Tag: selling

Work, Working Hard & Work Ethic: The Non-Intersection of the Three

First off, let me discuss guilt.

Not your Jewish mother type of guilt (“You never call me.” “But Mom, I spoke with you two days ago!”)

Or guilt around felony like circumstances (you are on your own there).

But guilt around work and effort. Not in a high school physics sense (W = f*d), but time put in for tasks involved, and overcoming guilt around how much time is enough.

In sales, one could be working 24x7x365, because really, there is always something you could be doing, like more prospecting, more marketing, more networking, more customer touches…the list goes on. In this regard, selling is an endless job, allowing those who can’t say “no” to answer to their inner guilt and do “just one more thing”. A sales rep’s personal stake to produce has a lot of guilt tied to it. Add to it management’s expectations and this guilt boils down to time spent at work.

There are a lot of expectations, and being up to speed on your field of expertise is one them. One of the things which I do a LOT of is read. It is the primary method of finding out the what of my industry, not to mention the primary method of communication in my industry. But I have guilt when I am reading articles related to my industry, because it is taking time away from doing things with my job. But, my job is dependent upon me being up to speed on things on my industry, which in turn makes me a more effective salesperson, so I need to read.

Today, I read about “Work Ethic”. I’ve been following IS Survivor Keep the Joint Running since the 1990’s, and I like a lot of what he has to say, and this treatise is no exception. Then I read his post from 2004, and what I realized is my inner Jewish mother is killing me.

Work ethic

Working less for fun and profit

If I were you looking at the title of this post: Work, Working Hard & Work Ethic, the Non-Intersection of the Three I would wonder what I’m getting at, and if I’m just advocating being lazy. But I’m not–really!

What I mean is that you have a job. If you do your job, you are merely on cruise control. If you do your job and work at it diligently, then you are “working hard” and if you ask for other projects, even though they’ll cut into family time, then you have displayed what many would call a “work ethic”.

My problem with all this is comes down to expectation. If I am hired for a sales position and given a quota, then however I achieve that quota should be of no concern to anyone. If I achieve my quota with 20 hours a week of work, then my management shouldn’t care, they should revel in and repeat my results. But if I don’t achieve my quota and am working 50 to 80 hour weeks, something is wrong, especially if I’m closer to 80 than 50.

In my last corporate selling position, there was a lot of “busy-ness”. Endless amounts of time used on tasks which weren’t enabling. Paper trail tasks to CYA for management, along with endless troubleshooting calls for products which were still not ready for prime time. In the end, my colleagues and I estimated out of a standard 40-hour work week we were in some sort of corporate exercise for up to 30 hours. But the expectation was still to hit the numbers placed before us–a minimum number of meetings, training and prospecting. When I asked my peers how they were fairing, none of them had achieved the minimum expectations across all KPIs.* In addition, due to the number of meetings during the day, it meant most evening/nights and weekends were taken up with answering e-mails.

This was on top of an unstable culture which didn’t provide any psychological sense of safety (a topic for another post), so the feeling the hammer could come down anytime was very real. This means a lot of hours were put in under the thumb of uncertainty.

Okay, you say, enough grousing. What is the solution?

Lean processes. It is the focus of this blog and it just doesn’t go away.

There are many things which could have happened to alleviate the sheer number of hours logged, but the biggest contributor would have been expectations backed by data. How many calls should a rep be expected to make? How many meetings, physical or virtual, should a rep be expected to make. And if we set this bar, what data have we used for this number?

Let me run with the meeting idea: Let’s say the expectation is 12 face-to-face meetings a week. Each meeting lasts 1 hour. The travel time to and from the meetings we’ll estimate at an hour total. Planning and set up calls for each meeting I’ll estimate at 30 minutes (I’m being very light on this estimate, since some meetings can take a lot of time and innumerable e-mails/phone calls to set up just to get all the moving parts aligned), which totals 6 hours, and all in, our rep has 30 hours out of a standard 40-hour work week already spoken for. Now add in corporate overhead, like standing meetings, etc. (see above). If it was at 30 hours like I mentioned, then the total for the week is 60 hours. And this hasn’t included time for prospecting, marketing efforts, shows, lunch and bio-breaks.

If the rep has a family, then he is probably trying to shoehorn children’s events and/or spousal commitments in some of the interstices. And then, the inevitable opening of the laptop late night to answer e-mails before the start of the next day.

If expectations were set on data, even if the numbers were set north of where the current data resides, they would still be based upon something versus opinion.

Recently in a newsletter I received, the author talked about what your worst salespeople could be telling you. One of the first things which stands out to me is the average tenure of a rep. I’ve mentioned this as a statistic before in the regard to how disruptive this is to the continuity of selling. But in regard to this article, I think it misses the mark. I know some excellent sales reps and they aren’t leaving because they suck, they are leaving because management isn’t listening to them. When excellent reps realize they are being hamstrung by corporate BS, impacting their earning potential, they leave as quickly as possible. Then, the second thing which caught my attention was “2. That You Are Tolerating Underperformance” (his typo, not mine). The author pulls info from Selling Power magazine, and talks about managing the rep through setting milestones. Five bullet points about managing through milestones, but not once a mention of how those milestones were created. Without any data, the milestone is meaningless. I can set milestones (“Grandma, although your in your mid-seventies, go run a mile today with your bum knee. Today you do it in 12 minutes, tomorrow we’ll expect 10.”) but they don’t mean anything unless balanced against data: historical data, growth data and revenue data, to mention a few.

Suffice it to say, when setting up KPIs or minimum activity standards, you have to look at what is exceptional and what would be known to produce failure. Then, target the 80th percentile and see what happens. Tweak, tune, or scrap depending upon outcomes.

But don’t just spitball it. Because if you do, you will find yourself in a situation where people aren’t achieving your expectations, no matter what your opinion is about it.

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.

*If a company issues unattainable KPIs, then they are setting the rep up for failure, because if they wanted to get rid of the rep then they have the proof. Not a very ethical practice, but it does happen.

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.

Smart Sales Operations

Well, it happened. I finally had enough and decided I had to take out my frustrations by hammering tiny little keys with my angry fingers.

“Enough? Enough of what?” you may ask. Enough of letting the small things become the big impediments which ruin my sales and my ability to sell. Things which companies can easily control that affect the sale, but most of the time never try to correct or even identify.

I’m talking about Sales Operations.

This blog will deal with using Smarts to produce operations which enable sales. Processes,  process, progress. The infrastructure of selling. I have been a vocal proponent of sales infrastructure long before things like CRM became mainstream. And before I attacked my keyboard, I did a little research on the current state of Sales Operations and the information available for Sales Operations. There wasn’t much. If there was some it was usually tied to a product. While it would be great if I were to be hired to consult, my real goal is to make you, the reader, really think about the operations which are in motion behind the sales person and a sale.

This will not deal with any selling methodology, that is, the how, the why, the close or the cold call and various topics around sales methodology. That topic has been and continues to be covered by a lot of individuals and companies–some who are right, and some who think they are right. Although some methodology might creep into my noodling, my focus is concerning the administration and tracking and enabling which goes hand-in-hand with sales; I rarely see it given a proper nod in acknowledgement of its criticality.

I liken it to architecting infrastructure. We are incredibly dependent upon background services like plumbing, electricity and climate control. These pieces of physical infrastructure work in the background and our expectations are very high for up-time, with little tolerance (emotionally or physically) for downtime. These conveniences run in the background of our life, and we rarely think about them, but when they go down or are impeded in some way, we know. A stoppage makes us realize how interwoven these services are in our life, and how one hiccup creates a cascade effect of issues.

So, to further extend the analogy…

Without really realizing it, people worry a lot about pooping. Not everyone is having outright conversations about pooping, but there are commercials for toilet bowl cleaners so one has a clean potty to poop in, the Squatty Potty so they can be more effective at pooping, commercials for laxatives, fiber boosters, constipation relievers (to start the pooping process), and lots of marketing for toilet paper–the finale to the pooping process. We all know a lot about toilet paper. The brands, the textures, the softness, their roll sizes. The sales and marketing for toilet paper brands has been memorable, plentiful and pervasive. But toilet paper matters for naught if one cannot get the effluent out of their house. All of this peripheral conversation around pooping means nothing if when you flushed, the poop didn’t leave your house. You really wouldn’t be too worried about how clean your toilet was or what brand of toilet paper you used if you couldn’t flush it away. You would really be worried about how to get rid or your waste–or become acutely aware of the build up pretty quickly.

So it is thinking like this which I realize makes me The Infrastructure Guy. I like to think about the “how” — How do we make things better by refining, streamlining and studying issues to provide solutions. Similar to Six Sigma in manufacturing, but for sales and selling. And this blog will provide my thoughts, insights and experiences on how to enable the sales force to achieve more sales by implementing Smart Sales Operations.

What is one thing a business can do to streamline its process? First thing: on-boarding.

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