Doc Rivers was quoted on ESPN where he was asked about his career in coaching the Celtics, and he described it as “a miserable joy”, and anyone who has been a student of either pro basketball or became caught up in the most recent excitement of March Madness, knows exactly what this means. The cliffhanger of Duke’s final win in the NCAA championships this year, and the stunning upset of Kansas’ unexpected loss a couple of weeks ago bring all coaches to the point of either tearing their hair out- the misery- or basking in the glory of the final win and its accompanying praise -the joy.
As Coach Rivers commented however, every example of joy is followed immediately by the reality that the very next day you need to wake up early, turn the page, get out and practice hard and prepare for the next game. The misery and the joy of coaching sports, and of managing sales in any business.
I happened to be in the sales offices of a couple of our companies last Monday, right after the end of the quarter results came out. It was very apparent to the sales managers and to every individual salesperson where the joy was located and where the misery was taking place. Nothing in business is more descriptive of the word, “results” than the end-of-the-month, quarter, season, or year posting of the actual performance by player on the scoreboard.
Whether it’s in basketball where the scoreboard is 100 feet above the parquet, or it’s in the sales offices of either a young startup or at IBM, and their CRM system is open for everyone to see, the management of sales is a joyous job, but it is not for the faint of heart or the poorly equipped. Salespeople live and die on posted results, and the life of any sales manager and, for the matter, every CEO, just like the life of any basketball coach, simply comes down to measuring the percentages of wins to losses, month to month, season by season. That’s the joy (and sometimes the misery) of running any dynamic sales organization-especially today.
Pretty much all of our companies posted a very strong quarter coming out of the blocks. As we’ve been talking to our customers during the past two weeks, it seems that the quarter came in as planned with positive results posted somewhat uniformly for every month. Everyone seems to be searching deep into their crystal ball, which is still forecasting caution rather than optimism for the balance of the year. Having said that, even with this overhang of caution, sales managers in general are talking about what appears to be a strong Q2. Although we’re not seeing any growth in backlog, pipelines are definitely growing, the number of actual qualified leads is sharply up, and a small number of salespeople are now being hired in order to position for increased revenues for Q4 and 2011.
And everyone is talking about and beginning to plan the details for what’s coming in 2011. While no one is “very optimistic”, the managers of most companies we’re involved with are positioning for much sharper growth in 2011. We’re finding the number and intensity of discussions are increasing and plans are developing to sharply improve sales effectiveness, make significant shifts in marketing tactics, and assess partnership changes in order to ramp up channel leverage. Personally, we believe that 2011 will be a very strong year.
Also, lots of lots of M&A talk around both from the buyers and the sellers, and although bank lending still remains extremely tight, the faucets of both PE and venture money are definitely opening up. All of which should bring us to figuring out an appropriate game plan so that we’re in the best possible shape for next season, whether that “season” is just for Q2 or the entire balance of 2010.
So, a couple of simple, short term ideas to put into play with your team next week:
Get in Shape
It’s been a long winter, and it’s time to get in shape intellectually and physically to best prepare yourself for the balance of this quarter. If you’ve put on a couple of pounds during the winter, or you’ve made too many excuses not to get out of bed earlier so that you can get to the gym, then right now is the perfect time to set a new 60 day regimen and exit June tighter, more physically trimmed and personally stimulated and reinvigorated about your own health. At the end of the day, it’s all about being healthy. As the Player/Coach for your salespeople, you should also be pushing them to do the same.
Read at least one business book over the next 60 days. Me? I’m reading Seth Godin’s new book and a very interesting book about the staggering improvement in healthcare results as a result of the development of simple checklists for docs. I want to see if the same simplicity and discipline can be adapted to salespeople.
Get Together & Teach One Another
At your next physical sales meeting, take a dedicated segment of that time and have everyone come prepared to teach one “best practice” that they have used, exactly how they’ve used it, what are the tools that they’ve used and very specifically detail the results that they’ve achieved. A peer-to-peer training session of drills-always the best way to sharpen sales skills, get focused and become the MVP for this season.
Write it Down
Every player, on every team whether it’s high school, college or pro ball has a playbook. Pros, of course, have detailed playbooks for every game, so why should we think that as professional salespeople, we’re any different? One of the best salespeople that we know, Kevin, a heavily experienced and very successful AA player, literally carries a book in his computer bag that he’s developed of scripted texts, templates, and best practices that he’s used over the years. He refers to it all the time; he writes comments down and dynamically refreshes it frequently.
Too many senior salespeople that we see believe that they can do all of this “in their head”, and they “know what to do and say”. It’s our experience that the well- organized Kevins always win, while the more informal others are just hoping that they win. It’s not surprising that the best athletes are always the most prepared and most heavily trained.
Just a couple of easy-to-do ideas to stimulate your juices this week.
It’s 5:45, the sun’s coming up, and I’m off to run on the beach and try to lose a couple of pounds. With snowboarding finished, I need to gear up for June’s foray into surfing.
If we’re going to turn this economy around, we all need one another to simply put more points on the board. Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, who is driving deep into the details of remaking his company, provides an appropriate comment for every salesperson focused on this quarter, when he points out that “Life is a series of near misses. But a lot of what we ascribe to luck is not luck at all. It’s seizing the day and accepting responsibility for our future”.
A good comment to guide us for this quarter.
Talk soon, and in the meantime, Good Selling!
Jack
