I recently returned from our division’s National Sales Meeting, a week-long conference wherein the sales staff are pumped full of excitement about current and coming products, told the final results for the fiscal year, trained and role-played until they are worn down to little sales nubs, and then feted heavily to both thank them for our bonuses and get them ready to hit the pavement again.
I was a presenter at the conference, and have had significant contact with salespeople in Southern California. Even so, I was surprised by the obvious differences between the people I met there and the folks I work with and near back at the home office.
- The salespeople measure. They have measurements for every milestone on the way to a sale, every result that signifies progress toward revenue. They are evaluated on how often they reach these milestones AND their effectiveness in converting this into revenue. Both activity and results are measured and compared, and the statistics are kept, visibly, daily or weekly (depending on the stat). Each measurement has a target, and rewards increase as targets are exceeded. meanwhile, I am sure that most of the people I work with do not have at hand such measurements with which they can evaluate the effectiveness of their work, certainly not metrics that can be updated weekly or daily. I don’t, so I’m going to make some.
- The salespeople strive to be completely competent and look completely competent in all that they do. If something is not well-explained, well-presented, and logically sound, our salespeople notice. “That’s an F,” they say. They recognize that the appearance of correctness and confidence that they strive to project must be backed by logic and facts, and they stand for nothing less. It is not clear to me that everyone else in my division behaves with the same attention to detail, and I am sometimes embarrassed by how we represent ourselves to the public because of this.
- The salespeople plan, rehearse, execute, and follow-up. They have a four-step approach to just about any customer-facing activity (where customer is quite broadly defined): they plan what they are going to do based on their goals for the interaction. They practice the skills necessary to effect that plan. They take a deep breath and go and do what they planned to do. Once this is done, they take a moment to objectively evaluate what happened, how they did, what they did well and what they should do differently. This seems like a no-brainer, but it is evident from the way some projects are run that the same mistakes are repeated again and again because this basic plan/prep/do/think is less common than it ought to be. It should be a matter of personal practice, of project team practice, and of corporate cross-functional practice at all levels, and it is clearly not.
- The salespeople have a photobook. A photobook helps you identify other employees and can be a boon when you need to find or meet with someone you don’t know. The tiny uptick in recognizability can make a huge difference in that first moment. Many HR departments frown on photobooks, and it seems unlikely that a department- or division-wide photobook could be produced without strong objections. but the sales staff has leapt that barrier because of how much help it can be for them to know their fellows.
- The salespeople are exceedingly competitive. Enough said.
- The salespeople exact some sort of commitment, every time. Even in conversation with a potential customer who won’t buy, the salesperson tries to gently guide them to agree to something, be it a trial, later contact, acceptance of a brochure, something that keeps the relationship going. One salesman joked that he dated well in college because even if a woman told him no, he get them to agree that he could ask again the following week. Too often I’ve been to meetings where action items are not produced or are not assigned, where responsibility is not placed with a named individual, where complaints are made about the behavior or absence of a department rather than a person. This is the opposite of exacting a commitment.
While the slickness and jocularity of the sales staff sometimes bothers me, they are the most entrepreneurial and businesslike members of our division, and there is much to emulate. I’m going to start by measuring my activity and thinking about its effect of revenue, and by ensuring that I exact some commitment from every business interaction, be it from myself or others.
