Sales management is one of the toughest jobs around—particularly that of the first line sales manager.  Fundamentally, our job is to maximize the performance of our sales teams–both tactically and strategically.  I read a post, How the VP of Sales can Inspire their Sales Team with 4 Simple Habits.  It got me reflecting on how managers maximize their impact, and where managers should spend their time, not just the Vice President of Sales, but all levels of sales management.

The post offers some interesting suggestions, frankly a number of them I disagree with very strongly.  Let’s start with the areas in which we are in real alignment.

The biggest impact a sales manager at any level can have is by being out with their people in front of customers.  Yet too often, exactly the opposite thing happens–managers spend too much of their time internally focused.  They are chained to their desks, conducting internal meetings, conducting internal reviews, spending time reporting on what’s going on.  Some of this is necessary-we need to communicate to the rest of the organization, we need to get resources and support for our people, we need to get help for our customers.  But too often, managers are consumed with this.  They stop visiting customers, they stop visiting their people.

Being chained to the desk, being focused on reporting, staying internally focused on internal politics do not produce revenue or improve the capabilities of sales people.

Without a doubt, the number 1 and the number 1 priorities of sales managers are Customers and Your People!  If the majority of your time isn’t spent in the field working with your people and visiting your customers, you are prioritizing things incorrectly.  Nothing trumps spending your time here–period.  A number of years ago, I was EVP of Sales for a large organization.   I was scheduled to do a presentation at our Board of Directors.  It was an “important” presentation.  As the day approached, a critical customer situation arose.  It was clear that my involvement was needed and, unfortunately, the only time available with the customer conflicted with my ability to present to the Board.  The decision was easy for me–I conveyed my apologies to my boss, the CEO, and to the Board Members, saying Customers and this situation were more important.  Fortunately, my boss and the board applauded that decision–and we did get the order.

So managers need to prioritize time with customers and with their people.  We need to unchain ourselves from our desks and spend the majority of our time in the field.  Take a moment right now and look at your calendar for the past 30 days.  If you haven’t spent a minimum of 50 percent of your time in the field with your people and with customers, you’re not maximizing your impact.

Now once we’ve committed to spend our time in the field, where do we have the most impact?  This is where I think the article is dead wrong.  It suggests that managers spend the bulk of their time with A players and calling on their customers.  I don’t want to ignore the A players, but this is not where the problems are, this is not where managers have the most impact—both in driving performance of sales people and in contributing to closing business.  By definition, the A players really don’t need your help, so it’s irresponsible to focus the bulk of our time with them, unless all you want is “feel good” meetings.

Where we as managers have the greatest impact and leverage is with our B and even C players.  Maximizing the performance of that huge middle range of our people—the B players has the highest return on a manager’s time.  Working with them, we have so much more impact, so much greater room for helping them improve.  Likewise, the impact we have working with them, on their deals, helping strengthen their competitive positioning and moving the deal through the customer’s buying cycle.  (For a different perspective the value of focusing on your B players, look at what the authors of Challenger Selling have to say.)

It may be more fun hanging out with A players and their customers, but that’s not our job as sales managers.  Our job is to maximize the performance of our organization.  We have to invest our time where it has greatest impact, and frankly where we’re needed.  By  definition, it won’t be with our top performers.

This doesn’t say we ignore our C players either.  Our job is to maximize performance, this includes dealing with performance problems.  Coaching our C players–either getting them to be B’s or A’s, moving them into roles where they can be B’s or A’s (and that may be out of the company) is our responsibility as managers.

Whatever level of manager you are, spend your time where you have the greatest impact–it’s always with customers and sales people.  Once you get out to the field, don’t hide out–head straight for the people and customers where you can bring the greatest value and impact, and where you are most needed.  Don’t ignore your A players or your great customers, but they don’t really need you as much.  It’s your B and C players that need you and your attention.  It’s the tough customers where you can help both your people and the customers the most.

Serve your people, serve your customers, the rest takes care of itself.

Related posts:

1. Sales Is Changing, Are You Maximizing Your Impact?
2. Performance Management And Accountability
3. Performance Management Friday — Sales/Management Alignment

One of the things I love the most about sales people is the eternal optimism.  It really takes a tremendously positive outlook to be a great sales person.  After all, we face rejection every day.  We face challenges and obstacles in every situation.  Some are challenges come from changing customer expectations. We always face market and competitive challenges.  Sometimes we face challenges from within our own companies.

It requires tremendous resilience and optimism to succeed in selling.

But sometimes that optimism hurts us.  Sometimes it prevents us from looking at reality, from seeing things the way they really are, not how we want them to be.  This is, perhaps, the most dangerous challenge sales people face.  It’s one of our own creation.  And it’s funny, it sneaks up on us–it never smacks us in the face, it kind of creeps in.  All of a sudden we find ourselves mired in a very difficult situation, struggling to understand and work our ways out.

It happens all sorts of ways.  Our pipelines aren’t as full as we want.  Our managers may be pressuring us to increase the numbers of deals in the pipeline.  We relax our qualification criteria to get more deals—but because they aren’t in our sweet spot, our ability to win is threatened.  All of a sudden our win rates go down.  This makes our pipelines look worse, we relax our qualification criteria further…. you know how this story ends.

Or it’s the deal we just can’t let go.  We’ve invested a lot of time and resource.  We believe if we just do a few more things, we can persevere.  We do those, it’s not sufficient, we do a few more…… it goes on forever.  The deal’s dead, but we can’t let it go.

Or we are busy, our days our filled with meeting after meeting, call after call.  But we aren’t making progress.  We confuse busyness with progress and accomplishment.

Facing reality is critical to our success.  If our pipelines aren’t full, we mask the real problem by filling them with junk.  If a deal just won’t move forward, continuing with wishful thinking doesn’t change things–it keeps us from really understanding what it takes to win–or even if it is winnable  And busyness masks everything.  We don’t have the time to reflect, to understand if we are making progress or just filling our time.

Facing reality is tough.  We may discover things we don’t want to confront.  We may not be as strong as we had hoped we were.  We may discover we need new skills to improve our ability to compete.  It may tell us we’re spending our time with the wrong customers–that we may have to find new customers.

Facing reality is important.  Good or bad, it provides the ability to understand the issues most impacting our performance.  It helps us identify and solve our problems.  It allows us to improve or fix things that keep us from achieving our goals.

It’s easy and tempting to fool ourselves, to the point of hiding our heads in the sand.  But that doesn’t fix the problem, it makes it worse.

If you aren’t achieving your goals, are you really looking at what’s happening.  Are you seeing things the way they are or the way you want them to be?  Facing reality is the only path to performance improvement.

Related posts:

1. What Are The Biggest Challenges Facing Sales VP’s In This Economy
2. No Grin-F#!?ing Allowed!
3. Are Your People Selling What They’re Supposed To Sell?

Over the past few months, I’ve been involved in a lot of discussions on sales compensation.  Last quarter, the conversations focused on commission and bonus plans people were looking to put in place for this year.  Last week and this week, I’m involved in a lot of discussions about people being disappointed in the bonuses they received or didn’t receive for last year, how to manage the issues and so forth.

We talk about pay for performance all the time.  Everyone likes pay for performance when there are great years.  When we’ve blown out the numbers or overachieved our goals, people are excited about pay for performance.  But when we have had a tough year.  When business is down or we haven’t met our goals—despite how hard we worked and how much we tried—we don’t like pay for performance.  I can’t count the discussions I’ve had about, “my people think they should be paid for their hard work and effort.”

I have to admit I’m a little hard nosed about this topic.  We can’t have it both ways, it’s just an insane argument.  When we perform well we should be compensated for it.  When we perform poorly, we should be compensated for that performance—not our effort.  If our performance has been down from the previous year, our compensation should be less than the previous year.  We’ve produced fewer results.

I suppose it’s human nature to focus on ourselves and our compensation.  It’s natural to always want to see progression and increases.  But failing to produce results impacts more than our compensation.  It ripples through the entire company, it impacts shareholder perception, suppliers and others. 

If the sales organization as a whole doesn’t produce results, people lose jobs.  Even though we have worked very hard, even though we have put in long hours, we haven’t produced the results.  We can’t pay the bills in the organization, we can fund new projects and programs through good intentions and hard work.

Accountability is tough.  There are upsides and downsides.  We can’t choose to be happy with the upside only and not have to bear the consequences of the downside.  Accountability is blind to that.

I’m tough on this.  People say, they should be better compensated.  My answer is very simple, you can be better compensated.  It is totally in your control.  Meet or overachieve your goals.  Your compensation will increase when that happens.

Perhaps my view was shaped many years ago when I was having a similar discussion about my compensation with my manager at the time.  I thought I deserved an increase because of my dedication and efforts.  His response was succinct and clear:  “Your increase will become effective when you become effective.”

Are you being effective?  Are you achieving your goals and producing results?  If you aren’t you have no basis for any discussion on your compensation.  Sales is a job in which we are compensated for our performance, so it’s our responsibility to perform.

Related posts:

1. Performance Management And Accountability
2. Compensation Drives Sales Behavior? Is Compensation The Only Tool For Managing Sales Performance?
3. Pay For Performance?

I’ve been writing this series of posts on metrics, and how sales people and managers leverage metrics to help maximize our performance for a number of months.  I’ve never written about Quota measurements–the “grand-daddy” of all sales measurements.  Part of the reason is that it’s something that’s pretty well understood (or so I thought), the other is that it’s a trailing or historic metric.  It’s difficult to use on a day to day or week to week basis to monitor and improve our performance.

I thought I’d write about Quota for a couple reasons.  As we approach the Fiscal Year End for many businesses, people are consumed with getting those last minute sales (some customer are consumed with spending money they might have left over–kind of serendipidous.)  Also, there’s an important aspect about Quota too many sales people overlook.

Quota is usually measured in Revenue or Orders.  Often, we may have multiple quotas, they may include certain product line quotas, customer or account, or some other measure.  Historic measures tell us what we have done, how we have performed, but they aren’t helpful on a day to day basis.  By the time we find out that we are under performing, it’s difficult to do anything about fixing it.  For example, if we are really off in our quarterly Quota performance, it may take us more than a Quarter to fix it.  That’s why we want to look at leading measures that are tightly linked to historic or trailing measures.  For example, we know the number, quality, and flow of deals in our pipelines is closely tied to Quota performance, so that’s why we spend a lot of time on funnel/pipeline metrics.  If we don’t have enough deals, we aren’t going to make our Quota—so we prospect for new deals.

But salespeople lose track of something important about Quota.  Quota is about jobs!

“Well duuuhhh Dave, tell me something I don’t know.”

Yes, we all know our jobs are at risk.  Fail to make Quota for a long enough period of time, and you find yourself looking for a new job.  But there’s something equally important, that sales people don’t think about (not unusual, because we usually think about ourselves).

Quota attainment is about the people in our company–ultimately the people in the entire supply chain, and their ability to keep their jobs.  We don’t bring in the orders, factories get shut down.  Engineers and product people are laid off, marketing budgets are cut, the list goes on. 

Too often, as sales people, we live in our own worlds.  We forget that if we fail to achieve our objectives, that has a ripple effect through the rest of the organization.  If we aren’t generating revenue, managers have to reduce spending to a level that is supported by the revenue that’s being produced.

In a large organization, sales people can “hide.”  There can be the mentality, “My quota is just a small part of the overall quota or the sales goal of the company.  It can be made up by other sales people in the organization.”  There’s some truth to that, but you get enough sales people doing that, there’s a significant shortfall.

In smaller organizations there’s no hiding.  Don’t make your quota, you start seeing empty cubicles around you. 

The funny thing, is often sales people can survive bad performance longer than the other people in the company can survive sales people’s bad performance.  So often, other people go before a bad sales person goes.

The global economy is struggling.  There are some bright spots, but there are lots of troubled spots.  We get upset with our elected leaders and other prominent people for not providing the leadership to help the economy recover.

Yet sales people are in a unique position–we can contribute to the recovery.  We can contribute to keeping and creating jobs, albeit in a small way.

There is no magic, if customers aren’t buying they aren’t buying.  But perhaps we can go that extra step to help create reasons to buy.  We can show them something they haven’t thought of before.  We can show them new opportunities or ways they can improve their business—helping them grow and improve their revenue (you can see where I am going).

Sometimes we do everything we possibly can, but we just can’t create the sales.  I get that.  I look at top sales professionals–they are constantly stretching doing everything they can, making no excuses.  They know they are working not only for their own job, but to grow the company.

But then there are the rest.  They complain about the thing the company is doing to them, they whine about what they don’t have, they are busy, they are “trying,” but they aren’t producing results.  It’s never their fault, but it’s the stupid customer, the bad products, or something else.  They worry about themselves, and are blind to their impact on other people’s jobs.  They work for themselves–not realizing they are working for other in the company.

Over the Holidays and New Year, we have a chance to regroup and think about what we need to do in 2012.  Perhaps if each sales person started thinking about their own “economic recovery program,” collectively we might have an impact on the recovery.

For those readers celebrating the Holidays, Best Wishes To You And Your Families!

Related posts:

1. Does Success Blind Us To The Real Opportunity?
2. In Winning, It’s The Little Performance Differences That Count
3. No Grin-F#!?ing Allowed!

I’m writing this with some trepidation, I worry that my message will be misunderstood or used by poor sales people as an excuse.  With that as a disclaimer, there’s real value in losing—but we have to take the time and extract the value that losing provides us.

We never want to enter any sales situation to lose it.  We have to compete vigorously, doing everything we possibly can to win!  It’s our job, it’s what makes us successful, and it’s what professional sales people live for.

However, recently, I was engaged in a conversation with someone claiming his organization’s win rate was in excess of 99% (let’s put aside definitional issues, under virtually every definition, 99+% is very high).  My immediate reaction was, “That’s too bad, it must mean you  are missing lots of opportunities.”

Winning is great, but we really don’t learn much from winning.  We don’t learn where we can do better.  We don’t learn what we are missing, We don’t learn how to stretch ourselves to achieve more.  Winning too much means we are playing it safe–we aren’t taking risks.

There’s a danger in winning too much, we become arrogant, we become blind, we stop listening, we stop improving, we start believing we are unbeatable, we get comfortable and complacent.  Ultimately, we set ourselves up not just for losing, but for massive failure.

Losing is tremendously powerful.  The problem is too often we don’t take advantage this power.  It’s through losing that we really learn.  If we’ve lost because we have stretched ourselves, if we have tried something new, if we have pushed ourselves outside our comfort zone–either trying something new with our customers, going after new markets and new customers.

Losing is the most powerful way of learning something new–but we have to take the time to understand and learn.  We have to apply what we have learned to winning the next time.  Losing shows us where we can improve, how we can grow.  Winning can never teach us those lessons.

Wasting the opportunity to learn and grow through losing is just wasteful–it’s a failure in your personal professionalism or of management.

Losing isn’t something we try to do.  We shouldn’t make excuses when we lose, but we take the opportunity to learn, grow and move forward.

Related posts:

1. In Winning, It’s The Little Performance Differences That Count
2. Why Didn’t You Buy From Me?
3. Earning Our Way — No More Excuses!

Time Management is a top issue impacting sales productivity.  It’s tough to establish measures on  time management.  Some people keep an inventory of what they’ve gotten done, for example to-do’s completed.  One of the things I like tracking–not on an ongoing basis, but from time to time is:  Time Available For Selling.

There are lots of ways to look at this.  It’s important to establish your own definition and maintain consistency  in how you track it.  Many tend to define it in the following way:  Time actually spend meeting with customers and prospects (whether in person or on the phone/web conference), plus time spent in preparing for the meeting and in direct follow up.

Most of the market survey’s on “Time Available For Selling”  is reasonably in the same range, 37-45%!  This means 63-55% of our time is spent in non sales activities!  Surprised?  We’ve done some assessments where we have seen time available for selling as low as 18-30%.

It’s kind of amazing,  our jobs are to be working with customers, yet the marjority of our time is spent in other activities.  A lot of those are important activities.  Training meetings, some time spent in customer service/non selling activities, some necessary administraioon , travel, and other things.  These are all part of our jobs and part of what we need to do to be sales people.

Time Drains: 

However, when you start monitoring how you spend your time, it’s important to look at “time drains.”  These are things that detract from your time available for selling.  As we’ve helped organizations assess this, we find some stark contrasts between sales people in large organizations and sales people in small organizations.

In large organizations, there are lots of distractions to selling activities.  There tend to be lots of internal meetings–they may be well intended, but they are drains on people’s time.  For example, in one Fortune 25 organization we worked with, we found marketing, product managers, customer service and all sorts of people interested in “understanding what the customers thought, what was happening in the field,” and other things.  These were well intended people, doing their jobs, but when we looked at the collective impact of hundreds of these people vying for sales people’s time, the impact was great.  In this same organization, there were continual new programs and initiatives.  Again, each product manager was anxious for their initiatives to be successful, they spent time with sales people, getting mindshare, training.  Each effort, alone, was a small impact, but when you looked at all the things going on across the entire organization the impact was enormous.

Many of these things are important.  However, it’s important to look at the overall impact of each of these little time drains.  In the case I cited above, everyone–sales, marketing, product managers were simply unaware of the impact of these time drains.  Once they became aware of them, we were able to look at doing things differently.  In the case of this organization, we were able to free up 20% of the time–without changing anything about how the people sold, we were able to almost double time available for selling, consequently double productivity.

Every large organization has these time drains.  We become unconscious to them, and over time they grow.  Assessing the time drains periodically can give tremendous improvements in Time Available for selling.

In small organizations, it’s a little more difficult.  The reason is, often sales people wear multiple hats.  In addition to selling, they  may be doing some marketing programs, customer service or support.  It’s simply because the organization is small and cannot afford to put the resources in place for each function.  The time drains are very obvious, but the fixes are more difficult.  Sometimes when they get to be big enough, you find you can justify hiring a person to do the function, freeing up the sales person to sell.  Sometimes, sales people use these other duties as an escape or an excuse.  If you know you have to do a lot or prospecting and you want to find excuses for not doing it, you can always use your other responsibilities as a mechanism for avoiding it.  It happens to all of us.  For example, I reserve time once a week to process bills and send them to our accountant for handling.  Usually I do this on Saturday mornings.  Today, I had a large block of time that I needed to do prospecting — I’ve told you how much I hate it. I almost decided to do my bill processing–I could have easily rationalized it–fortunately I didn’t.

In organizatons, large and small, we can always find excuses not to sell.  There are always “important meetings” to go to, reports to complete, research to be done.  Too often, sometimes unconsciously, we create the time drain.  This is the worst possible time drain–something top sales professionals minimize.

Leveraging Time Available For Selling:

If we accept the market surveys, the average sales person only has 405 of their time available for selling—that’s less than half our time!  Think about it, we have quotas that require our full time effort to achieve, but we have less than half our time to achieve them!

We need to make sure that whatever time we have available to sell, we use as effectively as possible.  This is where planning comes in–investing the time to develop a strong deal strategy–focusing on how you increase your odds of winning and reduce the sales cycle is critical.  Making each sales call count—figuring how you might compress what you would normally accomplish in 2-3 calls, compressing it to 1 call.  Planning, preparation, then effective execution are critical to making the most of the time you do have available to sell.

Final Thoughts:

It’s hard to monitor Time Available For Selling and the Time Drains.  Once a quarter, I take a week and closely watch my time.  At the end of the day, a look at how I’ve spent the day.  After collecting data for a week, I look at how I’m spending my time.  Are there time drains I can identify and eliminate?  I look at the time I have spent selling, have I used that time to maximum impact?

In sales we can recover virtually everything.  The only thing that we lose permanently is our time–it’s critical that we make each moment of the day as impactful as possible.

We’ve done lots of work in this.  If you need help in looking at how you are spending your time, give me a call!

Related posts:

1. Performance Management Friday — Sales/Management Alignment
2. Performance Management Friday — Funnel Churn
3. Performance Management Friday — Activity Measures

In this week’s post on performance metrics, I’ll take a step back.  Rather than looking at a specific metric, I’ll spend a little time talking about the differing points of view on metrics—the sales person/individual contributor’s view and sales management’s view.

Too often, these are viewed as being conflicting.  Sales people resist metrics because management uses them as a club on performance.  This happens more than we’d like to think, it’s really terrible management practice.  Rather than discussing this, let me focus on how sales people and managers should really be on the same page.

As individual contributors, or managers, we the reason we put metrics in place are: 

• Establishing goals we want to achieve.
• Establishing measures or milestones that indicate whether we are on the path to achieve out goals.

Metrics provide us a “control system” to help make sure we are on target.  As sales people, we want to make sure we are “in control,” that we are pursuing enough opportunities to make our numbers, that we are expanding our presence in the territory, that we are satisfying our customers or whatever.  At an individual level, metrics provide us personal alerts.

Likewise, managers need to know that we are “in control,”  that each team member is in control, the team is in control, rolling up through the organization.  Management has the need and right to know what’s going on, to have alerts when things are going off target.

There should be no lack of alignment in the necessity, purpose and use of metrics between management and sales people.

So where do the problems arise?  In my experience they arise in a few areas.

First, while the measure that individuals and managers may be looking at may be the same, the actual goal is not useful to the sales person.  For example, number of customer meetings/calls per week is one where there is lots of misunderstanding.  Managers may establish an arbitrary number–the same number for everyone.  However, everyone’s territories are different, the number of leads converted into opportunities will be different.  One may need to have 10 a week, another may need 15 a week, and another may need 20.  Establishing an arbitrary number of  20, for example, is meaningless–and ultimately not helpful to any of the sales people and manager.  Likewise, arbitrary funnel “coverage” numbers cause problems.  Some companies require 2-3 times quota as the “right number of opportunities” in the pipeline.  Last week I met with a team having an average close rate of 70%, yet management still required them to have 3 times coverage—they were justifiably upset.

The tools are available for sales people and managers to analyze things and to establish individual goals that are meaningful to each sales person.  Not taking the time to understand performance at an individual level, establishing the goals that are appropriate for each person and territory is wrong and drives a wedge between sales and management.  This is really a management problem.  Management must take the time to understand differences between sales people and territories, jointly establishing meaningful metrics.

Another related area is the way management uses metrics.  Metrics are guideposts, alerts.  They help you understand if you are on target or if you need to take corrective action.  Using them as a club doesn’t help the sales person and doesn’t resolve the problem and provides no value to the sales person.  Management needs to work with the sales person, understanding what the issue is, helping the sales person overcome the issue, whether it’s getting additional resources, coaching, whatever. 

Another area, the final for this post, is sales people don’t recognize managemen’t legitimate need for information.  Most sales people are fiercely independent.  They don’t like others “looking over their shoulders.”  They keep information to themselves for varieties of reasons.  But sales is the engine that drives the company.  Management needs to understand what’s happening, they need to establish an outlook and set expectations for everyone else in the company.  It’s part of a sales person’s job to keep management well informed, to avoid surprises.  Everyone knows the challenges of selling and how things may change.  Witholding information, or providing inaccurate information is doing the company a disservice.

There should be absolutely no conflict between management and sales on metrics.  There should be absolute alignment.  Metrics that are critical to helping a sales person stay on target are the same management needs–they take the roll-ups.  As with so many things, any “conflict” is probably a lack of good communication between sales and management, and an inability to understand each other’s perspectives.

Related posts:

1. Performance Management Friday — Activity Measures
2. Performance Management Friday — Funnel Churn
3. Performance Management Friday — Wallet Share

Selling has always been a tough job.  Everyday, it becomes tougher as customers leverage other resources to help make buying decisions (why they actively seek to avoid sales people is the topic of dozens of other posts).  In spite of the challenges to success in selling, I see too many sales people making bad choices—they focus on doing what they want to do rather than what they have to do.

It would be great if we could be successful focusing on what we want to do, personally, my favorite part of the sales process is thanking customers for their order.  If I could achieve my goals/quotas by just spending my time thanking customers for their orders, then I’d be 1000% every year!  Unfortunately, things don’t work out that way.  I can’t limit my activity just to that.  I have to do a lot of other things, some of which I hate, in order to be successful and do the things I want/like doing.

I hate prospecting.  Over my career, I’ve made thousands of prospecting calls, I still hate doing it.  It’s somehow unnatural calling on someone you may not know, trying to introduce yourself, determining a need, getting them interested in talking to you.  Somehow, as well prepared as you are, it seems intrusive.  I hate the rejection.  I hate the humiliation of sometimes making bad prospecting calls.

I hate writing proposals.  It’s tedious, detail oriented, I actually have to really focus on the project definition, tasks, schedules, contingencies.  I have to write clearly and precisely, I have to go through several drafts.  I’ve created tools to make proposals easier, but I still dislike writing proposals.

I hate negotiating—well that’s not true, there are large parts of negotiating that I really like.  The process tends to add great clarity to what you are doing and what the customer wants to achieve.  I like talking about the value and results people will achieve and how the investment the customer is making well justified.  I like getting customers to understand the value of a price premium.  I guess it’s the foreplay and posturing that goes on until you start having meaningful discussions, I’d just prefer to skip over those.

I love qualifying and discovery.  It’s really is fun to get the customer to think about their business differently, to help them envision new opportunities.  It’s fun to work with the customer to jointly discover how they can achieve these possibilities.  I love presenting the solution–the way the customer can leverage our capabilities to achieve their dreams.  I love getting them engaged in talking about the solution and hungering for it.

I hate our internal administrivia.  Yes, even though I run the company, like every other sales person, I have to maintain my CRM, do some reporting, do some administrative tasks.  I’ve outsourced as much as I can, but there still is stuff I have to do–and I still hate it.

Sales would be great if we could be successful doing the fun stuff, the stuff we like to do.  Unfortunately, that’s not our job.  To be successful, we have to do all of it.  We have to do the stuff we hate to do.  We have to do it well.  If we are unwilling to do this, then we are not fulfilling our responsibilities as sales people.  We will not be successful.

Professional selling is not just about doing the fun stuff.  It’s about doing the complete job.  It’s about trying to find some joy in those things we don’t like doing — and doing them even if we can’t find that joy.

The most rewarding thing about selling is being successful!  I’ll do whatever it takes to be successful.  What about you?

Related posts:

1. Do You Really Want To Sell?
2. Does Success Blind Us To The Real Opportunity?
3. Sales Manager Or Individual Contributor?

Let me open by posing a scenario then asking a question. 

Scenario:  You have two sales people, each with $1 Million quotas.  Each has done an outstanding job has sold $1.1 Million.  One has done it by focusing exclusively selling one product line, the other has done it by selling the entire product line.

Question:  Which sales person is the better performer?

Before you peek down in this blog post, what’s your answer?

I pose this question a lot.  Most of the time, the first answer people give is, “There is no difference, each person did the same and over achieved their quotas.  They are both great!”

Then people think, they usually get to the right answer.  Yes, both sales people over-achieved their revenue goals and brought in sales of $1.1 million.  But the high performer was the one that supported the company’s strategy by selling the entire product line.  Too often, sales people and managers just focus on the number, thinking that achieving the number is the goal.

In reality executing the company’s strategy is the goal.  Usually that goal is a set of financial goals–that become our quotas, a set of product line goals, and possibly some other things.  Great sales performance is about executing the company’s strategies in the markets, with the customers.  It’s not about just making your number, but it’s about doing all the other things consistent with the company’s strategies.

I meet sales people who think they are doing a great job, they are on target, but they’ve done it by focusing on their favorite product lines and ignored everything else.  Or they can make their number with one or two customers, so they ignore all the other customers in their territory.

It’s critical, as sales people, that we align our sales strategies with the company’s strategies.  It’s critical, as sales managers that we make sure our teams are balancing their performance–that they aren’t just focusing on one thing, or one part of the overall strategy, but they are executing on the whole strategy.

Let me illustrate this with an extreme example.  A company has five major product lines.  Success of all the product lines is critical to the company’s overall growth, competitive, and market penetration strategies.  But the sales people get together in a bar one night, complain how difficult some of the products are to sell and agree to sell only one product line.  At the end of the year, each has made their number, but they’ve sold only one product line.  Yes, if each sales person made their number, probably the company made it’s revenue goal, but four of the product lines failed–nothing was sold.  Inevitably, the company would have to shut down those products because of the lack of market success.  Now they are a one product company, they are exposed to their competition, that has a much broader product line to sell.  The competitive position is threatened…….  You know the rest of the story.

In reality sales people wouldn’t collude and agree not to sell the single product line.  But too often, sales people stay only within their comfort zone—and will tend to stay there as long as they can make their quota.  They don’t try selling that new product.  They don’t try going after that new customer.  They don’t try anything different.

Sales performance and goals must be aligned with the company strategies.  If it isn’t, then you’re not selling what you’re supposed to sell.

Related posts:

1. Do You Really Want To Sell?
2. If Our People Fail, We Have Failed As Managers
3. Your Selling Process–It’s Not Optional, It’s A Condition Of Continued Employment

One of the most important roles of the sales professional is to remove obstacles to the customer’s buying process.  It’s a role that has always existed, but too often, we forget about it, focusing instead on presenting our products and solutions,  or trying to persuade them to buy our stuff.   Providing information, responding to customer questions, trying to convince them are really insufficient — both for our success as sales people and for the success of our customers.

As sales people, we are trying to manage our sales process, aligning with the customer’s buying process.  Ideally, we are moving through the buying/selling process, synchronizing what we do, ultimately culminating in a decision.  Ideally, the customer and we are aligned around a sense of urgency and timing for a decision to But too often, things get derailed or slow down.  The customer has other things that come up, they shift their attention from making a buying decision, to other crises.  Sales people asking for the status of their decision, we want to provide them more information, we want to persuade or convince them that we have a superior solution, we want to get the order.

No amount of information or persuasion will solve this.  Until we have identified the obstacles and developed a strategy to remove the obstacle, the deal won’t go forward.  The obstacles could be internal to the customer.  They could be having trouble getting aligned around making a decision, they could be having difficulty getting internal approvals, they may have shifted priorities.

There may be obstacles the customer has with our solution.  They may not understand it, they may not believe our claims, they may believe other alternatives are better.

It’s the sales person’s job to identify and remove the obstacles—whatever they are.  We have to constantly be asking ourselves, “What’s standing between us and a customer decision?”  “What are the things we can do to remove those obstacles, facilitating the ability for the customer to make a decision?”

We can wait–perhaps the customer will discover and resolve these obstacles —- sometime.  Or maybe the competition will discover and resolve those obstacles, but will we get the order?

Or we can wait, and someday, maybe there will be a decision, or maybe there won’t be………

Related posts:

1. Selling Is The Easy Part, It’s The Buying That’s Difficult
2. Our Customers Need To Do A Better Job Of Buying!
3. The Illusion Of Control