The Sales Manager's Success Manual

by Thomas, Wayne M.

• ISBN13: 9780814480502
• ISBN10: 0814480500
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-09-26
• Publisher: Amacom Books

Summary

Today's sales managers face a tough challenge. They must be more productive than ever while relying more on partners and technology with reduced resources in the field. And with fewer, larger customers, every decision becomes more important -- and riskier.The Sales Manager's Success Manualprovides the critical information sales managers need to succeed in this increasingly difficult job.Covering fundamental sales management topics including compensation, forecasting, and motivation, along with more advanced topics such as dealing with internal politics, understanding generational issues, managing up, and developing intuition, the book shows readers how to: hire the best sales force foresee potential surprises help reps make better decisions save time and resources target accurately for better results work with the CEO and the rest of the company Packed with savvy advice, enlightening case studies, and no-nonsense know-how,The Sales Manager's Success Manualis a one-of-a-kind book no sales manager should be without.

Author Biography

Wayne M. Thomas (Sudbury, MA) is a consultant, speaker, and sales trainer. His clients include AT&T, Sprint, Nortel, and Novell. As a sales rep, he won IBM’s Golden Circle Award, as well as awards at AT&T for building a top-performing sales team.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xii
Taking Your Team to Market	p. 1
Going to Market: Leadership and Responsibility	p. 3
"The Ultimately Accountable Job	p. 4
It Takes a Leader-and Sometimes a Lucky Break	p. 4
Realities	p. 5
Going to Market	p. 6
The Path of Least Resistance	p. 12
The Sales Force	p. 15
How to Assess Your New Team	p. 16
Sales Channel Sizing and Company Profitability	p. 21
In Pursuit of Rewards: Chocolate, Sex, and Money	p. 24
Sales Environment	p. 29
Type 1 or Type 2 Situations	p. 30
Why Good Salespeople Make Bad Decisions	p. 34
Sales Control and Policies	p. 45
Sales Controls	p. 45
The "Art" of Forecasting	p. 48
Thin-Slicing, a Productivity Tool	p. 54
How a Super Salesman Avoided Common Decision Traps	p. 63
Channels	p. 67
Role of Partners	p. 68
Alliances Can Position You	p. 69
Thin-Slicing in a Sales Channel	p. 69
The 80/20 Rule	p. 73
Product/Market Match	p. 75
Role of Sales	p. 75
Unwrinkling Southern California	p. 77
Competition	p. 83
Learning from the Fosbury Flop	p. 83
History Repeats Competitive Ebbs and Flows	p. 87
The Customer	p. 93
Loyalty Costs More Now	p. 94
How to Avoid Being the Designated Loser	p. 95
The Market	p. 103
Sales Is Only the Messenger	p. 103
The Great Market Shift in 100 CE	p. 105
Personal Coaching	p. 109
Facts-in-the-Future	p. 111
Consider the Odds, Charlie Brown	p. 111
Predictable Surprises	p. 111
Change Accelerates	p. 113
Anticipating the Future	p. 114
The Truth About Statistics, or Why You Need a BS (Bad Statistics) Filter	p. 117
A Short History of Bad Numbers	p. 118
Champagne Secret	p. 120
The Illusory Link	p. 121
The Gullibility Factor	p. 127
"How Gullible Are We?"	p. 128
What Are Best Practices?	p. 129
Dotcom Euphoria	p. 131
Caution: No Silver Bullets for Sales!	p. 132
IBM's Success Environment	p. 132
Examine the Evidence	p. 133
Application to a Forecasting Gap	p. 134
Exponential Sales Growth	p. 135
Additional Insights	p. 136
Intuition	p. 141
Intuition Is Experience, Not Magic	p. 142
Experience in Action	p. 143
Intuition Is Mainstream	p. 143
Improve Your Intuition	p. 146
"Rounds" for Team Intuition	p. 146
CSI: Seeing the Invisible	p. 147
Intuition Is Knowing What Will Happen	p. 148
Test Your Intuition	p. 148
How Much Information Is Enough?	p. 151
Spam Slicing	p. 152
Information: Less Is Often More	p. 152
A Lesson Learned from Betting on Horses	p. 153
Mind Games	p. 155
The Availability Heuristic	p. 156
Processing Biases	p. 157
Lonely at the Top	p. 158
A CEO's Advice	p. 159
Public Stress	p. 159
Drowning by Hanging onto an Anchor	p. 160
You Take It, You Own It	p. 161
Overconfidence	p. 162
Walk a Mile in the CFO's Shoes	p. 165
Where Does the CEO Stand?	p. 166
The CFO's Viewpoint	p. 166
Sales Takes No Action	p. 168
Classic Goof	p. 168
The Brain of a Sales Manager	p. 171
Brain Science	p. 172
We Have Dog Brains!?!	p. 172
Mr. Spock as Role Model?	p. 173
Mental Imaging	p. 174
As We Thinketh	p. 174
Why Goals Work	p. 175
There Are No Limits	p. 176
Evolution in Sales Management	p. 179
Making Your Age Work for You	p. 180
CIA Advice for Continuing Career Success	p. 184
Superwoman and Other Dysfunctional Models	p. 184
The CEO and Sales Force Success	p. 189
Evolved and Unevolved CEOs: Hurd vs. Fiorina at HP	p. 190
Predictability	p. 192
Predictable Failure	p. 193
Perception Sticks Like Glue	p. 195
Iceberg Perceptions	p. 196
Perceiving the Risks	p. 197
Flexibility and Success	p. 198
Know the Truth	p. 199
FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions	p. 203
Hiring	p. 203
Overconfidence	p. 204
Changing Territories	p. 206
CEO	p. 206
Learning	p. 208
Loss Reviews	p. 209
Earnings and Tenure	p. 210
Decision Making	p. 210
Best Wishes for Success	p. 212
Notes	p. 213
Bibliography	p. 219
Index	p. 221
About the Author	p. 227
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

CHAPTER 2

The Sales Force

When you get right down to it, one of the most important tasks

of a manager is to eliminate his people’s excuse for failure.

ROBERT TOWNSEND

Most companies find the cost of going to market is their secondlargest

expense—just behind COGS, the cost of goods sold. Depending

on the mix of goods and services, companies may spend

up to 40% of revenue marketing their products. As CSO, you are a

steward of this investment. In your role, just a few strategic decisions

will add to or subtract from the company’s return on its investment.

One of your first decisions is whether the current sales force is

adequate or inadequate for its mission. Do you or don’t you have

the right people?

According to Caliper, an organization specializing in recruitment

and selection, 80% of salespeople are in the wrong jobs. After a

study of 78,000 sales representatives, Caliper concluded that 55%

should not be in sales at all, and that 25% were in the wrong kind

of sales.

If Caliper’s findings describe your salespeople, you have a

Hindenburg Omen on your hands. You have also discovered an area

where your leadership as an agent of change will make you a valuable

corporate asset.

How to Assess Your New Team

How do you determine if your reps and staff are a match for the mission

you are leading? You need clarity on two things. The first is

your company’s objectives, which flow from its mission. The company’s

mission might be: “To make money for the Hunter family and

to cure cancer.” More specific objectives flow from that: “Achieve $5

billion in sales this year.” Second, you must create a sales strategy to

achieve the objective(s). You can only begin your sales force assessment

with these ends in mind.

For example, to achieve $5 billion in sales, you decide upon a

fundamental change in field tactics. Your new strategy requires a

solution selling approach to corporate-level (C-level) executives. In

the past, the sales force called primarily at the department level

using product-oriented tactics. It was effective, but meeting your

new assigned objectives requires high growth in existing accounts.

The sales force must expand its skills to include effectiveness at the

corporate level. Now, assessing your sales force becomes more

straightforward. Do they have the polish and technical expertise to

be credible at the C-level? Have they demonstrated it before?

Collecting Data

• Examine the results of existing sales teams and individuals sales

reps.

• Socialize your sales vision with colleagues in other departments,

and gather their feedback.

• Talk to some of your customers.

• Review team performance with your sales managers, meet oneon-

one with top-performing sales reps.

• Review performance reports on sales and team activity.

At the earliest possible time, begin making field calls with your

salespeople. There is no better way to make a confident assessment

of your terrain than by experiencing it yourself. Do not accept someone

else’s assessment, because his or her evaluation criteria may be

different from yours.

Riding in a car with sales reps always provides deep insights

available no other way. After a few days in the field, you will appreciate

the sales culture, marketplace, customers, and competition

more insightfully than any other way. Then, with the confidence of

your own observations, you can make faster, more sound decisions.

Remember that you are taking a small sample of the whole

organization as you make your calls. Do not take everything you

hear or see as a universal truth. Be aware of what I call “the rep

who” influence. Psychologists tell us that we have easy recall of, say,

“the rep who” you rode with last week who claimed that the company’s

tech support was lousy. You must keep an open mind later

when the issue of tech support arises, remembering that each of us

has a different perspective on the truth. We see through the eyes of

one in our personal context. Try to simply flag issues for further

investigation rather than assuming you have special insight from that

single exposure.

Your early need is to see the big context and make decisions

about how the structure you inherit facilitates or inhibits the behavior

it does. That said, making sales calls can unearth solutions to

great mysteries and provide valuable insights.

I debriefed a new CEO who had returned from a week’s worth

of sales calls. Primarily, he had called on large accounts and top

executives within those accounts. He learned that while the company

believed it had a major account program, all it really had was

a product sales program. Most of the executives he called upon had

no idea of the diversity of his company’s products and the potential

benefits available by more integrated partnering. This insight led him

to develop, despite protests from his VP of sales, a separate major

account group under different management.

Do It Now

Many months will pass before the benefits materialize from major

sales organization changes. Because of this ramp-up time, a new CSO

must determine early if she will make major changes in her channels.

This is essential because she also must set expectations early.

In clear terms and wary of overconfidence, the CSO must inform

her CEO how much time will be required to ramp to achieve

expected results from the change. She must also warn the CEO of

estimated productivity declines in the interim. Then she must get a

firm commitment of support.

If you don’t get buy-in, at least you have put yourself on record

assessing the inadequacy of the current sales team to achieve objectives.

In denying your request, the CEO also goes on record with you.

What happens next? You begin to limp along with a sales force

that you have identified as inadequate to do the job. A smart CEO

will be open to reconsider your earlier assessment as it now comes

to pass. Inaction will not solve the problem.

Loyalty to one’s staff is important; however, loyalty can hurt people

who are asked to perform tasks incompatible with their attitudes

and skills. You cannot send ducks to eagle school.

A former VP for an international communications firm shared her

experience: “The market need these days is for consultative selling.

We could have great product-oriented salespeople, but they just

wouldn’t have the horsepower to do the job required today.” Her

experience was that 80% of the existing sales force failed to adapt to

consultative selling. “There is no time to waste these days. My advice

is to make cuts and changes all at once. Loyalty to you isn’t worth

much if you don’t make your numbers.” If you don’t, it will be your

neck on the block.

“You Got to Know the Territory!”

Another sales VP advises new CSOs not to stop with changes to the

sales channels. “Also assess political alliances of your staff and field

managers.” In addition to fourteen years as a sales leader, he has a

black belt in karate and is a student of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. “I

wish I had taken Sun Tzu’s advice myself when I became a sales

VP—‘know your terrain.’ ” Sun Tzu says that any commander “ignorant

of the conditions of mountains, forests, dangerous defiles,

swamps and marshes . . . cannot conduct the march of an army.”1

“Only after you understand your terrain can you develop an effective

strategy.” In other words, you must adapt your tactics to the

reality of the environment as you find it. To illustrate, he discussed

several managers in technical and administrative positions whom he

inherited and knew to have political loyalty to others.

Spies

“They were essentially spies.” By the time he learned that several of

these holdovers were actively undermining him, it was too late to

move them out of his organization. To his chagrin, he discovered

that his boss clandestinely maintained an open door to them.

“I should have gotten rid of them immediately and put in people

loyal to me. I was reluctant to do that because of their political

connections. Now I realize there would have been some of initial

discomfort, but it would have been well worth it. In the end, they

killed me.”

With your own loyalists, you can move earlier and more decisively.

Most sales executives believe the optimum strategy is to make

your personnel changes quickly. Stringing them out will kill morale

and cause your best people to look for companies where shoes are

not always dropping.

I know this from personal experience. I was a sales executive

brought in to AT&T to help its sales force succeed in a deregulated

environment. In this environment, AT&T announced that 40,000

employees would be separated from the company. You can well

imagine the internal environment after this announcement.

The downsizing occurred over several years. During that time,

morale was low and stayed there. Instead of a focus on market success,

the employee focus turned to and remained on personal survival.

I observed a sales organization with a short-term, personally

pragmatic outlook. Because the downsizing occurred in stops and

starts, predictability vanished. Throughout its 100-year history, perhaps

more than anything else, predictability of the company’s systems,

markets, and policies drove the loyalty and commitment of its

employees. Thereafter, virtually nothing became predictable, and the

culture collapsed. Who could have predicted that the most recognized

company in all the world be sucked into decades of decline,

finally culminating in the sale of the company?