Category: infrastructure

Efficient E-mail Makes Everyone Efficient

If you are like me, you have a personal e-mail account in addition to your work e-mail. You may even have other e-mail addresses adding to those basic two you have to manage. When it comes to reading e-mail, keeping track of numerous different addresses has a fundamental problem: volume.

There has been a lot written about e-mail: etiquette, management, sending, receiving and bcc’ing. I’m not sayin’ what I’m sayin’ is original, but efficient e-mail came up in a conversation the other day, and I knew I had to tell my perspective…

First, the background. As I’ve mentioned before, I surprisingly have a lot of connections to hockey. I play hockey, my wife plays hockey, my son plays hockey and my daughter plays hockey. Only one child missed the hockey train, but since she is already out of the house and out of college, she is an outlier and gets removed from the data set. Because of all this hockey, I receive a lot of personal e-mail around scheduling. Scheduling for practices, workouts, games, meetings, films, etc. My youngest child, my daughter, happens to play for three different organizations, which means e-mail times three. In addition, one of the organizations she plays for has a house team and select team–the select team pulls players from the various house teams to form the select team. (Bear with me, I’m getting to my point). The coach of the select team has done us all a solid by coaching (if you have never coached hockey, it might just be the longest sport season of all the sports, starting in September and going until March–some claim longer than that).

The coach, while excellent and attentive, has one major flaw–he can’t write a succinct e-mail to save his life. Not only that, but within each tomes he types is vast and varied amounts of pertinent information. I mean A LOT of info. For instance, we had a tournament this past weekend in Pittsburgh. In one e-mail, the select coach listed 1) the dates 2) the times 3) the hotel information 4) the opposing team info 5) the organizing body info and more. It was three pages. It was dense. There were no bullet points. And, it was unusable from a smart phone because I forgot what I was reading by the time I scrolled down to the bottom with innumerable thumb swipes.

So I suggested to him, based upon my experience in business and coaching soccer, to get EFFICIENT.

What do I mean by efficient? Well…in marketing, they talk about “open rates” and “above the fold“. The first means did the recipient actually open my e-mail, and second, was the call to action within the first reading pane before the reader had to scroll down.

So there are two examples I’m going to use, and one shows this in action, and the other shows the chaos of reaction.

My sport growing up and through college was soccer. And then coaching soccer. And then coaching my children’s soccer teams. And in coaching soccer and communicating, I learned some lessons. In the beginning of the season, the first e-mail I sent was one big e-mail with all the pertinent info about where to find stuff, contact me, my assistant coach, schedules, venues, etc. And after that initial kitchen sink e-mail, then each week I sent basically one e-mail, and did it in a very specific way.

First, the subject line always spelled out exactly what this was about, e.g. “2016 Fall Soccer – Seniors – …” and I would fill in what it was concerned with, like “practice cancelled” or “game delayed”.

Why? Because it was incredibly easy to search for my e-mails when the Subject Line started this way, and the recipient could look at their smartphone and see in the subject line what the message was and to what it pertained.

Second, in the body of the message, the call to action came first, “Practice has moved to the adjacent field.”

Third came the detail. “Parents, we have been informed our senior boys are scaring the bejeezus out of the younger children as they leave the field so we are moving practice to an adjacent field.” It looked like this:

To: tom@soccercoach.com
From: tom@soccercoach.com
Bcc: mom@soccermom.org
Subject: 2016 Fall Soccer – Seniors – Practice has moved to the adjacent field

Please start practice on Filbus field starting this afternoon.

Parents, we have been informed that our senior boys are scaring the bejeezus out of the younger children as they leave the field so we are moving practice to an adjacent field on Filbus Fields.

Thanks,
Tom
tom@soccercoach.com
(555) 555-5555

The most important takeaway from this method is each e-mail addresses one (1) issue! Even if the parent or player doesn’t open the e-mail, they know what it’s about. And, it isn’t some directive without explanation, but I don’t give the explanation unless the reader continues reading.

Your mileage may vary, but I saw my rate of parent and player replies (which meant I would have to reply back) drop significantly once I implemented this. Communicating directives efficiently gave more time back to me.

Next, the chaotic business example, one around internal communication.

In most organizations, e-mails flow back-and-forth like a conversation. And when someone says, “Did you read my e-mail?” it comes off as a challenge, because of course you read their e-mail (right?). Then the conversation spirals downward to talk about time-stamps and swamped inboxes. So I’ll give you an example of something which happened to me where the use of efficiency would have eliminated a 100+ e-mail thread and two hour-long conference calls.

In a former company of mine, we were working to sell a training package to a company. I had outlined this to the training manager in an e-mail and he replied back, but included in the reply commentary and pricing on another deal we were working on. So, true to my beliefs, I created a separate e-mail thread addressing this new information and went back to handling the information I had requested for the initial client in a different thread.

Then, my colleague proceeded to reply to both e-mails the same, because he was trying to join the thread back together. I replied to him with separate e-mails because they were separate issues with separate customers. He called me on the phone to rant about my ineptness. I politely explained how he was talking about two different issues and they needed to be kept separate. He organized a call with my manager to complain and on the call my manager said, “You had a call to waste my time about e-mail?”

The result of this was a very soft and perfunctory reprimand from my manager (“Make sure Bob knows in advance before you split the e-mail into separate threads.”) and my realization how I needed to deal with Bob in the future–call him. It was more efficient than e-mailing him and convoluting the topic I wanted to cover and it was the best channel of communication to work with him. (A topic for another time.)

In summary, in business communications–not marketing–keeping e-mail threads simple and specific creates efficient conversations.

Oh, and the good news? My daughter’s hockey coach and took my advice. Now if he could just cut it back from two paragraphs to one.

Thinks, Inc. is a consulting firm which specializes in Smart Sales Operations. If you’d like for us to come and assess your chaos, drop us a line at contact@thinks-inc.com

 

Transparency

Physics question: What is the difference between transparent and translucent? Opaque and clear? Iridescent or luminescent?

We use descriptive “clarity” words in our everyday speech. But in business, if you talk about “clarity”, i.e. being transparent, there is a difference. It is supposed to mean nothing is hidden: all the financials and agendas are open and known, and the path which has been chartered by executive leadership is easily accessed, followed and understandable by all.

Now, let’s stop laughing and dry the tears from our eyes as we discuss what really happens in business–obfuscation, misdirection, subterfuge, and outright lying. I’ve held off posting for a couple of weeks as I was observing some first hand obfuscation at a client and dealing with it. Management, in this scenario, was opaque and misdirecting with its policies and procedures. Personal agendas seem to trump corporate agendas, and covert strategies appear in hindsight to have been executed to maximize some individual’s leverage and pay.

I know this sounds jaded, but sadly, many times it is true.

First, a couple of stories around the good and the bad.

The good first. My friend owned a business which started off from nothing. Three partners came together and started a recruiting firm. They did what most startup business owners do, they hired sales talent and paid with highly leveraged compensation plans, and as the reps hustled and the company grew, the reps watched their commissions come in. The commission plan worked for the first few years, but as the company’s original business shifted and it became apparent the original commission plan didn’t fit the new path, the partners knew they had to make a change.

My friend came to me for advice. He explained where they started, where they were going and what the company needed to do to remain profitable. (In a nutshell, they were a permanent placement firm which had shifted to predominately staff augmentation in a niche market.) He did some mild railing against some of the biggest abusers of the comp plan and told me about the partner’s plan to roll out new, individualized comp plans to each rep. Their focus was on crafting plans for the senior reps which didn’t completely destroy their current commissions and shaft the newer reps with a greatly reduced commission structure–a kind of “robbing Peter to pay Paul” scenario.

When I asked how they arrived at that, the essential answer was they formulated their plan in a vacuum. The partners had met with each other and hadn’t asked for any input from their sales reps, nor were they planning on discussing the roll out with them.

What I recommended was transparency. First every rep got the same plan. Second, was a disclosure of the company numbers on sales, revenues and margins. And third, an explanation to all the reps why the company had to change the plan.

My emphasis, more than anything, was to use data to justify the “why”. If three years ago permanent placements made 90% of the revenues and that commission structure made sense but now only 10% of the revenues were placements, then that is a change which has to be addressed. But to simply move the bar on the reps without explanation creates distrust and paranoia. “What are they going to take away from me next?” I told him the reps would say. And things like, “I heard the company is in trouble.”

Surprisingly, (but happily for me) he took my advice. They gathered all the recruiters together and showed them the numbers, the trends and the future path of the company. They presented a new compensation plan which was fair, focused on the new direction, and still allowed for equal income as before by incenting the desired sales path. And they promised a transition period during implementation. After three months, only one of the senior reps had left. And the company transitioned to their new model. In the end, they survived the transition to go onto their next phase which catapulted them from a boutique to a medium-sized business.

The bad story. I’m changing some of the details around this so as not to identify any business in particular.

A company I consulted for had been holding more and more closed door meetings. The president and the VP of Sales, or the Controller, or the VP of Marketing. Individual meetings, sometimes with some different combinations of the aforementioned people, but more and more meetings. Prior to this, the company had been relatively open about its numbers and direction. A new VP of Sales had been hired, and its executive team began having more meetings with themselves than with the employees.

Soon, territories were being realigned. Specific accounts were shifted from one rep to another. Commission plans were changed and private commission promises were made. “Covert” was the operative word. I was brought in to analyze their sales operations but found (and reported–ahhh, the beauty of the consultant…) that sales operations weren’t their dysfunction.

So, what happened? Implosion. When the level of secrets met with the growing dissatisfaction of the sales force, there was a screeching halt of productivity. Why, the reps grumbled, would they work in this uncertainty? And so they started leaving.

As I’ve stated before, there are a lot of individuals which make a company run, but sales is the engine. If you don’t have any sales, you don’t have any revenue. And without revenue, you don’t have a business.

This particular story isn’t finished yet, so I can’t wrap this story up with a bow on how the company had its happy ending. It is a work in progress, and I’m watching them closely.

So, these are anecdotes, and maybe you’ve seen something similar. But my point is, no matter what the size of the company, transparency matters. If people know what they are working for, and feel valued providing value to the company, then magic happens. If people work without trust, then they will always have one foot out the door. Which do you want? Which would help your company be its best?

Thinks, Inc. is a consulting firm which specializes in Smart Sales Operations. If you’d like for us to come and assess your chaos, drop us a line at contact@thinks-inc.com

Incentive-Based Selling: Are You Incenting? or Dis-Incenting?

In many a post, I have presented a lot of info and asked a lot of questions around compensation.

My many-a-time rant tends to focus on retaining talent and fairness, and the sales rep’s ability to achieve quota and earn commissions.

But there is a problem in River City, and it doesn’t rhyme with “p”. It is in how incentives are being crafted.

Recently, I attended a webinar  about Crafting Commission Structures sponsored by Datafox. The webinar had two presenters, one from Zendesk, the other from Salesforce. Both of them were in the position of crafting compensation plans for their sales people.

First, the positive parts of the webinar: It was brief, focused and insightful. The speakers were articulate and informed and presented well. As a matter of fact, they probably don’t even realize they said something which annoyed me!

What did they say? Without realizing it, they said compensation plans were crafted so only a percentage of the sales force achieved them.

Let me back up and explain. Research has shown selling compensation models, i.e. quota attainment models, are actually dis-incenting to sales people. In my observation, for highly paid technology sales people, the typical scenario is a sales rep achieves quota one month (or quarter/semi-annually/annually) and are then reset to zero starting with the new compensation period. It is a Sisyphean task: sell, sell, sell and then get set back to zero. Daniel Pink discussed in his book Drive and in an article for the Harvard Business Review how this type of sales methodology doesn’t use intrinsic motivation to reward the rep and actually can dis-incent the rep since they never achieve a true finish line. His analysis created a significant backlash from those who said (IMHO from an emotional perspective) he was wrong (see this example, a person whose living is made off crafting sales compensation).

There is some truth in the disagreement, and I don’t deny that. But where I see the problem lay is in the quota itself.

In the area of sales with which I’m most familiar, information security sales, the advertised On Target Earnings (OTE) for outside sales positions is usually north of $200k. While I know several reps who earn and have earned considerably higher than this, I also know several reps who haven’t made quota, and here is why I have an issue–the truth is they were never supposed to make quota.

Based upon the Zendesk Senior Sales Compensation Analyst,
Strategy & Planning, Caitlin Ferson, the expectation is that between 40-60% of sales reps will achieve quota. Her explanation is that with current OTEs hitting such high numbers, quotas are being designed with an (implicit) expectation of failure. Which means 60-40% of your sales reps WON’T achieve quota.

Does anyone see a problem here?

My mantra of “If the sales rep is making money then the company is making money” is based upon the idea that the company is compensating the rep FAIRLY. Planning for a sales rep to fail so that the company doesn’t have to pay them is, quite frankly, immoral.

The company should be planning fairly for salary + incentive = achievable target for earnings. If it isn’t achievable, then don’t advertise the position for hire.

A great compensation plan is one where the rep achieves quota, receives commissions, and the company earns revenue. Call it simplistic, but it works.

Thinks, Inc. is a consulting firm which specializes in Smart Sales Operations. If you’d like for us to come and assess your chaos, drop us a line at contact@thinks-inc.com

Promote from Within or do Without.

What happens when a person from outside an organization is brought in for a higher level position, e.g. executive vice president, vice president, or first line manager?

Well, it depends…but I will say, based upon anecdotal evidence, that depending upon the level which the new hire is placed, it can be anywhere from transformative to strategic to downright disastrous.

And why? Because the lower in the food chain of an organization, the more important someone is who knows the company. Especially first line managers, since they are really “information encyclopedias” for their direct reports. That first line manager is there to help bridge that gap between company knowledge and company culture and the rep.  If you place an outside hire in position as a first line manager, then starting the position they have two tasks, not just one: they have to learn the company culture as well as learn the company knowledge. And when it comes to making those in the trenches successful, understanding where to go to get things done is invaluable to the front line. If the manager has to go and find out how things are done and then report that back to the rep(s), then there is a delay and a burp in the process of getting things done.

Let’s set up a scenario. A small manufacturing company is looking to expand, and they decide to promote the current manager into an executive role, creating a new position, and now need to fill his or her role as a first line manager.

The company has had good people work hard for them for many years, helping to build the company to get it to this point. The employees have worked hard–people who have produced products, sold them, created marketing, balanced the books, straightened up back office messes, managed crises, and led the company to prosperity.

And then, because the company believes it needs to change, they hire someone from outside because they have “experience”.

What does that mean, they have “experience”? In some instances, it means the new hire brings skills to the table which the company needs and their current employees do not have. But in usually it means they bring in someone who’s managed people before. The owner/president/decision maker decides to bring in an outside party because s/he doesn’t believe anyone on the front line is capable of “managing”.  But how did this person who is brought in gain their experience? Someone took a chance on that person, promoting them to a management position, and more than likely, from within their company. I have never seen a company hire a manager from outside a company who didn’t already have management experience.

As an example: in one company, they had gone through several marketing people. They had hired an intern who quickly proved her value, who understood social media, worked hard and had great ideas. She worked for the current VP of Marketing who had troubles not only with the fundamentals of branding and messaging, but also with the newer things like social media. Basically, the intern began to save the VP’s bacon on a regular basis. The president, realizing her worth, hired her full-time.

She then proceeded to lead their social media campaigns, e-marketing campaigns and anything else the VP didn’t understand. She continued to save his bacon and she was given a new title and a raise.

When the VP decided to leave, the president, instead of looking at who had helped the company and supported its growth–i.e. who was up and coming and understood the company’s needs–hired someone outside the company whose resume was impressive.

The new VP proved scattered and ineffective, and was replaced by another outside hire with an impeccable looking resume. Marketing foundered for several more years. And here’s where the wheels fall off the bus. The rising marketing star realized she would never be considered for the top job so she left. And suddenly there was a giant hole in the company’s marketing as all of that experience walked out the door. And not just her insights and understanding of the space, but her contacts and the relationships she had built for the company. The president, of course, groused at the lack of loyalty the ex-employee showed. That, sadly, is irony.

There are a few times when companies need to look outside their walls for talent. Ford was a good example when it admitted to itself it needed fresh eyes to look at the problems created by an insulated familial succession. But on the other hand, GM saw that hiring Mary Barra was the right move as she knew the systems and had proven herself while coming up through the ranks–which is what GM needed to straighten out the messes created by their siloed decision making.

I’m not saying “never”, as absolutes simply don’t exist in our world. But I am saying look closely at your people. Step outside of how you see them, and see how they could benefit the company. Many times building a mentoring program is a great step so that someone is prepared to step into a role that needs to be filled. In sales especially, I see this as an extremely important step, as most small companies promote the best performing sales rep to management. This will be addressed in another post, but two things here: 1) Just because a rep sells the most doesn’t mean s/he should become or is qualified to become a manager and 2) if you take your biggest producer out of the field, what have you done to your sales?

In the end, promoting from within provides continuity. It enables culture building and a sense of safety to the employees. And, ultimately, it allows for employees to grow.

If you give them the chance, they will succeed.

Thinks, Inc. is a consulting firm which specializes in Smart Sales Operations. If you’d like for us to come and assess your chaos, drop us a line at contact@thinks-inc.com

PS The Infrastructure Guy  and Smart Sales Operations are Trademarks of Thinks, Inc.

Foundational HR

Many years ago, when I was in my first real job, I worked for a pharmaceutical manufacturer. As was becoming the fashion but is now de riguer, employees were required to take training from human resources for employee interaction, needs identification and conflict resolution.

At the time, it consisted of getting a group of employees together to watch a VHS video coupled with an instructor-led discussion of the different scenarios involved and what could have been done better–initially, during and after the interaction.

One of these videos stands out even after all these years. I’ve tried to track it down online, but it has probably been shelved since the fashions were out of date even when I viewed it the first time. The screen resolution was striped and grainy from repeated viewings. What stood out then and still stands out in my mind though was how it addressed what I consider foundational HR issues and things like responsibility to oneself and co-workers.

In the video, a woman sitting at her desk picks up her phone and calls a person in another department. The co-worker is male and works in IT. With few pleasantries, the woman demands help. The co-worker, in return, is short with her. The conversation ends and the woman is upset and escalates to management. Management intervenes and basically coaches the pair on how to play nice.

The group discussion I was involved with focused on characters in the video, Fred* and Velma, and their method of requesting and responding. To make the HR point, the scene and its message were supposed to be cut and dried, so I don’t fault the video or its script writers for  the intended message conveyed. What raised my eyebrows was how the people who viewed the video missed what I considered the Foundational HR flaw.

So, back to the scene: after Velma hangs up the phone (remember, this was before chat and texting), she turns in her chair and complains to her co-worker about Fred. What a miserable SOB he is, etc. The co-worker nods her head sympathetically. The scene cuts to Fred, who has turned to his co-worker and is complaining about Velma wasting his time. Then he states that THIS IS THE SECOND TIME THIS WEEK HE HAS SHOWN HER HOW TO DO THIS.

After this, we, the observers, discussed how Fred and Velma should have handled the conflict. There were a lot of soft suggestions like “use a nicer tone”, and “apologize for behavior”. But something didn’t sit right with me, so I raised my hand and said, “Velma or Fred should have written down the instructions.” The discussion leader eyed me coolly and paused…and then went to another raised hand. Being young I allowed her stare to quell any further pursuit of my observation and we got back to what an SOB Fred was.

This baffled me, as the crux of the problem and what created the conflict was that Velma again needed information which was provided previously provided. The conflict was a result, but not the fundamental issue.

No wonder Fred was upset–he was just berated by someone who demanded help for a task he had already shown them how to do. The video focused on Fred and Velma’s interaction and response and how they should have handled it.

Now a few caveats. I understand the intent of the video was to demonstrate how to communicate with co-workers better. It is important as an adult to communicate our ideas and opinions without devolving into an argument and hurt feelings. People need to treat each other civilly in an office environment (and elsewhere!). And, learning better ways to express anger and frustration and avoid hostilities is important.

Some important information: First, being the monkeys we are, to quell our simian roots we begin training the our control of emotions starting at birth. Many parents call this “manners”. Second, many tasks need more than one walk through before they become fluid. Third, as the little aphorism says, “Your crisis is not my crisis,” so escalating it by screaming, yelling, arm waving, foot stamping, etc. will only make it your crisis with me responding to it with matching anger. Fourth, if the proper foundations were in place, then when this crisis appeared, its escalation would match its criticality–one does not yell “fire” in the movie theater if they see only the glow of a cigarette (not applicable today, but it was many moons ago). And fifth, if Velma had been shown the process earlier, then there should have been some documentation around to jog her memory when she was required to repeat it.

If you are familiar with six sigma and its brethren 5S, then an appendage to the 5S methodology is to incorporate a system to make information available when it is needed: right now, in a week or in a month. What Velma needed was not another explanation–that just pulls Fred away from his work and doesn’t guarantee Velma future issues–but an SOP (Standard Operating Procedure), guide, tool or template to follow to get to a point where she can complete the process on her own. If that means further training with Fred, then that needs to be built into a plan. If it means Fred left Velma with instructions or Velma took notes, then that needs to be built into a plan.

So…a few years later, different company, same video, and another instructor led discussion with a different instructor. When it came up as to what Fred and Velma should have done differently, I raised my hand and stated my same premise as before. When the instructor paused with her stare this time (they must be coached this), I continued with my observation that the solution was to make sure either Fred had left enough information with Velma or Velma had enough information from Fred so that both could go on their way and neither would have had to have angry words. Even if planning to meet again at another time for more training was better than demanding someone help you. This time I only got a little sigh from the instructor.

The moral is if you have incorporated a plan, procedure or SOP for foundational activities and information, then you won’t have to deal with Fred and Velma and their bad interaction. You could probably even hire Shaggy and Scooby to do the work for mere snacks because you would have such a great plan in place you could hire just about anyone–even a talking dog–and they could figure out the work because of all your wonderful documentation.

In the end, planning and documenting should be part of any process. When you onboard someone, you have a plan, right? Right?

Thinks, Inc. is a consulting firm which specializes in Smart Sales Operations. If you’d like for us to come and assess your chaos, drop us a line at contact@thinks-inc.com

PS The Infrastructure Guy  and Smart Sales Operations are Trademarks of Thinks, Inc.

*My apologies to Hanna-Barbera

Productivity

I am going to preface the following by telling you I am a big believer in Lean. Most people think of Lean Methodology as something only for manufacturing, but more and more people are coming to see organizations can implement Lean practices to improve operations and internal harmony. Dan Markovitz is an avid proponent of this philosophy and he is one of my influences when I’m consulting for companies, or thinking how companies could be better.

Recently, I was listening to a book-on-CD (yes, I still do that) by Womack & Jones called Lean Thinking. The title caught my eye because I thought it would be in line with my thinking. Alas, the book, written originally in 1997, is focused on manufacturing and the gains to be had by using lean practices. But something the narrator said caught my attention and it is completely applicable to sales and sales operations.

Briefly, the discussion was around “muda” or “waste” (the big three are muda, mura & muri or waste, overburden & unevenness). In Lean Manufacturing, waste is money down the drain, either by time or production. But where it is easier (but maybe not just easy) to track down waste in a manufacturing line, the 3M’s , but mostly muda, can be seen constantly in business on the sales and marketing side.

And this is the crux of smart sales operations–we look at sales processes as additive. What do I mean? I mean instead of looking at how a sales rep gets their work done and how do we extract information from that work stream, we layer a process on that sales rep to report on that work stream.

Let me give you an example to illustrate. A new sales rep is given a book of accounts in a given territory. Then, the sales rep is given a tool like a CRM, to prospect into these accounts, build a pipeline and funnel and start to close deals. Most of you are probably nodding your head in agreement, “Yes, that’s how it’s done.” Next, management wants to track the progress of the rep, so they ask the rep to produce a report. “No big deal,” you say, as all the rep has to do is create a report in the CRM and run it and give it to management. Then, management wants to know where deals stand, so they ask the rep to produce a report. Again, you may say, “No big deal,” and the rep produces another report. Soon, management wants to meet to go over the reports, which by now has grown to multiple reports and multiple meetings. The sales representative who was hired to sell has now become a reporting fool, spending significant time on administrative tasks, and trying to figure out how to balance their time with the other priorities of the job–like achieving quota.

As a personal example, my most recent experience was a manager who asked us to create a report used only by himself so he could present the team numbers to his management, showcasing the manager in the best light possible. The report was tedious, arduous and an exercise in frustration as it required two or more hours to produce each time (it was a Word doc, and none of the information gathering could be automated). This, coupled with the one hour accompanying meeting to go over the report and then the additional one hour meeting with the team to go over the collective reports was almost criminal in how much time it sucked. When confronted about this (as every rep had) the manager would say with his default response, “It only takes five minutes.”

Tying this back to Lean, what was wrong here? Waste. Waste of time, of processes and specifically of consideration. (While you might feel consideration can’t be wasted, how many times have you thrown your hands up in the air when your patience has reached its maximum? If someone who has been trying your patience continues to come back to you with the same issue again and again, you would more than likely snap, tell them about your frustration and tell them to get their problem fixed before they came back to you again.)

The problem for all this is a foundational issue: If the data has been captured in the beginning, then there should be no reason it couldn’t be pulled in an automated report. Computers are great at manipulating data, it is what they are built to do. So why was (I’m sorry, is–he’s still doing it) my manager wasting his team’s time to pull data he could have pulled? Because he didn’t value his team’s time. Why, as in the first example, is management layering on a report when the data for the report is readily available if it is being captured in the first place?

Smart Sales Operations deals with these issues in a foundational manner. We need to first look at what’s being sold, what is important information for the sales rep to keep track of and what is important information which sales management needs for visibility, and we build our tools around the information needed.

Recently I was having a discussion with a former manager of mine who has gone on to sales performance consulting. Our disciplines overlap a little, but his perspective on sales comes from a different angle than mine–he is looking to use tools to get more out of the reps, and I am looking at what is in place which can removed/tweaked/re-worked to produce better results. In the end, we both are working with companies to get more sales, for as I have said before, if the rep is making money, then the company is making money. Anyway, back to the conversation, he is a huge proponent of Salesforce. He believes it is infinitely tweakable enough to put processes in place to get the desired behaviors from the reps. My take on Salesforce is that it has morphed from a tool for the rep to manage customer interactions cradle to grave, becoming a reporting tool for management. While my former manager and I both see each other’s perspective, what I think is at the overlap of this Venn diagram is data. What is captured, what is needed, what is reported.

I’ve spoken about clean data before, and I am a huge proponent of data hygiene. But also in consideration is what data needs to be collected and how does this affect how the collector goes about their job. Because if your sales rep is spending more time creating reports, collecting data and meeting with their managers, then they aren’t out in front of customers doing what they were hired to do. They may be internally productive, but overall, they are not PRODUCTIVE.

Help your reps be productive. No muda.

Thinks, Inc. is a consulting firm which specializes in Smart Sales Operations. If you’d like for us to come and assess your chaos, drop us a line at contact@thinks-inc.com

PS The Infrastructure Guy  and Smart Sales Operations are Trademarks of Thinks, Inc.

Remote Workers Working Remotely in a Remote Office – Part II

In my first post about working remotely, it focused on what should be happening at the mother ship to ensure the remote worker successfully started in their new position.

But “remote” is a bidirectional communication. The home office needs to communicate and connect to the remote office, but the remote office/worker needs to communicate and feel connected to the home office.

Too many times when a company hires a remote worker, I see an unexpressed conflict. The company hires a remote sales resource under the auspices of growing the company but what they really want is a mercenary. The employee takes the job under the auspices the company wants to grow and that the company will provide support to that end. The company wants someone to go into the territory–independent of company culture and without any supporting company-based background–and begin producing sales. They want the sales rep to “crush the competition” “steal sales away” “bust into the territory” and other pugilistic possibilities. They want for someone to establish a name for the company in that new territory as quickly as possible.

Now I can hear your collective brains buzzing, “What’s wrong with that?” And for both the newly hired and the newly hiring, there is nothing wrong as of yet, except the gap between what’s discussed before hiring and what happens after hiring is like looking into a reflection pool. Not the reflection part so much, but what’s lurking underneath. How deep is that water under the surface? I may see the reflection of the company on top, but is it supported? Is this freshly minted corporate mercenary presenting the best foot forward for what the customer needs–and what the customer expects? How should the remote worker communicate to the mother ship what they are doing? And, if they are doing it correctly and to expected corporate standard.

This goes back to the previous post, but by instilling culture and expectations the company looks to see that message spread from the rep to the customer. And just like parenting, after initial hand holding by the mother ship and then giving progressively more autonomy, the company transfers its corporate image and beliefs, and the remote worker has a better chance of reflecting that image in their local market.

So I said the remote worker should be communicating to the corporate office, but what should they be communicating? Here’s where it gets a little complicated for me to explain, and not sound like I’m completely tap dancing, but the remote worker needs a neutral resource to which they communicate their activity, their efforts and their plan–in short, a mentor. Not their manager, but someone at HQ who knows the systems, understands what the worker is trying to do (in this case, sales) and give them perspective and guidance. This allows a conduit for the remote worker to HQ, as well as a way for corporate culture to be shone back upon our remote newbie. And, we don’t have to use the same mentor all the time and paring only one-to-one, but use more than one mentor and expose our remote guy (or gal) to others in the organization as well.

I’ll probably write about mentors in sales operations at a later date, but there is a reason people need mentors: they don’t come into a position knowing everything. I’ve heard it stated that for experienced hires, companies hire someone with 60% – 80% of the desired skill set expecting to train for the remaining needed skills. That means the new hire is still lacking 20% – 40% of the knowledge needed. So this begs the question, how are you treating your remote employees? Or if you are remote, how are you being treated? Now, reverse the ask on those two questions. Open communication between the remote employee and the company HQ will only make things better. And that, in the end, will bring more sales, and ultimately enable better Sales Operations.

Thinks, Inc. is a consulting firm which specializes in Smart Sales Operations. If you’d like for us to come and assess your chaos, drop us a line at contact@thinks-inc.com

The Infrastructure Guy  and Smart Sales Operations are Trademarks of Thinks, Inc.

Smart Sales Operations – Front Office vs. Back Office – Getting Paid, Part II

Last week I talked about processes internally for taking an order to fulfillment so sales gets paid. Knowing you have dutifully addressed all the bumps and burrs impeding your order processing in the past week, I want to address the next big looming issue: Customer Payment.

Let’s go back to last week at Company X where the sales rep has received a PO. The order gets processed and pushed through the back office, the customer has received their product and/or services, and they have been invoiced.

What happens next? In an ideal world, the customer receives your invoice, smiles at the thought of the good work or product you’ve provided, and then happily cuts a check. And Company X, in turn, excitedly rewards the sales rep by paying the rep their commission due.

Did you notice a lot of smiling and a lot of processes happening? Daisy-chained together and executed without a lapse? Unfortunately, in our more accurate world, the customer hasn’t paid, for any number of reasons, and now the invoice is thirty-days old, the goods and/or services are sixty days past delivery–meaning the customer only has a vague remembrance of Company X–and you, the sales rep, haven’t seen a dime of commission.

How does this get rectified? In a sweeping generalization, many of these issues need to be dealt with up front. And I don’t mean in PO language (a topic for another post). I mean, talking to the customer about how an order gets processed, who on their side of the company touches it and ushers it through, and what obstacles loom which could stop your company from getting paid.

Herein lies the rub. This part of the typical sales cycle is either brushed aside or avoided because it is uncomfortable. It makes the rep anxious as they don’t want to be presumptive of the sale, and it makes the customer irritated, because of the aforementioned (potentially) but also this is typically not an area of expertise and they don’t have the knowledge or understanding to answer these questions.

One of the recommendations which was made to me by one of my former managers and a mentor to me, is to have the customer purchase something small from you. Whatever you can consider “small”, it is more the exercise in getting the flywheel moving so when the big purchase comes through, the axles are greased, the engine is ready at idle, and the wheels are ready to roll.

Why? Most companies have myriad documents to sign before they can engage in business. Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA) and Master Service Agreements (MSA) are two big ones. Ask to see a copy of the company’s PO, especially if it may contain additional language. Many times customers will state their payment terms on their PO. It is quite a surprise to send in your quote which states payment is expected within 30 days of invoicing, and see this trumped by the customer’s PO which states that the customer will pay within 45 or even 60 days of invoicing.

To hammer the PO language catch example home, a former customer of mine had a clause on its PO which stated that if the customer paid within 30 days, they would take a 3% discount off the invoiced amount. We always received payment from the company on the 29th day. Another customer paid for services on a different timeline than goods–60 days versus 30 days. Each of these smells a little rank in terms of ethics, and due to the fast paced nature of business, these iniquities were allowed–with a lot of grumbling. Only when the customer was addressed about the difficulties their policies presented to us did they relent. But if we would have known about this upfront, the surprise for me and my back office would have been a lot less.

While many companies use their purchasing policy to create a mechanism for “float” it doesn’t have to be that way. If you have done the homework and asked the questions up front, you should be able to alleviate many of the speed bumps which get your company paid and you receiving commissions.

Of course, there is much more which can be done, but consider this is a musing’s first blush.

Your task for this week? Go to that customer who is always slow to pay. Ask them if there is anything you can do on your side to get them to pay on time. And if possible, help them streamline their process.

Any better ideas for Front Office vs. Back Office? I’m always interested in learning.

Thinks, Inc. is a consulting firm which specializes in Smart Sales Operations. If you’d like for us to come and assess your chaos, drop us a line at contact@thinks-inc.com

PS The Infrastructure Guy  and Smart Sales Operations are Trademarks of Thinks, Inc.

Smart Sales Operations – Front Office vs. Back Office – Getting Paid, Part I

One of my early sales managers used to say, “The sale isn’t final until you get paid.” And he meant me getting paid, not the company. And after many years of doing sales, I found out he spoke the truth. Why is this important in the understanding of Sales Operations? Because the entire company runs on the back of what is sold.

Jeffrey Gitomer says, “Nothing happens until somebody makes a sale.” (I’m paraphrasing here, but run with it) Loosely translated, a company has to sell something to have a company: to make payroll, to invest in marketing, to pay salaries, to have admin and HR and…the list goes on and on. But what is meant to be understood but not stated, is that your customer has to pay you for whatever has been sold for all the aforementioned to happen.

This is a critical piece. It can’t be emphasize enough how important it is to recognize getting paid for whatever has been sold completes the sale. And why am I emphasizing this so much? Because there are a lot of factors which can impede getting paid, and many of them reside within your company.

Let’s run with a scenario. At Company X, when a sales rep gets a purchase order, excitement reigns. Dollar signs flash in the reps’ eyes as they think of commissions, swimming pools and movie stars. But the PO only represents a promise to pay–first the customer needs to receive the goods or services ordered. So next step after the PO, in most companies, is the rep enters the order into a system. From there, it usually goes to various and sundry hands for further massaging and parsing to ensure the proper goods and/or services are delivered to the customer.

Here’s where Sales Operations can shine or stumble. In Six Sigma*, scrutinizing the manufacturing line for places where things can or do go wrong is expected. In sales, the process for order fulfillment is more like an archaeological dig, where process which were in place when the company started still exist, and things like root suckers appear, added on like riders to congressional bills wending their way through the approval process. People (management, administrators, the reps themselves) add approval check boxes, form distributions, departmental approvals and eventually, you have a mess.

To achieve the best process, streamlined and elegant, companies should strive for one version of the truth. When the rep places the order, all necessary information to complete the sale is captured up front. (In my ideal world, when the rep identifies the prospect, this data is entered into the CRM or crosschecked/confirmed against data if it is existing). Billing address, shipping address, PO number, contacts for billing, contacts for receiving, contacts for payment resolution, the name of the end user–whatever is needed to make sure the order can be processed. And, it should be set up in such a way that information which is needed repeatedly or will be used again doesn’t have to manually entered each time–the more times a number, address, name, value, etc. has to be entered, the greater the chance there will eventually be a mistake.

In many companies, streamlining the process is difficult because the system which is set up has too many people involved to initiate an order. In other companies, initiating the order is easy, but pushing it through the levels of approval requires hand holding by the rep–taking him or her away from their original job description, which is selling.

So with all of this back office process, what is the ultimate goal of the company and the sales representative?

To get paid.

Are you sure your processes are leading to this ultimate goal?

Now, think about things at your company. Is the same true? Are there processes in place which you know are unneeded but because there is still a blank field on the page you make someone enter a value–any value–because you haven’t gotten rid of it?

Your task this week: walk a few orders through your process from start to finish. Question everything. See if there aren’t some things which could be pared down, combined or left out completely.

And begin to make the changes which enable Smart Sales Operations.

*For great reading on Six Sigma applied to knowledge workers, I highly recommend reading Dan Markovitz’s blog: http://www.markovitzconsulting.com/blog/

More on Front Office v. Back Office next week.

Thinks, Inc. is a consulting firm which specializes in Smart Sales Operations. If you’d like for us to come and assess your chaos, drop us a line at contact@thinks-inc.com

Onboarding – Smart Sales Operations

Onboarding is the set of processes companies have in place to bring on new hires. In the computer and networking world, this includes provisioning and access to necessary systems. But there is more than just getting the new hire an e-mail address. For instance, what happens when a new sales rep gets hired? Do you have a rigorous process? or do you wing it?

What happens at your company? And what happened to your new hires in the past? And after reading this, what are your plans for future hires?

Apple is famous for its user friendliness, whether it be hardware or software, and Apple receives praise for the simplicity and functionality of its designs. And because people at Apple think about how something is or will be used, a lot of problems which an end user would potentially have encountered are circumvented. Through use testing, glitches are identified and eliminated. The burrs which would blister the experience are smoothed.

One story I remember* regarding Apple was their packaging strategy for their early systems. When the end user received their new computer and opened the box, Apple led them through it using a string. Yes, a string. Once the lid was open, the top sheet had a string attached to it, and as the user pulled things out of the box, the string connected each piece sequentially so that the owner set up the monitor, the power and the CPU in proper order, and when completed, turned on a fully functioning system. Even if the end user had no idea what each part was or where things went, Apple’s system eliminated the guesswork of putting together the computer.

That string is really a kinesthetic checklist. And I’m a big believer in checklists. If you have the chance, I recommend reading Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. It is a great guide to looking at situations where checklists can be implemented, and in many of Gawande’s examples, save lives.

So back to onboarding. Is there a checklist in place? One which describes the steps which should happen as a person is brought into a company? A series of checklists can and should be in place for all aspects of the new hire process, such as interviewing, first day, first week, first quarter and first year.

For example, interviewing:
Have they filled out an application?
Spoken to the correct people in the area which they will work?
Gotten rubber stamped by the hiring chain of command?
Been tendered an offer letter?
Have they accepted?
Set a start date?

Once they’ve set a start date, does the company have an internal checklist to get things done? Most companies think of obvious things like health benefits and payroll, but what about laptops, cell phones, and business cards? What about training? In our current era of “faster, faster”, many times companies leave out things because they believe it only takes up time, but what they are really doing is increasing the ramp up time.

How? Because they aren’t giving the new hire the tools to be successful internally. What makes someone become part of a company? Is it because they are given an employee ID? Or is it because they interact with HR, engineers, other sales people and admin.

One company where I started many years ago, I sat for three weeks without a working laptop. When I got my laptop I was told to order business cards–and I didn’t know how to do that and no one had taken time to write it down. All processes were tribal knowledge–and I wasn’t part of the tribe quite yet.

Action item for the week: look at your onboarding process and determine if you take a new hire completely through your company’s processes–with no assumptions of “they should know how to do that”–because many won’t.

You don’t want your new hire to be waiting around for three weeks to start becoming one of your team.

*I say remember because I can’t confirm it’s true–please correct me if I’m wrong!

More on onboarding later. Next week we begin Front Office v. Back Office.

Thinks, Inc. is a consulting firm which specializes in Smart Sales Operations. If you’d like for us to come and assess your chaos, drop us a line at contact@thinks-inc.com

PS The Infrastructure Guy  and Smart Sales Operations are Trademarks of Thinks, Inc.