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MARK DONNOLO: We were talking about training before as something that’s been really highly defined, it’s centrally controlled, we know what we’re doing, we’re very professionalized about it. And then we’re distributing it through coaching, which we’re all saying is more important than the training.

We’re distributing it out to a lot of people that may not do it well, or they may not do it enough. Maybe they don’t spend enough time coaching.

How do you manage that in terms of the quality of the development? As it goes from training to a distributed coaching model, and the fact that you’ve got people – your first line sales managers – that may have been great reps but they’re not great teachers, they’ not great coaches necessarily, they’re not great managers. How do you keep that quality level up? What do you see in terms of making that successful, that transition?

LINDSAY JOHNSTON: We see that a lot in my business because we’re dealing with sales organizations. Our primary focus is customer relationship

management, so you get companies that will spend a lot of money on technology, their sales people, the process, and the tools, but they miss

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that next layer. And I think that next layer is absolutely critical: that front line management. Because if they can’t reinforce and coach that process, it will never be that. The rep will kind of do it for a little while, because someone spent millions of dollars on it and someone told him he had to do it, but as soon as that disconnect happens with their management, when they say,

“Don’t worry about it. Give me a

spreadsheet, I’ll roll the forecast up,” or whatever the process might be.

So the biggest thing that we see in our business is you have to coach your coaches. Right? That was something Coach Doherty said. You’ve really got to coach your coaches. The best

organizations out there, I see that comes from the top. The CEOs are coaching their people and it rolls downhill, so you take it from both ends of the spectrum. And you have to create that model.

I think the biggest difference between training and coaching is training is a fixed program. Coaching is an individual one-on-one interaction. So if I’m dealing with you Mark, I know what your

strengths are, your weaknesses are. If I’m your manager I know what pushes your buttons, what sets you off, and I know how to interact with you. Eddie is going to be completely different. I mean, Eddie is a hardnosed driver and I have to be a little more shocking to grab his attention. Where, with you I can be more subtle because you’re sensitive, or something.

I think a lot of it is coaching the coaches on how to implement these programs better.

CHRIS ROY: Great point. When you make the transition from front line player to the first line coach, we

intentionally, probably three years ago, decided we’re going to have to play our coach in place. This person is going to have a few direct reports, but he’s not necessarily going to lead a big massive team. It’s more of a half-step to graduate into a leadership role so they understand the maintenance and the administrative piece of the job, along with the psychological portion of the sale and the science of the sale.

They have visibility into the larger machine, the larger organization. It’s a good grooming ground. And frankly, you can find your high potential. You can have high potential people who are in first line sales jobs, and when you put them into that role they take a

divergent path. Some of them will become great managers. Some of them won’t, but they will become more senior sellers in a little more selective role at some point in the future.

We’ve found that as you develop someone from a first level seller to either management or a more senior seller, it’s a good path because it will force a path. And if you find someone who’s great at both, it’s a good problem to have. Without providing an awful lot of exposure to the organization, it allows the development of someone while still keeping everything on the rails.

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MARK DONNOLO: Steve, in the metrics you showed us before, obviously the ultimate response from the customer is increased revenue – they buy more.

Were there other ways that you got responses from customers in terms of whether we’re actually improving our skills to work with them, and moving to more customer-centric selling?

STEVE YOUNG: At a company like Verizon or MCI, we had a large group that did that and spent a lot of money doing it, and got pretty consistent results. But we did an annual customer satisfaction survey. We did customer feedback meetings, we did loss reviews and really got a lot of feedback that way. Those were all good.

The best way to get it was face-to-face, one-on-one, where you had a trusted relationship with a customer and they really told you the truth. And they could say, “Steve you lost this one because you didn’t do X, Y, or Z.” That’s how you learn.

But you’ve got to have a customer-driven organization. Everybody knows that. You’ve got to listen to your customers. So the more often you can talk to them and be in front of them, the better off you are.

MO BUNNELL: I’ll tell a story about Ralph. Ralph is doing a fantastic job changing his sales organization from a very analytically driven organization to more relationship-based. They’re

getting their customers to move beyond considering them trusted advisors to becoming raving fans.

Think about it. He has to go into Wal-Mart and displace some SKUs in the front line, the cash register line, and move someone else’s candy out for his candy. Think of the analytics Wal-Mart is going to want to see around that. So they’ve been a real analytically driven sales organization for long time, and now they’re moving to be more relationship-based.

What’s interesting about what you asked before, about training versus coaching, is that I think a lot of companies think, “I either need to do training or I need to do coaching, and coaching is more expensive than training. Training is cheaper because you move a lot of people through in an assembly line fashion.” Well, what a lot of companies should do isn’t either/or, it’s both.

You start off with training, because very inexpensively you can move a lot of people through, and get them exposed to it. But then you follow that up with coaching so that the training isn’t a onetime event.

TSLF Member: They have to work in concert, because without the training, the coaching won’t work well; and if the coaching isn’t supporting the principles of training, then that’s not going to be very effective either.

TSLF Member 2: Have any of you ever tried mystery shopping before you’ve ever gone live in front of a potential client – from sales training into going live into the field? By mystery shopping I mean someone who is predestined to

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be a potential prospect, but currently is not a prospect.

We do that with our marketing

department. It’s helped us with the on-boarding process, sales school and then live into the field. We actually mystery shop and make some pre-set

appointments for them, so when they show up at a business they go through their four or five robotic steps that they’ve learned in sales school and the features and benefits of the

organization.

And then we get the feedback from the mystery shopper. Would they have bought or would they not have bought?

They test our price point, and other things and that’s worked out for us prior to letting them just go live into the field and make all those mistakes with potential prospects.

MARK DONNOLO: So they’re not doing it just in the classroom, where they’re pairing off and they’re selling to me, but taking it to the next level, the wading pool before we go out to the market.

STEVE YOUNG: That’s a very good idea.

It was always an issue I had. You want folks to do role playing so you make your mistakes in a safer environment.

I always use a lot of sports analogies and talk about professional football players. They get $8 million a year, and they walk through the plays hundreds of times before they run the play. And you’ve got a sales person who might be making $100,000 who’s reluctant to do a role model with a peer before they go out to call on a customer. So I like that,

because that is always a challenge for us.

MARK DONNOLO: I’ve heard it said that sales people don’t like to rehearse; they like to do things by gut. It’s kind of their cowboy nature. Look at the Olympics.

They have these ski jumpers; the guys and girls that go straight up. You see them beforehand and they’re kind of visualizing with their eyes closed and doing all the moves. As sales people, we might be better off if we did some of that. How is this really going to go? I’m just riding the crest as I get in there, and I don’t really know what I plan on doing in different situations. But visualization can be valuable.

EDDIE BIRCHFIELD: As I look at coaching, especially in organizations as large as yours, I assume there were a lot of levels between you and the people on the street. I have the vision, and I’m curious to see if you do too, that coaching is even more important for that first and second line sales person, as opposed to up the food chain.

Certainly coaching is important, but I think it could move your needle more by implementing coaching further down.

STEVE YOUNG: I agree with the concept.

Reality dictated otherwise for us.

Because we didn’t do that. We came from the top down.

The reality was, given the unproven nature of coaching, given limited resources and limited time, we felt we had to do it at a leadership level and then use the trickle-down theory. I agree with you. You’re probably going

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to get a lot out of that. But we couldn’t solve for that.

EDDIE BIRCHFIELD: But once it’s implemented. Do you think you get more benefit in that first and second line?

STEVE YOUNG: Yes, I do. And I think over time Verizon will get that as it gets down to the sales manager level and they start to build.

Part of coaches’ responsibility was to train the trainers and to teach a

manager how to coach. But, I shared my coaching experience. Most sales

managers aren’t really good at coaching. In fact, I’m sure you know from your organizations, most sales managers are good sales people who don’t know a thing about managing.

EDDIE BIRCHFIELD: My coaching was always, “Come on, Eddie. Let’s go close this deal.”

ERNIE RIDDLE: My sense is you have to do both. I know at Xerox, what gave the impetus there was this whole Malcolm Baldrige, Deming quality award. The company was being attacked pretty heavily by the Japanese back in the 80s, and there was a lot of major

transformation in the industry. Our CEO went to Japan and went through four months of Deming training by the man himself. Then he took the top 50 guys, and we spent literally two days a week for five or six months being trained by him. Cascaded through the whole organization. And a piece of that, which I had the responsibility for at the time, was in sales. And just like Steve’s charge

a moment ago, there are coaching needs at the manager level and the RVP level. And that largely was around how to institutionalize the concept of

coaching down in the sales organization.

It wasn’t how to do a deal and those kinds of things as much as it was, how do you institutionalize this? Make it part of the DNA so it becomes natural and you don’t have to think about what you’re going to do that day as it relates to coaching. It just becomes a natural impetus for you.

I’ve translated that to a couple smaller companies I’ve had and the same would be true. It’s not big formal programs.

You can’t afford all the institutional things you would normally have. It’s attitudinal. Coaching, in part, is

attitudinal. If you get the attitude right, then coaching can occur more naturally.

MARK DONNOLO: Let me take a quick poll here because we hear this question a lot. How much time do your front line sales managers spend, on average, actually coaching their sales people versus co-selling or doing other management issues?

TSLF Members: Ten percent.

DAVE SHARP: I’d say at least half their time.

My guys are spending half their time coaching. It could be one-on-one or it could be several; it doesn’t have to be one-on-one. But strategizing, talking about the deal and the approach and everything about how you handle this, how you handle that. Very much kind of

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an intimate thing, even though it doesn’t have to be one-on-one.

It’s a frustrating aspect about my job at the moment. I’ve only been there a few months, but the administrative stuff is beating me down. I’m learning the company, I’m meeting people, I’m doing a lot of things that are keeping me from coaching as much as I want to coach right now. I’m probably spending 20% of my time coaching right now, and I want to spend 50% of my time coaching.

Wherever you are in the organization I think you have to figure that balance out. But I really expect, of my time and my managers under me, to spend half their time coaching.

MARK DONNOLO: So when you look at the mangers under you, what do you see is the thing that is prohibiting them from spending that much time

coaching? Is it available time, or not being used to doing it or not knowing how to do it?

DAVE SHARP: I try to be really careful about this, but I think it’s the

administrative burden that the company places on them. It’s reporting, it’s

finance, it’s conference calls, it’s updating this person and that person.

That’s the biggest drain that I see out there.

I have my own call that I do with my guys an hour and a half a week. And it’s pretty widely attended. I just decided yesterday it’s going to be half an hour.

At least two days a month it’s going to be half an hour instead of an hour and a half. Why not? We’re going to be more

efficient and I’m going to give you an hour back to go do something that’s client facing or increasing your sales time.

MARK DONNOLO: So did one of your team members bring that to you?

DAVE SHARP: No. I’m sitting here seeing what a burden I have, and I’ll get better with that over time. But I thought, “I’m doing the same thing to my people.” So I’m going to lead by example.

TSLF Member: Is there ever a time when you can over-coach? For example, in our organization they say you’ve got to be in the deal with your representatives so many times a day, or for full days. Is there a point in time when you say, less time but more touch points? Or shorten the gap of those touch points? Is there a time you can over-coach?

CHRIS ROY: I think a sign of a good coach is when they can relinquish some control. You can programmatically manage everyone the same way, and that may work for a period of time. But if you’re developing your people, by definition you’re going to have some of them that take coaching better than others, and they’re not going to need that sort of touch all the time; at least, not equally distributed. You can have people at different points in their career; you’re going to have people in the organization that are there to develop a skill and they may be a little bit out of position.

But there are some in my group that I can go a month without speaking to –

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and I tend to not do that – but there are some that I talk to twice a week.

STEVE YOUNG: We actually did a sales-time study; we found coaching was 9%

of their time. We found that they spent more time on administrative tasks than they did on selling tasks. I knew that, but we needed the data to convince some of the operations people to change some of the order processes.

MARK DONNOLO: What would you said is the right number?

STEVE YOUNG: I’ve heard 30%.

MARK DONNOLO: We’ve see it in the 40% range. And it goes to that old adage that the best sales people are not the best sales managers. What makes somebody a good hunter or somebody who’s very left-brained doesn’t make them a good right-brained creative sales manager. There’s a whole new set of skills to be learned. What they’ve been measured on for decades, they’re no longer measured on. They’re measured on something different. They get used to that behavior, going out and selling, and maybe they don’t make that transition to coaching,

MO BUNNELL: I like your 40% number. I think a couple things get in the way.

One is ego on the sales manager’s part.

I think a lot of sales managers we see train their people to come to them with all kinds of issues, because they feel important. In reality they need to push a lot of those issues down so that they can free up time for coaching. I think that’s issue one.

I think issue two is: we say coaching is important, but how much time do we spend training our sales managers to be coaches? There are behavioral

techniques to learn, and there are specific four-step processes to learn how to coach, what to look for. Most companies don’t do that.

I think those two things get in the way.

They don’t know how to do it and they feel better handling administrative stuff because they feel important. And then day over day over day they say they

They don’t know how to do it and they feel better handling administrative stuff because they feel important. And then day over day over day they say they