As everyone knows who reads these posts, in my “spare time”, I teach business planning and marketing as a lecturer at MIT and as a marketing professor at Tufts. I love the work and student involvement, plus it provides an excellent opportunity to integrate concepts into the real world of sales and marketing tactics, both for my students and for our companies at the firm since often they become case studies in the classes.

Even after having done this now for some years, grading students is still a challenge for me.  Do they get an “A”? Maybe it should be an “A-”, possibly a “B+”?  And at Tufts, giving a mark lower than a “B-”, is the academic equivalent of banishment from the campus.  Even with a math-driven formula built into the way I grade, still the awarding of grades, and especially final grades, is an anxiety producing but obviously necessary process.

Just as grading is part of the deal between professor and student, so are performance reviews between sales managers and their salespeople.  One of the key findings that we discovered 10 years ago, and have verified repeatedly in our surveys, is that highly successful salespeople rank themselves not against their quotas, not against their bosses’ requirements, but against other highly successfull salespeople.  Of course, they’re graded every day, week, month and quarter against quota, but the real standard among the “A” players is measuring themselves against one another.

Right now, make a list of your salespeople.  Okay, now grade them with “A”, “A-”, “B+”, and so on.  Be objective and bluntly honest with yourself since this exercise is for your eyes only.  And then sit down and figure out in one or two sentances for each salesperson what are you going to do with each of them during the balance of this quarter to change their grades?  

After you’ve completed the list, the realization that you will have to make is that you don’t have the time or the capabilities of working with every person on the list, so now the real task begins.  Where are you simply not going to invest time because the person is a solid “B+” or “A-” player, and the reality of your own schedule is that you simply do not have the time, and your grading is that the person is “good enough”?   Are you going to put more time into your “A” level players and make them “A+”?  Are you going to try to raise a “B” to a “B+”?   Do not pretend that you’re going to make a “C” into a “B” since it is highly unlikely that that person can do it without extraordinary time from you and most probably from others.   Better to cut your losses and replace the person…and do it quickly.  

Most sales managers incorrectly invest their time into attempting to improve the “C” players and hoping against hope that their efforts are going to be rewarded when in fact they should put their time into the variations of “B” and “A-” players and improve the overall scorecard of their group or the company.  The other management mistake is that of acknowledging that “some revenue is better than no revenue” such that you keep the “C” level performer just because they’re bringing in something.  Unfortunately, the math never works since once quotas continue to slip from “C” and “B-” performers, and then there’s a speed bump, for whatever reason, in one given month for the entire company, the drag caused by the “C” and “B-” players can put the entire month and quarter into a loss.

The management rule of thumb is to always to be in a recruiting mode such that when that next “A” opportunity presents themselves, you simply take that opportunity and remove  your lowest level performers.

A tough reality, but a necessity all the same since we all live by grades.

Good Selling !

Jack

With a solid January put to bed, everyone seems to be taking a deep breath, sitting back and taking a concentrated assessment of just how they’re going to accomplish their 2010 objectives now that the 1st month dust has settled. The board has now approved the annual business plans, departmental budgets have been confirmed, sales meeting kickoffs are behind us, and it now comes down to the hard work of day-to-day departmental management and Blocking & Tackling week-by-week through the year. Right?
Read the rest of the entry »

Very early yesterday morning, I drove to the picture-perfect New England town of Newport, New Hampshire. Since I had an early morning planning session with a key customer, I wanted to arrive early so that I could go over my notes, plus I wanted to talk to my favorite economist and her reaction to the Wednesday night Obama speech.

Picture Main Street, USA, and you have a mental image of what Main Street in Newport is. Neat, beautiful, picturesque and a perfect example of a small town community complete on one hand, with the headquarters of the Lake Sunappe Bank, the region’s leader, and also with my favorite place to have breakfast, The Main Street Bakery.

I walked down the stairs yesterday morning for my normal cup of tea and egg sandwich and, most importantly, to be able to listen to the owner, single employee, waitress, cook & bottlewasher and ask her what she thought about President Obama’s State of the Union comments.
Read the rest of the entry »

In addition to the work we do with our customers, I’m a professor at Tufts, where I teach Sales & Marketing within the Tufts entrepreneurship program. Great students, great faculty, hard work and very rewarding in the fact that it tests my skills, energy and the small amount of intellect that I sometimes think I have. Nothing is more real than addressing 20 students at 8:30 for three hours every week for 13 weeks.

Last Friday, I hit the “send” button to post the final grades in a very intensive course where the final semester-long project counts for 50% of the overall grade. As usual, I’m not too sure who is more anxious about this process: me or the students? I am sure that it is me.

From my Tufts experience over the past three years and my ten years plus of teaching business planning and marketing at MIT, I’ve adapted this concept of final exams and brought it into the world of interviewing sales managers, and this morning is a great example of putting this into practice.
Read the rest of the entry »

The Patriots lost badly against the Saints last Monday night, and so far with a 7-4 record this season, dare I say as a New Englander, it’s not looking too good for the hometown boys.   Maybe, this weekend against the Dolphins, they will get their mojo  back. 

The world of sports is exactly like business because (1) it is business, and (2) in both worlds, performance metrics drive everything.  Point, of all types, condition how we think and act every single day, month and quarter in our sales lives, or in the case of football , every season.  Take your choice and say the words, “Patriots”, “Celtics”, “Red Sox” or “Bruins” to any lover of sports in Boston, and in a nanosecond, there’s an immediate image that flashes somewhere in our frontal lobe of someone scoring a point, slamming the ball out of the park or a headline with a box score right beside it.  Who won; who lost?

Sports is all about winning and measuring that win with points, and Sales is exactly the same.  Actually, in every business, measuring performance is absolutely core to what one does, even in non-sales, non-sports activities.  I’ve always thought that Robert Frost said it the best when talking about the form and shape of modern poetry.  In disgust about the increasing use of free verse with no regular pattern of rhyme or meter and unlike couplets or sonnets, he wrote that “writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net” .  Simply, without form, without measurement, what’s the point?
Read the rest of the entry »

Just finished a Sales Optimization Boot Camp at The Entrepreneur’s Network in Rochester, NY. A great city with a wellhead of innovative ideas, superb technologies born out of Kodak, Xerox and a host of terrific universities and medical centers. In my experience, all of the necessary ingredients that go into the primordial soup that ultimately get boiled down to launch successful start up.

Whatever your thoughts about upstate NY have been, get rid of them. Yes, on one hand, it does have a bit of snow and cold, but then I spend part of my life living in Vermont (that’s a picture of my pond with the fall mist rising from it on the header of this post), so who cares about a little snow? On the other hand, very committed and caring business leaders in Rochester and Buffalo, a superb economic development county government and ridiculously inexpensive wonderful housing. I would move there tomorrow, if it weren’t for the fact that my wife would then really have issues with the fact that we already live in three states.
Read the rest of the entry »

Sales Optimization should not be as confusing as it sounds.

As sales execs, we’re always focused on the numbers:  bookings, revenue, margin and, more or less, how we’re measuring up to our expense budgets.   Numbers dominate our ideas and corresponding actions on any given day in the month, and as the months go by and we’re facing that end of the year quota number, pressure mounts either because we’re behind the curve and scrambling to make up, or we’re pushing for more bonus dollars.  It’s been that way forever, and, in the world of sales, it will always be about numbers, performance to plan and customer satisfaction ratings.  

So, why is that we typically do not use the math of those numbers to our advantage as our prospects get developed and they flow along the sales funnel moving from raw leads to closed orders?
Read the rest of the entry »

Hiring the Best !

Whatever happens in 2010 in the economic market and in defining, “The New Normal”, you can be assured that increasing the effectiveness of your sales and marketing resources will play heavily into improving your revenue and net income. For the past five or six years, ever since we started to hear the first rumbles of seismic changes shifting into the fundamental architecture of selling, we’ve been practicing “sales effectiveness” strategies and tactics within a large number of our companies. Actually, one of the first places that we tried this strategic thought process out years ago was at the Lake Sunapee Bank, a wonderfully managed community bank in New Hampshire. We came away from that experience very positive and thinking that if bankers can benefit from these ideas about process, metrics, and “The Engineering of Sales”, then all of that would resonate even more loudly within the world of tangible products and tightly defined services. And, over the last few years, that has been exactly our experience. 

With more process and science in profiling, testing, hiring and onboarding “A” level salespeople, the result has been higher revenues with better margins. With more discipline in creating step-by-step selling processes, the result has been shorter sales cycles with better win/loss ratios. With more exacting definition in who should qualify, who should hunt, who should farm and expand and who should support customers, and the result has been dramatic decreases in the cost-of-sales percentages to revenue. All good.

But, not good enough.
Read the rest of the entry »

Leverage: Not That Easy!

In actuality, most leverage in business is not only hard to do, but most of the time, we don’t execute it all that well, so although we talk a good game about creating “strategic partnerships” and “combined selling and marketing programs”, the reality is that most leveraged sales programs simply fail.

And, they fail largely because both sides do not go into the partnership with the thought of a win-win-win. Win for me. Win for you. And, most importantly, win for the partnership so that everyone makes a lot of money. No matter, how well we plan and how objectively we believe that we’re approaching the relationship, there’s a natural emotional tendency in all of us to first think: “What’s in this for me and/or for my company?”
Read the rest of the entry »

100% Selling Time? I Don’t Think So.

We plan to provide our readers with a series of three or four editions of The Edge providing strategies and tactics which can be used to optimize your sales activities.

Each year, we go out and survey hundreds of B2B salespeople, and one of the more complex answers that comes back is in response to the simple question of “How many hours a week do you work?”. Having asked that question now for a number of years and cataloging thousands of responses, the average equals 58 hours a week for the most highly successful salespeople. When we take a look at the salespeople on the bottom end of the curve averaging around 38 hours, these tend to be the least productive as one would expect, but the real interesting data comes from analyzing not the number of hours, but the effectiveness of the utilization of those hours.

Read the rest of the entry »