Here on the beach, where I’ve spent the better part of July and August both working and…not working so hard, all summer I’ve noticed the sharp changes to the beach from last summer. In most places the sand had been scoured from the shore by last March’s big northeaster leaving much of the beach pebbled up with rock-strewn cuts drawn between the low and high tide marks. Once we were past the early June reality of…”it is what it is”, the beach has worked perfectly over what clearly has been the best weather in 25 years according to the locals.

And, then with these last four days of rain, high winds and pounding surf, the beach has been totally changed in an instant with not just sand, but 2 to 3 feet of perfect, fine, light brown sand deposited everywhere along the beachfront. No more rocks, no more stepping gingerly across the pebbles, no more kids building castles out of rocks and not sand, but then…no more summer.

Changes obviously occur on the beach constantly with the shifting sands. When we return to weekends in Vermont in another month, the changes will be dramatic since it will be the height of the foliage season.  In another week, when I’m back in the regular pattern of going to the office in Boston everyday and teaching again at Tufts and MIT, in the forefront of my mind is the fact that this thought process of “change” has already stimulated me to think quite a lot about what changes need to be made in the business and among the services that we provide as I think toward 2011.

In my career, I have always found that planned change is a very good thing.  It’s been good for the beach and I’m looking forward to shaking it up a bit in the business later this fall.  In these times of continuing economic uncertainty, rapid evolution of the technologies that cocoon us, and, most importantly, the dramatic shifting in the sands of our customers, this is the perfect time of year to think through all the changes we need to make as we move into 2011.

Just thoughts from the beach…at the end of a perfect summer

Jack

I’m not sure what my friends at PWC are smoking, but they might think about sharing it (just medicinally, of course) with the general population since the majority of American workers don’t feel very optimistic at all. At best, the small business owner feels that the economy is not going to get (much) worse. This lackluster economy shed 131,000 jobs in July and although the unemployment rate held steady at 9.5%, the number of discouraged workers who just dropped out of looking for a job is up by 389,000 from just a year ago. The real disturbing number is that almost one million workers have dropped out of the labor force since April. In general, the only place that manufacturing jobs were added was in the auto industry which has been bailed out of its gross mismanagement and inefficiencies by billions of stimulus dollars.

We are now 2.5 million jobs short of where we need to be just to get to 8% unemployment. Assuming that the boy scouts in Washington could figure out a way to deal with this, we would still wake up every morning to a $1.4 trillion deficit.

Personally, I like the guys at PWC, but I think that they need to climb down out of their ivory tower, leave the Fortune 500 companies alone since they can aptly deal with their own issues, go out and listen to the real people among millions of small business owners and entrepreneurs…and stop smoking the weed.

Creating effectivity and optomizing my salesforce is all about my ability as a manager to both manage and balance my time. Managing my time during my 60 or 80 hours a week is critical, and I need to think of everything that I do in measured amounts of my own personal time. Should I travel here or there? Just how much time can I afford to spend with a B- salesperson? How much time do I set aside each quarter for actual customer time in the field? And then there are those other gnawing issues each week which I need to deal with related to my family time and time for me just to decompress (if only for 3-4 hours each week).

For me, with 100 plus hours each week on the calendar, I make sure that some portion of each weekend is carefully guarded as personal downtime. In the winters, it’s Saturday afternoons when I’m off the hill after a morning of snowboarding (Although it sounds “relaxing”, snowboarding mornings for me are typically business time). In the summer, it’s Sunday afternoons when I’m cleaning up work issues and prepping for the week ahead. Whatever the time, my recommendation is to find your own spot, plug it into the calendar and jealously guard that time as your own. You’ll be a much more effective manager if you do.

For me, a good weekend is when I put on my business watch on Monday mornings on my way into the gym and notice that my self-winding mechanism stopped somewhere on Saturday afternoon.  Then I know that it was a great weekend !

However you do it, protect your time…before it runs out.

Let me know what you do in terms of your own time management.

Good Selling !

Jack
Head Coach

Think about coming to our Sales Management Optimization Boot Camp-October 24th-26th

Give me a call at 617-504-4222 or email me, and I can go through the details with you.

My experience is that it’s not about the quantity of the boards; it’s about the quality of the board meetings and follow on work. I’ve always advised the 60/40 Rule. Depending on the status of the business, a maximum of 40% of the time can be spent by management “reporting out”, while the remaining time should be spent discussing previously-defined strategic questions. That’s really the value of having a group of heavily experienced managers at the board table on a consistent basis.

Therefore, I very much enjoyed this morning’s Harvard Business Review’s Management Tip on Boards, which I have copied here.

3 Ways to Motivate Your Board of Directors

When serving on a board of directors is voluntary, sometimes members can lose focus or doubt that their participation is essential. At your next board meeting, try these three tips for reinvigorating and encouraging board members to devote more time and energy to growing your company:

1. Pose provocative questions. Spend a significant part of each board meeting wrestling with critical issues and asking your board to think through the toughest challenges facing your company.

2. Share the stage. Minimize time spent listening to prepared presentations. Be sure the conversation isn’t dominated by one or two members.

3. Spend time one-on-one. Find out about members’ individual interests and how they might translate to helping your company in a unique way — for example, by coaching an executive or attending a critical in-house meeting.

Today’s Management Tip was adapted from “Motivating a BOD” on the “Ask the Expert: Tammy Erickson” board of the HBR Answer Exchange.

Yesterday, as part of my regimen for my first summer living on the beach, I went for a long early morning walk and watched runners, kayakers, surfers, speed walkers and a group of yoga enthusiasts all using pieces of the beach while taking part in their individual personal improvement training programs.   It didn’t appear to me that there were any Olympians training out there yesterday, but every day, I notice hundreds of active beachers pushing themselves through their own personal training programs.  Some like Mike may be preparing for an event, but, in the majority of cases, and I know in my daily trek to the gym at 5:00 AM, it’s merely part of what makes me tick and keeps me on edge for what are typically “engaging” days, to say the least, with my customers.

So, if so many of us take part in physical conditioning-to some extent-why is that we don’t demand that same discipline in training our salespeople on a consistent basis throughout the year?   If I follow the concept of physical training to “just stay in shape”, which is what most of us are doing when we head off to the gym or the beach or the road, then why not apply this to an annual Get-In-Shape program for the most important athletes in any company-our salespeople?   

The classic reasons why most sales managers do not do this are:  (1) Most managers don’t think of it and assume that their salespeople (I hear this all the time) “are professionals and know what to do”.  (2) The word “training” conjures up mind-numbing programs with bad textual content and droning instructors, so we drive the idea to the furthest reaches of our priority lists, and (3), they just don’t know where to turn for instruction given the variety of needs among their salespeople.

First, even the best A-level salespeople need consistent training.  If they’re truly an “A”, then your job as manager is to figure out how to make them an “AA” producer.   The truth is that most salespeople will average out as “B” level players, which is fine, as long as their managers are developing year-long improvement programs for them.

Second, I have never found any sales organization that didn’t benefit from repeated training programs on the classic subjects such as ”Objection Handling”, “Selling to the Corner Office”, “Negotiation Principles” and “Closing Techniques”.   If you just ran formal programs, with testing and role playing, in one of these subjects each quarter, you would definitely be pushing most of your team to shed some of the pounds that they’ve put on over the years.  There are countless subjects for improvement, and in some of these such as “Selling Higher”, you could easily develop a fun, highly engaging and instructive year-long program on this subject alone.

And third, just to follow up on that last thought, training today, with all of the online Learning Management Systems and specialists combined with mixed media opportunities can easily be made to be a highly interactive process  with lots of opportunities for self-directed follow up.

So, as you’re thinking this week about your upcoming summer plans and just maybe making use of the superb weather to get outside and do a bit of conditioning for yourself, think also about how you could bring your salespeople through the formality of conditioning themselves between now and the end of the year to make sure that you’re fully prepared for the second half ramp up.

I’m off to walk the beach and then test out the new Cannodale later this morning since Mike inspired me to maybe think about the Pan Mass Challenge this year. 

Have a great day and…Good Selling!

Jack
Head Coach, Derby Management, LLC
jack@derbymanagement.com
617-504-4222
October’s Sales Management Boot Camp:
(http://www.brainshark.com/brainsharkinc/vu?pi=zHOzsw9tsz1Trz0)

My manufacturing process career ended abruptly that day with a wave of his hand and the words, “The guys in the back can make that decision, but if you have a few more minutes, I’d like to tell you what’s really keeping me up at night.”  Something occurred during that initial meeting that allowed him to trust my background, ability to listen and experience such that he  could open up and ask for my thoughts and recommendations. 

It was literally with that meeting, that the focus of my business shifted from one of selling quality and manufacturing systems to one of coaching senior management in the processes of rapidly growing their businesses-which in most businesses typically comes down to working with them to (1) strategize their direction and (2) optimize their sales and marketing functions.  The two most critical factors to achieving success.

A Trusted Partnership is the top rung of the ladder that begins with “Approved Vendor” (You’re on the list) and moves up through “Preferred Supplier” (You get more than the other guys) to “Solutions Consultant” (You are selling consultative services) to “Strategic Contributor” (You are sitting at the table working on longer term business issues) and finally “Trusted Partner”. (Senior management is asking your advice as a sounding board)

Becoming a Trusted Partner means that one of the best calls of the week from a customer is unexpected and begins with the words, “Do you have a minute?  I’d like to bounce something off you and get your reaction.”  It’s when a customer invites you to the office or dinner and wants to get your reaction to a new growth strategy.  It’s an example like I heard from Jane last week when I was at Lake Sunapee Bank, a superbly run institution in the New Hampshire and Vermont market.

I was working with all of the LSB business development team beginnning to unfold this strategy of trusted partnerships and looked to the 35 people in the room for examples.  Jane provided us with how she had, over a period of two years, moved an account from a single auto loan (Approved Vendor) to handling all of their business and personal loans (Solutions Consultant) to today’s Trusted Partner relationship where the CEO of the company actually hands out Jane’s business cards and relies on her advice for a myriad of involvements.  That’s a Trusted Partnership!

The questions that I might recommend that we all should be working on at this time of year are questions such as…

Just what is a trusted partner in my specific account base? 

How many accounts can I develop a trusted partner relationship with?  (20-25% sounds right to me). 

What are the Trusted Partner account planning analtyics and process steps that I need to work through such that I can be assured that at the end of this cycle I’m rapidly climbing the rungs in the ladder?

All good questions, and I thought that I would provide a few tested ideas in the next couple of posts to give you some insight and tactics that have worked for me.

In the meantime, “Good Selling” !  Q2, for me, is always the most critical of the year since it sets up the velocity for the second half.

Jack

The BIG issue that I’ve been kicking around for the last few months is to figure out analtyically how to reach the level of “Trusted Partner” with a larger number of our cusgtomers and not merely stay at the “Approved Vendor” level?  Everyone knows that it’s far easier -and much more rewarding-to sell to existing customers than new prospects, so the questions are ”What’s the split?”, and “What are the selling and adoption steps necessary to move up the rungs of the ladder from “Approved Vendor” to “Preferred Supplier” to “Strategic Contributor” to the highly prized position of “Trusted Partner”?

To us it’s no longer about making the sale.  I believe that we’ve got that down solid in terms of the process tactics and tools that we’ve been practicing for the past five years.  The questions now that we find intriguing in our company and in the sales offices of the majority of our customers, and that we need to answer over the next couple of months are about adoption, improved utilization and total integratation into the minds of the senior decision makers.   

More on these subjects over the next couple of weeks.

As I think about customer engagements

In our very busy, maxed out lives, no one really thinks about power.  It’s just simply switch on-switch off, and that very uninteresting, never-think-about-it surge of instant electricity immediately performs to cook my toast and pulse my iPod. The question of “Who thinks about power?” is answered with “no one”…until, of course, it isn’t there, and the immediate result is no heat, no lights, no water, no nothing.

Three days without power may have been a bit inconvenient, and, yes, it frustrated me that I had to sit in the car charging my iPhone in order to get emails, but, in the scheme of things…like Haiti…this was certainly no biggie. 

With this issue of the loss of power rummaging around in my mind for three days, I was constantly tugged to think about the sales managers that I’ve known who have exhibited ”power” and those that did not and what the differences have been.

Dave, one of my best heads of Sales, has considerable power.  His 90 person team knows it and respects it.  There’s a strong sense of leadership there balanced with enough fear that the troops first, “Do what Dave says to do”, and then (only the top-performers) may ask questions later.  His peers understand his power attributes and acknowledge them…assuming, of course, that he’s hitting his numbers and supporting their departments as well.  And, his boss uses that sense of power, which often comes down to personal achievement, to push, to cajole, and to stretch to even more and more performance and better and better metrics.  

All a very good definition of what constitutes “power” in an experienced sales manager.  But, this sense of exhibiting “power”, does not necessarily come with experience.  Ray, one of our better up-and-coming heads of sales, had never run sales prior to this current position which he assumed last January.  In fact, Ray had never been much of a salesguy and assumed this role as VP of Sales & Marketing as an internal battlefield promotion when the prior head of sales resigned as a result of  continuous misses to the sales forecast, to the business plan and pretty much everything else.   The difference is that the prior manager never really had much “power” at all; whereas, from Day 1, Ray has exhibited personal confidence and strong direction along with a strong mix of questioning, listening and making decisions to quickly move the ball forward.  The prior manager, a solid individual and a nice enough guy, was an excellent strategist, but too often lacked the tactical decisiveness to act which created too many strikeouts each time he went to bat.

In the case of Dave, some of his power comes from his 30 years of running successful sales organizations.  With Ray, he has the experience of the industry, albeit from the operations and customer side of the business.  But in both of these cases there’s a number of common traits that make both of these managers successful.

First, they both listen well to all sides of the puzzle whether it’s a complex sales opportunity, a personnel problem, or an overall business issue affecting the company.

Second, they are both process guys.  They are religous about their sales and marketing processes.  They are both quants and steeped in the math and the resulting metrics plus they demand adherance to the system.   They are equally religious about adherance to their CRM systems-not surprisingly, in both cases, SFDC. 

Third, their personal attributes of success are measured by drive, perserverance, confidence, work ethic and strong leadership focused on making their entire teams successful.   Attributes which were bred into their behaviors decades ago and are now being exhibited in gluing together their somewhat independent salespeople into solid performing teams.

And last, they are not afraid to make decisions.  To move ahead.  To do solid planning…but just enough…and then move quickly forward to execution especially when it comes down to the 20 workdays of any given month.

Does your own head of sales, have the power to consitently lead?  What about your individual salespeople in their ability to move quickly from Disovery to Close?   The next time that you come across what you consider to be a successful sales manager, stop for a minute and think about what it is that you perceive in their skills and attributes that exhibit ”power”, or perhaps, it’s just “success”, and begin to formally define exactly what you want in your own sales leaders.

Good Selling !

Jack

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