s full potential?”

In bad times, we’re so busy surviing and making sure that we are no worse than competition, we don’t address the same issues, “should we be achieving more?”  “Is our organization performing at it’s full potential?”

It’s interesting, in both good and bad times, there are a small number of leading individuals and organizations–sales people and executives that think a little differently.  Executives who aren’t driven as much by competition, but who are driven by their own performance standards and expectations.  People who always are assessing themselves and their organizations, looking to improve, constantly redefining performance and success.

For those people and organizations, quota is less a goal, than something you pass on the way to attaining your goals.  The economy is not an excuse (good or bad), but something that has to be accounted for in developing and executing the best possible strategies.

These organizations defy the conventional wisdom of ‘Rising Tides Float All Ships.”   Somehow they don’t seem to be affected by the tides–or the impact of good/bad economies and markets is lessened for them.  They don’t let success blind them, they are constantly looking to improve performance.  They don’t let the economy be an excuse, but believe there are ways to outperform their own expectations.  They look outside for other views–independent assessments, other ideas.  They are disciplined in their analysis.  They experiment, try new things.  They are not afraid of failure, and learn from their failures.  They readily admit their own limitations, seeking to grow.  They don’t hide their mistakes, but learn from them and move forward.

Which category of sales person or sales leader do you fall into?  Are you rising and falling with the tide, or are you ignoring the tides and setting and achieving your own performance standards?

The other day I received a call from a troubled CEO.  He ran a small company.  “My sales people aren’t producing results!  My sales manager is worthless!  Can you help me straighten this  out?”  After asking a few questions and probing a little further, I politely declined, I made some excuse and suggested he find someone else.

I didn’t take the project because as I spoke to him, I discovered the root problem was the CEO.  Yes, there was a problem with the people.  They didn’t have the skills, they didn’t have the attributes, there were a lot of problems.  Some appeared to be doing things that skirted some ethical and business practice issues.  Others were just plain lazy or sloppy.  Potentially 75% the sales team was wrong and should have been terminated.  The manager was all wrong as well.  He wasn’t doing what the owner expected, he wasn’t doing what he should have been doing.

There were a lot of problems with the sales organization.  It started with having the wrong people.  But I couldn’t help this CEO fix these problems.  He basically was the root problem–he had hired all the people, he had created the environment in which all these people operated.

The people we hire are a reflection of us and our companies.  They are a reflection of what we value, our culture, our operating style, what we think of our customers.  We tend to hire in our own image.  If we are hiring all the wrong people, what does that say about us and our company?  What does this say about what we think of our customers, or how we want them to be handled.

Too often, I see people complaining about their sales people, when the root problem is them.  It starts with bad hiring decisions, it continues with providing them poor leadership, not defining performance objectives, not managing performance, not taking action with problem performers.

When I see this problem, systematically, in an organization, while there may be problems with the sales people, the root problem is with management.

Are you hiring the people that will represent you and your company the way you want to be represented?

Are you setting the right performance expectations, providing the right tools, systems, processes, training?

Are you providing the leadership, coaching and developing people, making sure they are acting in a way that is consistent with your strategies, values, and culture?

Do you act on problem performers?

If you see lots of problems in your organization, the first place to look in fixing the problems is in the mirror.