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immediate supervisor about, “Hey, I feel like I’m not doing really well here. Can you help me?”
This created a safe space for them to work it out in a place where it was confidential, and they could figure it out on their own and they had that extra layer of support.
STEVE YOUNG: I think that was a big point. It took awhile for Renee to convince me of that, but I think it was a huge point. Because I do think it’s human nature that you’re not going to share your biggest weaknesses and your concerns with your boss. Maybe you guys are better people than I am, but I never had a boss that I was really willing to say, “I really don’t know how to do this.” Because the answer I would always get would be, “Well you damn well better figure it out.”
The second reason was that
confidentiality. And it was true. Renee never shared with me, even with my direct reports, that Bill, who ran the west coast, was having a problem with this or that Jim who was running New York had a problem with that. It was always, “Here are some trends that we’re seeing in the organization. We’re rolling out this new program and you know what? The folks really aren’t getting it, they’re not behind it.”
And that helped us go back to the program and say, “Ok, so what really is going on?”
You did uncover a lot of information from trends. But the confidentiality piece was very important, I think, for
folks to buy into the program and start to use the program.
I’ll tell you these are not psychologists.
But we even got to the point where, a person is a person. And there are a lot of things that affect their productivity, and it’s not all about whether they’re properly trained or they’re not making enough calls. And when it got to a certain point I always sent them off to some professionals. But to have that confidential relationship, where folks could feel comfortable to talk about their business concerns primarily, I think it really paid off for us.
RENEE ROBERTSON: So here’s the model. This is where learning and development and coaching really all came together. And this is where you can really start to see career
progression, and how we start to build that career progression.
Think about your sales reps. What do they really need? They need to understand the product, and the system. How do I price and build a proposal? How do I forecast? How do I close a deal? So these are skills-based training. We had some really strong skills-based training in place for all of our employees.
Then when you look at the manager level; this is where they have to learn to work that aggregate sale; roll up all those forecasts; build the funnel
holistically. But also, now they’ve got to coach and manage their people. So we worked with an outside company to build a very strong sales management and leadership program. It was a couple
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of days, and it was to help them to really learn how to integrate funnels, get better at their forecasting, and it was their first introduction to what I’ll call the professional development stuff:
the capabilities and the competencies and things like that, and to start to think more with a management orientation.
Still tactically oriented, but you have that shift in thinking with your sales management.
his is where we started to introduce some of the coaching.
We started sales and leadership coaching where some of the sales managers or high potential would get one-on-one coaching. If they went to the sales training, the management training, we provided them back-end coaching to solidify the training, to really help them integrate it and bring it back into their business – really help them use what they learned in training and in their work. We’ve all been to training class where you get the big binder and then it sits on the shelf. This gave them the opportunity to really bring it into what they’re doing.
Then, as you kind of move up in the organization with our directors, this is where we do a lot of our one-on-one work.
We did executive coaching. We helped teach them to be better coaches. We held leadership conferences where we either worked with an outside firm – or, to Steve’s point, we had put a
mechanism in place that allowed us to capture the essence of what was happening inside the organization without really breaking that
confidentiality – and then roll that together and really correlate the data and say, “Here are the issues. Here are the types of issues.” And it provided a great opportunity to bring our leaders together. It really allowed for that pathway or forum to work out some of the bigger issues we were experiencing, and build really strong solutions.
Then at the senior level, at Steve’s level, the level of coaching that happens there starts to get a little different. It’s more strategic in orientation. You’re dealing with organizational savvy, you’re dealing with navigating larger systems.
Different things come in to play.
So as a coach you’ve got to be able to adapt to different models and be able to work in that space. And then those leaders were all included in these conferences we put together, so the whole team was able to work together to make the sales organization really a high performing organization.
So we started to say “Ok, what does
‘good’ look like? What do we want our leaders to look like?"
We built a competency or a capabilities model, or what I like to call the DNA.
What do we want in our DNA? What does it look like for good sales
leadership? There’s nothing here that I think anyone would say, “Hhmm. That’s strange.” It’s about having really good business acumen; understanding the organization; relationship management.
Such a key competency for sales
professionals – it’s absolutely one of the most critical I think, especially today since many of our organizations are
T
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matrices – the ability to communicate and collaborate, inside the organization as well as with clients. It’s absolutely critical for our success.
So this started to scope out the framework for what effective and strong leaders will look like. And this is one of the baselines we used to measure our success, from a talent perspective.
We measured talent, performance and
results. And that became the model.
STEVE YOUNG: This helped in two ways.
It helped the employees. Because I’m sure when you go around and talk to your sales people, they all want to ask,
“How do I get to be where you are?”
My answer was always, “You’ve just got to be kind of lucky.”
But, seriously, being able to say, “These are the competencies of a leader. You’re a sales rep now. These are the
competencies of a sales manager. Do you have these now? Have you developed those? There are ways you can develop those, there are classes you can take, you can find yourself a mentor within the organization.”
We always preached that your
development is your responsibility; it’s not your boss’ responsibility. You’ve got to take that responsibility very seriously, but we will provide a lot of the
facilitation to make you a leader. It helped the employees.
I’m sure we’ll talk about succession planning and high potential, because we very much took that seriously. I always told anyone in my organization, when they asked, “What do I need to do to
get promoted?”
I would say, “You need to have your replacement ready to go, someone that can do it even better than you, or I’m not going to move you up.” I always put it on them. “You need to develop your replacement.” We talked about that all the time.
So, it helps your employees; very clear progression. It helps with retention;
they know what the rules are and they know what they have to do. That helps with morale, and when you have good employee morale you have good
customer relationships. When you have good customer relationships you
generally have good results.
This is not all touchy-feely. With me it