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| Inside View |
September 15th 1998 |
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In this issue:
Book Review |
Sales Disaster Recovery Have you ever had your sales target adjusted down? For sales people it’s a rare occurrence. If you are a sales manager, you have more chance of getting an XJ8 for your next company car. According to Pareto’s law, 20% of sales people win 80% of the business. Is it true for your team? Most sales managers I ask confirm it. If Pareto’s law predicts your team’s results, two out of every ten win 4/5ths of the business! The two live well. The rest worry a lot. What happens when one or more of your top people get a better offer? Finding replacements for unexpected departures makes a mess of your schedule. A friend, who recently suffered this misfortune, related his experience to me. After five weeks of taking calls from recruitment consultants, he interviewed a credible replacement. Unfortunately, as is often the case with the best people, this candidate had multiple offers to consider and accepted another. After eight weeks my friend got an offer accepted. The new sales person started four weeks later. He was a fast learner and quickly started re-building a pipeline of opportunities. My friend was lucky. Recovering the status quo set him back only four months. During the time it takes to hire a replacement, who will step in to prevent the loss of business already in the pipeline? Even when the exiting sales person conducts a professional hand-over, it is difficult for their stand-in to grasp the nuances of competitive situations. If you, as the sales manager, must take over, you get a double hit on your workload - the business in process plus finding a replacement. If it hasn’t happened to you yet, prepare for it. Your toast is bound to land butter side down sooner or later. When it happened to me lady lucky smiled. Someone I had wanted to hire for a while decided to join us, just at the right time. Even then a corporate headcount freeze almost frustrated his appointment. I have known sales managers to miss their target by a wide margin when this kind of challenge arises. Excuses don’t help pay the mortgage. Banks have disaster recovery strategies for key dependencies, buildings and IT. Should sales managers have contingency plans for the loss or transfer of key sales people? What form could a disaster recovery plan take? A partial answer is to keep tabs on suitable replacements for key people. What did you do with the CV’s of the candidates you almost hired, during your last recruitment campaign? Another idea is succession planning. Identify what sets your top people apart and teach it to the others. If losing key people is not enough of a hazard, sales managers must face the reality of product price and value. You always have the best product and a competitive price, don’t you? If you can answer yes to this question, long may you continue to enjoy the advantage. When this happy situation changes many of your sales people will turn to you for help, or worse, look for another employer whose proposition is more favourable. Their lifestyle, established in the good times, is threatened. Most don’t know how to compete with an inferior product or price. A comprehensive disaster recovery plan should address this eventuality. We can learn from the training disciplines of the professionals - the armed services. Field exercises; mock battles and computer simulations are their daily fair. You might consider running a simulation or business game to see how your sales people would cope in adverse conditions. Some will create solutions. Others will use what has worked elsewhere. Carefully designed competitive sales simulations reveal unexpected weaknesses and hidden strengths. On top of this, participants learn from each other. Business games, that reflect the characteristics of your circumstances, offer the greatest learning potential. If you have people with time, creative talent and sales understanding, you can develop simulations in house. You will probably find it is more cost effective to hire a consultant with the right experience. Those who have designed and facilitated such events for others will be able to adapt previous work. If you are currently in a trough or suffering from the recent departure of key people, the suggestions here may offer scant remedy. They all require forethought and planning. What can you do when you are already in the pit and every option is tainted with negative impact? A marketing friend at Microsoft once gave me some very good advice. "Get back to the basics." The really good thing about this advice is that you can interpret it in your own way. It might mean a review of objectives and priorities or conducting a SWOC - Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Challenges. To think outside the box, get outside the box. Distance yourself from the problems. Become your own management consultant. It is easy to lose sight of fundamental principles. Backtracking to the roots of our training and understanding can yield fresh clarity and new ideas. If you still can’t see any way out, now is the time to dig deep into the coffers and ask for the help of a good consultant. It’s true, consultants read your watch and tell you the time. Have you ever chastised yourself when someone else suggests an obvious solution that you had missed? Sometimes we are just too close to our own problems to recognise the way forward. First published in Sales Director, Sept 1998 Make it their Idea I will start this months idea with an obscure quote. "Great speakers throw ideas into the air, great questioners plant ideas in peoples minds." The best ideas are always your own. How can you make your idea your prospects? Subtle use of the rhetorical question, is the answer. Have you ever expressed a great idea and been frustrated by another's failure to hear it? You may also have experienced your ideas being stolen. Sometimes even in the same conversation. Has this happened to you? If it has, congratulations. You already know how to seed an idea in another's mind. Let's consider a sales example. You want to get a prospect to borrow your product and become committed to buying it through using it for real work - a.k.a. the puppy dog close. If your prospect suggests it you have much more chance of the strategy working than if you suggest it. Try employing the rhetorical question: "I suppose if you had it here for just a month, you could solve that problem." The problem being a real difficulty or challenge your prospect is facing. Don't pause for an answer, carry on with the conversation. Next comes the hard part, patience. You must give the seeded idea time to germinate. One final caveat. When your prospect proposes your idea, as if it were theirs, refrain from exclaiming "that was my idea."
The Circle of Innovation "Distance is dead" says Tom Peters, alluding to the revolutionary things the web has done to traditional communication and boundaries. This is one of the many provocative ideas Tom pounds us with. Have you been to a Tom Peters seminar or listened to his tapes? More than his other books, Circle of innovation reads like he speaks. It does an excellent job of shaking one out of complacency. Change is not enough. Better than last year is not enough. Continuous paranoia, risk and revolution are the ingredients for sustained great performance. This is the message, supported as ever, by well researched examples, histories and studies. Not a conservative diet. ISBN 0 340 71720 3
Articles by Clive Miller |
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