I was listening to a web-conference today, one of the speakers discussed the importance of collaboration in sales, citing the higher use of web conferencing, webinars, Webex, and other tools.  While I have great respect for the speaker, I wanted to scream!  Absolutely, collaboration is critical to sales, and business, professionals.  It’s always been important, new forms of collaboration are increasingly important.  But web conferencing ,  webinars, Webex are not collaboration — they have little to do with collaboration!

Effective collaboration is about alignment of goals and objectives.  It’s about working together, perhaps in different ways than we have in the past.  To collaborate effectively, we have to look at how we realign our work processes, how we share risk, resources, rewards.  Effective collaboration requires shared values and vision.  Collaboration changes the way we look at control and independence.  Collaborating means that we have to surrender some levels of control and increase our dependence on those people we are collaborating with.  At its core, it requires much higher levels of trust.

Collaboration can profoundly change our relationships—within our own organizations, with our customers, suppliers, and stakeholders.  It can deepen and enrich our relationships, enabling each of us to achieve our goals, execute our strategies, grow and innovate more effectively and efficiently.

Having said all this, collaboration is not the be all, end all.  There are many cases where collaboration is inappropriate or ineffective.  If we cannot align our goals and objectives, our “our collaboration” is not likely to be effective, it’s more likely to increase conflict than produce results.  If the organization/function we are collaborating with does not bring critical capabilities that complement ours, then we are possibly wasting money and resources.

Collaboration is one of those words that is fashionable to toss around–it’s the politically correct thing to do.  Vendors can sell a lot of hardware, software, systems that enable us to communicate—not necessarily collaborate.  Social media tools provide us platforms that can facilitate communication and collaboration.  Using these tools does not mean we are collaborating.  Collaboration is important, but let’s not confuse the tools with what it really is, what we must do to be effective in collaboration, when it is appropriate to collaborate, and how we produce results through effective collaboration.

Do great sales people make great sales managers?  This is a debate that never seems to end, I’ve written about it before, over the past few weeks, I don’t know how many posts I read about the topic.

There is a real problem, too many times, we take great sales people and move them into sales management roles.  Some succeed, some fail.  Move anyone into any management job, some succeed, some fail.  The real issues are: 

• Do we know what skills, capabilities, experiences, and mentality do we want in a sales manager?  Do we have a profile of what the ideal sales manager looks like?
• Do we look for candidates that match our requirements or profile as closely as possible?
• Do we have an “on-boarding” or development plan for the new manager?  Are we providing them the right training, coaching, and development to enable them to be successful?
• Does this job change make sense as the next step in the person’s career?

Evaluating candidates against these criteria helps us make better decisions about sales managers.  Great sales people matching these criteria are likely to be great sales managers.  Great sales people that don’t match these criteria are best left to be great sales people.

The question is not Do great sales people make great sales manager?  Let’s move on and focus on hiring and developing great sales managers, wherever we source them.

The web provides endless amusement in understanding new approaches to selling.  I recently found the following post in a sales training discussion blog I participate in.  It was posted as “Huge Favor:”

Recently, I’ve been engaged in a number of discussions about how tough a job sales is.  The issues usually involve:  “We have the highest risk job in the company, if we don’t hit our numbers, we’re gone!”  Or it is:  “Our performance is visible to everyone in the company, they see whether we make our numbers or not, no one else has that visibility.”  Or it is:  “Without us, nothing happens, we are the most critical and criticized function in the organization?”

I worry about these claims–complaints.  In the best case, they are ill-informed, in the worst they are arrogant and elitist.  Make no mistake, sales is a tough job, it is critical to any organization.   But is this posturing justified?

The conversations where these comments come up is always the same, it is a group of sales people feeling under appreciated and misunderstood.  I never hear these comments when I talk to a bunch of manufacturing folks, nor when I talk to development engineers, or finance folks.  Funny thing, when I talk to then, the issues are the same–but do a global replacement for the function.   Manufacturing says, “We have the highest risk ob in the company, if we don’t make quality products, or miss shipments, we’re gone.”  Engineering says, “Without us, nothing happens.  Imagine if we didn’t develop these new products that customers want, no one would buy anything.”  Finance says, “Our performance is visible to everyone in the company, everyone sees budgetary reports, everyone understands DSO, our performance is judged by the street every day!”

In reality, every job in an organization is tough and presents it’s own challenges (Even the show “Undercover Boss” showed this with the COO’s inability to pick up trash, sort recyclables, clean toilets).  None of us can be successful without the others in our organization performing at their highest levels.  We can’t perform at the highest levels unless each person is held accountable for their performance and has tough metrics against which their performance is measured, regardless of whether it is quota performance, on time delivery, meeting engineering milestones, reducing DSO.

Another complaint I hear from sales people is, “They just don’t understand what we do and how challenging it is.”  But do we really understand what they do and their challenges?  I really like this issue, it is a platform for understanding and real change.  It can be a source for accelerating the success of sales professionals.

Imagine this case, we sell solutions manufacturing automation systems.  We’ve been well trained in the products, their features and functions.  We’re smart and we can speak intellectually about manufacturing productivity and effectiveness, but we don’t really understand who they are and the pressure of their jobs.  Wouldn’t we be much more effective if we went to our own manufacturing people and learned more about them, the pressure of their jobs, and what worries them about performance?  Couldn’t this be a fantastic conversation–we understand them better, they understand us, we learn to appreciate each other within the organization.  PLUS the great added bonus is now we’ve seen manufacturing through their eyes—we can now better understand our manufacturing customers.  They probably have a lot of the same issues our own people have—or at least that’s a great starting point for engaging them.

While I’ve held a lot of jobs in different functions, I basically consider myself a sales professional.  Selling is a tough job, every deal stretches my capability and forces me to learn and perform at higher levels.   But every other function in the organization is as important–without them performing at the highest levels, we have nothing to sell.  Without understanding them–and appreciating them, our jobs are harder than they need be.  Without understanding them, we cannot connect with our customers as effectively as we can.