The Management Curve

From a simple Google search of sales technology keywords such as CRM, Sales Force Automation and Sales Performance Management, one would think that sales technology is taking over the world.  There are dozens upon dozens of companies competing for the technology sale.  From internet based programs designed for individual salespeople and small sales teams to mega systems designed for the largest organizations in the world, anyone considering the purchase of a system is faced with a maze of choices.

Naturally, any field that has the volume of activity as sales technology is going to attract attention from academics–and sales technology has certainly attracted its share.  Another Google search of keywords relating to research on sales technology generates a gross number of about 350,000 hits.  Although a large number of these hits are ancillary to sales technology research, a fair number are directly related to the topic.

Unfortunately, few address the most critical question—does sales technology improve the sales or sales management process?

To date, the study of sales technology has been primarily relegated to how well the technology has been accepted within the sales force.  There have been studies at Penn State, a study published in the Journal of Business Research, and others.

However, little has been done in studying what impact the technology has on sales performance.  A paper in the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management and reprinted at Allbusiness.com seeks to analyze the impact CRM technology has had on sales performance, but as the authors admit, a great deal of further study is needed.

Yet, within this single paper are indications of both the potential value and the potential pitfalls of sales technology.  The study found that there is a point of diminishing returns to the use of CRM technology.  Salespeople who ‘underused’ and those who ‘overused’ the technology experienced reduced sales while those who were ‘optimum’ users experienced an increase in sales performance and sales.  Unfortunately, there wasn’t a uniform standard for the optimum usage.  Each company must determine the optimum usage point for themselves—meaning investing a great deal of time and energy into monitoring and training.

Additional studies are underway to examine the real world impact of CRM and SPM systems.  Currently, companies must rely on anecdotal tales or their own biased experience to determine the value—or lack thereof—of the technology.  It will be very interesting to see the additional data as it become available.

Yet, even without the additional studies, I believe the study referenced above is a strong indication that sales technology if implemented properly will have a very positive impact on salespeople, managers, and companies.  The key is the proper implementation, meaning not just training salespeople and managers on the ‘how’ to use the system, but more importantly, what to do with the information the system produces—and that seems to be the single biggest hurdle to determining whether an investment was wise or whether the company simply has an expensive new toy

Do you require your salespeople to compile a daily or weekly call report?  If you’re like the vast majority of managers, you do.

What do you use them for?

How useful are they?

I’ve spoken with hundreds of managers about call reports and almost to a person they agree call reports are one of the most useless traditions management clings to.  The reports are filled with fictitious information, and the information that is truthful is itself useless.

The typical call report will identify who the salesperson met with, if and when the company plans to make a purchase, an estimate of the size of the purchase, and any information the buyer wants from the salesperson.  The report may even give an approximation of the likelihood of securing the contract.  It probably looks something like this:

Met with John Smith, head of procurement for XYZ Corp.  He said they’d be
purchasing by the end of the quarter and wants me to re-bid based on a quantity
of 5,000 instead of 10,000 units.  I told him I’ve had the new numbers to him by
Tuesday of next week.

What does this report tell the manager?  Does it:
•    indicate why the change in the number of units to be purchased?
•    discuss why the purchase decision will be made by the end of the quarter instead of now?  No.
•    indicate the likelihood of closing the sale?  No.
•    indicate what actions the salesperson plans on taking other than giving revised numbers?  No.
•    indicate who the salesperson is competing against?  No.
•    indicate if there are other decision makers in the process?  No.

We could go on.

The Problem
Call reports are useless for three major reasons:
1.    Salespeople haven’t been taught how to construct a useful call report.
2.    Salespeople see no use in the reports.  Although they’re told the reports will be used to help them sell more, they believe its real purpose is to keep an eye on them.
3.    They believe management is only interested in how many appointments they have, so they pad them with fictitious appointments to keep management off their back.

Salespeople see call reports as a weapon—or potential weapon–in the hands of management instead of a training and coaching tool.  And most often, that’s what it’s used for.

The typical call report doesn’t give the manager enough information to be able to help identify the areas in which a salesperson needs training and coaching.  Consequently, the most often result of submitting a call report is a response of “You aren’t seeing enough people.  You need to make more calls.”

That response is worthless.  It doesn’t help the salesperson in the least.  There is no guidance in how to ‘see more people.’  There’s no identification of what the real root problems and issues are.

Call Reports as Real Tools
Call reports, however, can be real tools managers can use for coaching, training, market and competitor analysis, and managing department assets.

The problem with call reports isn’t with the concept, it’s with the execution.  Salespeople must be taught how to construct a meaningful call report and managers must be trained how to analyze the report for coaching, training, and market analysis purposes.

A Meaningful Call Report
Call reports don’t have to be massive documents, but each call should be broken into three sections:

Synopsis of the call: a brief summary of the sales call.  Who, what, when, bullet points of key information from the call, including the length of the call.

An analysis of the call: a longer discussion that analyzes the call and the sale, indicating:
•    who the decision makers are and where the sale stands with each
•    what issues must be dealt with before the sale can be closed
•    who the competition is
•    the salesperson’s best estimate of the probability of closing the sale
•    the salesperson should rate each potential prospect as to the long-term value of the account

Moving forward: What specific steps the salesperson intends to take—and when—to move the sale forward.

A call report that follows the format above can be used to help salespeople close more sales.  It lays out for the salesperson and the manager what happened, where the sale stands, what is expected to happen, and what the salesperson is going to do to make it happen.

Using the Report
Call reports that summarize, analyze and outline how the salesperson will move the sale forward offer both the salesperson and their manager real information that can be used:

•    To spot skill and behavioral issues where the manager can step in to coach and train
•    Opportunities where the manager can offer specific help in identifying and addressing prospect needs
•    Spot accounts where the salesperson is investing too much—or not enough—time and energy
•    Spot buyer, competitor, and product trends within the local market

Some sales performance management technology products and CRM programs make the call report generation process easier and more accurate.  They can help turn generating call reports into highly useful tools for helping your sales team members become better sellers, spotting and analyzing changes in your local market, and maximizing both the department’s human and non-human resources.

Whether you are using hand written reports or using a system, you must turn the reports from wasted effort to keep management off the salesperson’s back into a real tool that can improve sales and your salespeople.

How many thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of dollars a year does your company waste on useless sales training?  No, I’m not suggesting that sales training is useless.  I’m suggesting that the way most companies approach sales training is wasteful in terms of time, money, and energy for both the company and the sales team members.

Sales training is typically a herd activity.  Someone—VP of Sales, head of training, or a regional, district or branch manager decides that X training is needed.  They either have the training department develop a training program or hire an outside training company to address the issue and then schedule a training session.  On the day or days of the scheduled training, everyone comes out of the field to attend—mandatory, you know.  So, for one, two, maybe even three days no one is out selling.  Lost sales opportunities and revenue for those days, and of course, there are the expenses for travel, meals, possibly hotel rooms.  The expenses alone can mount into the tens of thousands.

A small one-day training session for a region of say 18 reps can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000 or more depending upon the training company fee and the travel expenses for trainer and attendees.  That’s anywhere from $550 to $1,400 or more per salesperson.

That, however, is the least of the problems.  A far more serious problem is that all of the salespeople are being treated as though they all had the same training needs.  They don’t.  Those individuals who don’t need the particular training are taken out of the field and required to attend, just as those who do need the training.  Now, the company not only has lost production and the expense of training individuals who don’t need the training, they also have salespeople who resent being forced to take time out of selling to attend a session they shouldn’t be attending.

But the most serious problem of all is that those salespeople who shouldn’t be attending are not getting the training they do need.  Most companies hold mass training sessions only a few times a year—often only once or twice.  If the training offered fits the needs of an individual salesperson, great.  If not, well, maybe next year we’ll have something for you.

Why is training a herd activity instead of geared toward the needs of specific individuals?  Primarily because companies have not been able to determine who needs the training and who doesn’t.  They haven’t had the ability to pinpoint the needs of individual salespeople and develop programs to address them on an individual basis.

Secondly, sales training has traditionally been sold as a herd activity.  Many of the most popular training companies are designed to do mass training, not to work with individuals on a one-to-one or small group basis.  Many training companies are guilty of encouraging training waste by selling their services based on the assumption that the company wants to maximize the use of training dollars so they encourage the company to have everyone participate whether they need it or not.

And thirdly, as mentioned above, the company seeks to ‘maximize’ their training dollars, so the whole herd is to attend to squeeze every dime’s worth of training out of the training company’s fee.

As the use of sales technology that gathers a great deal of data on the activities and behavior of individual salespeople increases, the way sales training is delivered and consumed by companies will change.  Managers will be able to pinpoint the real needs of individual salespeople and to develop programs either through the training department or with outside training and coaching companies, to work with their salespeople one-on-one or in very small groups to address their specific needs and issues.

The company may still spend the same $10,000 or more, but instead of a single day mass training session on a single issue presented by a single company, those dollars will be used to address multiple issues and very possibly through multiple vendors.

Some companies are using this model today and experiencing far greater benefits than they experienced through the mass cattle call training of the past.  Their salespeople are performing at a higher level, managers no longer have entire sales forces out of the field at the same time, and companies are finally squeezing every dime’s worth of training out of their training dollars.

Yet, to be able to create highly targeted training, managers and companies must understand the needs of their sales team members far better than most do today.  They must have real information that reveals the real underlying issues of individual team members.   Sales metrics technology if used correctly can keep salespeople in the field selling, give salespeople the real help they need, while saving the company thousands of dollars due to lost sales and wasted training.

The writers on the site and many enlightened practitioners see the gold in sales activity/outcome data and sales metrics, yet there use isn’t widely adopted in the field. I wonder if part of the problem is a lack of overall sales management models to provide a framework? If we contrast the situation with our friends in marketing, they have plenty of frameworks and models: The 4P’s, 6P’s, SWOT, Product Lifecycle, and PEST to name a few; and these frameworks often act as the basis for the development of performance metrics.

When I became interested in sales management, I started by reading a number of books with Sales Management in their titles, and became aware that they had plenty of content on the softer issues; recruitment, training, sales meetings, but I have not come across any references to sales management models or the quantative side of sales management. The problem goes as far as an agreed standard definition for sales management. If you visit the sites of the various vendors for CRM and SFA, they all claim to offer ‘Sales Management’ and freely list what they include; yet in my opinion, very few or any of the things listed are part of sales management. We should also consider the use of other widely used words in sales management such as quantity and quality, often used to describe mutual independent events, which in one context they can be but in others they are linked.  Why would sales be the only profession where more practice (quantity) would not lead to better outcomes (quality), unless of course you are selling something that addresses only one?

Why are the model/frameworks important? Without the development of such models and frameworks, I believe we will struggle with both technology for sales and metrics. As the old adage says, if you do not know where you are going any road, or should I say any new tool or idea, will get you there!!!

I am not sure what comes first -  the model or the data? Do we need to start as with our friends in marketing with models and then collect the data to prove the models and from there a set of meaningful metrics? I suggest that it does not make a difference, rather the important thing is to start.

Flip through some random job descriptions for frontline sales managers on CareerBuilder or Monster.  Take a look at the job descriptions for frontline sales managers from a number of industries.  Look closely at the responsibilities and duties the manager is expected to handle.  What do you find?

The Job Duties
If you’ll take the time to look at least a dozen—preferably more—you’ll find a whole slew of duties that frontline managers are expected to perform such as:
•    Recruiting and hiring salespeople–and often clerical staff
•    Training, coaching and mentoring those people
•    Resolving customer issues
•    Coordinating and working with other departments such as shipping, manufacturing, underwriting, finance, etc.
•    Monitoring the local market and competition and keeping management informed of market changes and opportunities
•    Creating and implementing a local sales and marketing plan
•    P&L responsibility for the local office or branch
•    Conduct sales and training meetings
•    Complete reports for management on a weekly, monthly and annual basis
•    Create annual office or branch budget
•    Create monthly and annual sales projections
•    Operate as company’s ambassador to the community by attending community events and maintaining a high visibility in the community
•    Other duties as assigned

And then the kicker:
•    Maintain a high level of personal sales activity and personal production

The first dozen responsibilities listed above are management activities that are—or should be—critical to the growth and profitability of the company.  Most of these activities require someone with strong management, problem solving, and analytical skills.  To properly perform these activities, the individual must have a frame of reference to resolve customer issues, to develop sales and marketing plans, to maximize the return on assets, to properly analyze the local market and competition, and especially, to recruit, train and mentor salespeople.

Only the last item is a purely in-the-trenches sales activity related item.  Yet, as anyone who has been in sales understands, to meet that requirement of ‘maintain a high level of personal sales,” selling must be a full-time job.

The Requirements For The Job
Go further into the job description and you find the ‘requirements’ section, describing the background and experience this individual must have to be considered for the job.  Most typically, that description includes these items:
•    3-5 years direct industry sales experience
•    Proven high level of production, meeting or exceeding quota
•    Strong product knowledge
•    Proven industry contacts and book of business

What’s missing in the requirements for this position?  Of course, not a single word about management skills, aptitude, training or ability.

And how is this individual typically paid?  Usually some combination of base salary, commissions and overrides, or worse, overrides and commissions.

Does It Make Sense?
The above list of responsibilities was gathered from a number of job postings from a number of industries including retail, banking, insurance, securities, medical, software, chemical, consulting, and others.  Most of these job postings listed a majority of the above requirements including the personal production requirement.

Although traditional in many industries, does this combination of duties make sense?  If it does:
•    why are so many offices in these industries poorly run?
•    Why the constant harping by senior management for the offices to keep costs down?
•    Why complaints by marketing that leads aren’t being followed up?
•    Why the complaints by manufacturing and shipping that didn’t know certain things about various orders?
•    Why are commission checks so often wrong?
•    Why is the training and coaching in these companies so poor?
•    Why are so many poor hiring decisions made by the company’s sales managers?

The list could go on.

The reason of course is obvious.  The company didn’t hire a manager, they hired a salesperson to try to keep the herd in line and hopefully end up with the sales numbers the company wanted—and that sales manager is expected to make sure they do through his or her personal sales.

Sales management as so often practiced today is hardly deserving of the term.  And despite the onus being placed on the sales manager by the company, the problem doesn’t lie with the sales manager.  Typically, the company got exactly what they wanted—a top salesperson willing to assume responsibility they haven’t been prepared for in exchange for a title.

Can Companies Afford to Continue This Way?
For most companies, selling is becoming a bigger and bigger challenge.  Competition is fierce, their products are most often indistinguishable from their competitor’s, their markets are becoming more fragmented, their prospects are better educated and more demanding than ever before.

Management as a sideline, although traditional in a great number of industries, is costing companies billions of dollars every year in lost opportunities, bad hires, poor local market decisions, lack of resource utilization and lost sales.

In a complex world with razor sharp competition and astute prospects who often know more than the people trying to sell to them, companies can no longer afford to use management positions as rewards for past production.  Frontline managers are increasingly becoming the focal point of a company’s success or failure.

Many companies have already begun to change their management philosophy and have eliminated the selling manager position and have replaced them with full-time, qualified, and trained managers.  To this end, they have instituted manager training and coaching programs hiring outside companies and coaches to work with their new and existing management staff.

Take Action Now
If you are in a producing manager role, hire a sales management coach to help you prepare for the realities of the changing environment you are entering.  Those items within your job description that haven’t been emphasized in the past are becoming increasingly important.

If you’re a senior manager, consider whether a producing manager is really worth the lost revenue and lost opportunities.  Your company’s selling environment isn’t going to get easier.

Alan Timothy of i-Snapshot posted a comment to “Is CRM a Failure” that addresses one of the key issues that must be addressed by any company thinking about instituting any technology: can it meet the needs of all of the departments and users who will be using it or they would like to use it?

Will a single system work for customer service, marketing, sales, and maybe even payroll, accounting, shipping and scheduling? It would have to be a system that integrated the specific needs of all of these departments and could track customers, marketing metrics, sales metrics, commissions and payroll, manufacturing and shipping needs and schedules, and more.

As Alan points out in his commentary on the post, asking a system to perform all of those activities isn’t realistic. Yet, in many instances, companies are asking their systems to perform a good many of these activities. Usually, the result is dissatisfaction with the system because it can’t do what it wasn’t designed to do.

The concept of a sales department specific system is still relatively new. The how, why and what of the system is still a question that most companies have either not addressed or have not fully answered. Moreover, product developers have addressed the question in many different ways with different focuses and objectives. And, naturally, there are still a good number of companies trying to shoehorn every department and every need into a single system, hoping to save money by doing so.

Over the coming days, weeks and months, hopefully we can address the issue not only from a perspective of whether or not a single system can handle the needs of the sales department, but is the investment in sales tracking and metrics worth it? What real value can companies realize from instituting a sales specific system? What impact—good, bad, indifferent—would the system have on the salespeople, the management staff, and the company?

These are not easy questions to answer, and certainly, there isn’t a single answer. But the answers are vital not just to the company but to the salespeople and managers whose lives and careers will be fundamentally affected by how their company answers these questions.

For us in sales and sales management, these aren’t academic questions. Sales technology is going to have a tremendous impact on what we do, how we do it, and even whether or not we are successful at doing it. For many at this point, the issues may seem distant or even non-existent. For others, it evokes images of George Orwell and Big Brother. Others may see it as much ado about nothing, lots of noise about something that is more a toy than something that will have serious implications for them personally.

There isn’t a single universal system that will answer all of the needs of every department. Trying to force systems to perform functions outside its intended scope is ultimately self-defeating for the company. Now, what does the sales department do about it and how will their decisions impact you?

Sales metrics—hated and loathed by salespeople, and often for good reason.

In many companies (most?), the bit of metrics data the sales manager and company get on their sales team members is used only for the purpose of harassing, browbeating, and threatening the salespeople.

Call reports turn into demands for the salesperson to make more calls.  Commission reports are used to highlight weak sales and demand more calls.  Pipeline reports are used to demonstrate a lack of activity and to demand more calls.

So what happens to the call and pipeline reports?  They get padded.  Salespeople have learned that if you’re just going to use it as a bat to beat them with, they’re not going to cut the tree down for you.

With the ‘metrics’ available to managers from the traditional call, pipeline, customer status, and commission reports it is very difficult to isolate the root issues a salesperson has.  It can be done.  It takes study, practice and well developed analytical skills and real knowledge of the salesperson involved.

Unfortunately, that’s a lot of work.  So, many managers take the easy way out—take a quick look, determine the root cause is not enough calls and demand more.  It makes no difference if call quantity is an issue or not.  It makes little difference if the salesperson has been properly trained in prospecting and personal marketing strategies.  It makes no difference if the real issue is their interpersonal skills, their communication skills, their presentation skills, or their ability to probe, identify and solve prospect issues.  The answer is usually the same—make more calls.

Since the salesperson sees no benefit from developing accurate reports—but certainly sees a very real determent, is it any wonder the reports are fanciful?

Now, what happens when the company institutes an automated system and demands compliance to faithfully use the system?  Resistance, of course.  From the salesperson’s point of view, all the automated system is going to do is give the manager and the company a bigger bat to beat them with.

Yet, salespeople can be taught to relish sales metrics.  Certainly not by using the data the way it’s been used in the past, but by using it to proactively help the salesperson make more money.

The information gathered by an automated system—in fact, even that puff of information generated by traditional reports—can literally change a salesperson’s career if used properly.  Even a reasonable handful of accurate data can pinpoint real issues and real root problems that hinder a salesperson’s performance.  The data in the hands of someone who has been properly trained to analyze the information can be used to create an individualized training and coaching program for each team member.

If salespeople understand the information makes them money through pinpoint training and coaching, improving their skills, getting them to comply with using the system and producing accurate data—even a handwritten or very basic spreadsheet system—isn’t an issue.  Most salespeople want to sell more.  They want to earn more.  They want to excel.  But those same salespeople have no desire to be consistently beaten over the head.

If you want accurate reports from your salespeople, think seriously about why you want them and exactly what you’re going to do with them.  If can’t or won’t use them to help your salespeople become better salespeople, don’t even bother to ask for them because what you get will be designed to keep you off their back as long as possible.

On the other hand, if you’re goal is to help your team become the best salespeople they can be and to grow your team’s sales, communicate to your team in no uncertain terms what the purpose of the reports is and then stick to it—use them as training and mentoring tools, not bats.  It will take some time to get the response you desire because salespeople have been taught—either at your company or by a previous manager—that metrics aren’t to be trusted.

If you or your managers need help in learning how to thoroughly analyze and use the reports as training and coaching tools, hire a company such as McCord Training or any of the other consulting and coaching companies that specialize in the area.  But whether you need outside help or not, you can have salespeople who welcome sales metrics—and the side benefit is the reports you have in your hand will actually have some relationship to reality.

For most sales managers, data isn’t a gold mine of opportunity—it’s a quagmire of senseless boredom and useless numbers signifying nothing—with one exception, of course, that bottom-line sales number.

Managers who are not working with sales metrics technology have access to a fair amount of data that can help them manage and coach their sales teams more effectively.  Although call reports, pipeline reports, customer status reports, and commission reports are far from ideal in terms of compiling specific data on the sales team and individual team members, these reports can if used correctly reveal a substantial amount of data about the health and activities of the team and individual team members.

Those managers who are fortunate enough to have a metrics collection system designed to generate a great deal of information about their team and individual member’s sales activities, behavior and results have enormous amounts of specific data that can quickly change the performance of their teams and their salespeople.  This data can pinpoint specific coaching and training needs of individuals, reveal new sales opportunities, new prospects, new markets, uncover competitor weaknesses and tendencies, and a great deal of other information that can give the manager and the company competitive advantage and improve the performance of the team members.

Yet, whether or not they are using sales metrics technology or not, sales managers typically focus on one thing only—what their paycheck is based on, the final sales numbers.  If it doesn’t concern their income, there isn’t much attention paid to it.  And why should there be?  Their compensation plan tells them what their job is, what’s important to both them and the company—sales, and more specifically, sales today, this week, this month, this year.

What does this mean for companies who have or are instituting a sales metrics system that generates a great deal of real sales metrics?
1.    Companies must invest in training their managers how to analyze and capitalize on the data the system produces.
2.    Companies must realign the manager’s compensation plan to emphasize all aspects of their responsibilities, not just the bottom-line sales number.
3.    Companies must invest in the training and coaching of their salespeople.  All the data in the world is useless unless the company is willing to take steps to help the salesperson obtain the training and coaching needed to correct and improve skills.
4.    Managers must expand their thinking about what their responsibilities are and seek out specific training and coaching on their own.  No longer can managers take the financial and market analysis responsibilities contained in their job description lightly, nor can they continue to sidestep the advanced coaching and training responsibilities of their position.  To prepare themselves for performing these activities, managers will have to invest in their training just as their salespeople must invest in theirs.
5.    Companies must reexamine whom they promote into management.  No longer will they be able to use a promotion into management as a reward for high sales numbers.  Promotions will have to be based on management potential, not sales ability.

Companies who want to successfully use sales metrics technology will have to take steps to ensure the systems work to their fullest potential and for most companies that means radical changes in how their managers manage, how they are compensated, how they are selected, and how they are trained.

If technology is to change the way an organization manages the sales function, and how it interacts with customers, the technology has to work—otherwise it is both a wasted investment and poses the danger of becoming a detriment to both sales and customer service.

At this point, CRM is used in far more companies than Sales Performance Management or Sales Force Automation technology, which are technologies that typically integrate into the company’s CRM program. Since these programs are most often dependent upon the CRM program as its starting place, whether or not CRM is working is of critical importance as to whether the SPM or SFA program is working as it should.

There are indications that CRM is not doing its job in well over 50% of the companies it has been installed in. And, as you can imagine, the problem doesn’t lie with the technology.

Susanne Obermire on her blog cites a resent article in DM News that indicates that 45% of the companies who have a CRM program believe the program is not effective enough, only 15% of the companies rated themselves ‘extremely good’ at integrating data, and 50% didn’t even have a strategy to utilize the program.

If we assume that 70% of the companies that claim to have a strategy in place to utilize their program are adequate or better at utilizing the system (undoubtedly an extremely aggressive percentage), that leaves 65% of all companies who have invested in the technology with systems that are not getting a reasonable return on their investment.

Furthermore, for those companies who have added an SPM or SFA component to their system, those program’s performance is being negatively impacted by the CRM’s underutilization. Now those companies have two enormous investments that are draining resources from the company.

A corollary to the discussion is found in a CRMA Roundtable discussion held in 2005. During that discussion, Paul Greenberg cited a Strativity study from 2004 of 212 executives regarding their interest in adding a Customer Experience Management (CEM) component to their CRM system. The study found that 58% of the executives surveyed indicated that their companies didn’t deserve to retain their customers and only 31% of executives indicated they even had a commitment to their customers.

The failure of CRM isn’t about the technology. The primary issues are within the companies themselves who purchase the product without having a clear vision of its purpose, how it will be used, what it can and cannot do, and whether the company even cares whether it accomplishes its intended goal.

Before making the investment, companies need to sit down and develop a comprehensive plan of why they are acquiring the system, exactly what it will accomplish for the company, how the system will be introduced to the company and its customers, and how they will train their management, marketing, customer service, and sales staff on how to use the technology. The product developer will be more than happy to help create an overview strategy and to train staff on how to technically use the product. But companies must go beyond that basic strategy and basic tech training—they must bring in outside consultants and trainers if needed to make sure the product is fully integrated with the company’s sales and customer service philosophy, that users understand the ‘what’s in it for me,’ and that managers are thoroughly trained on how to utilize the data the programs generate.

Technology can help transform a company. But without a well thought out plan, thorough training of management and staff, and getting by-in by the users of the system, the technology can do just as much damage as it can good.

Contributer: Patrick Stakenas, President and CEO, ForceLogix Inc.

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There are many challenges to selling, and even more challenges to managing the people who sell, and even greater challenges to managing the people who manage the people who sell. Companies that recognize these challenges and that have taken the steps to truly get their sales teams engaged are typically the companies with higher sales, greater profits, lower turnover and high morale.

The sad comedy of the situation however, is that many senior level operational executives, chief sales officers and sales vice presidents are painfully unaware of the lack of engagement their sales teams have - often leading to their own demise.

It is up to senior management to take aggressive moves within their organizations to engage or re-engage their selling teams. As management teams get together each week and scratch their collective heads to try to figure out what to do next to generate more sales, they need to start with understanding what is happening at the ground level.

As an past executive for several large corporations, I can detail firsthand the would be engagement efforts senior management required each and every quarter, which by the way, was far from ground level. In fact, it was just the opposite. They typically began with communicating the results of recent performance and then continued with the ensuing message of vision, posterity and guidance. Board speeches were most often far from electric, and then the trickle down of the messaging would begin: CEO to senior management; senior management to middle management; middle management to sales; or even worse - the dreaded company meeting where each senior level executive gets up and spreads the word of company.

Engaging the sales team is greater than a speech or presentation illuminating the sales contributions from the prior period, whether they are good or bad. Engaging the sales team requires management to have information, field level information that illustrates the health of the sales team, the understanding the sales team has of the corporate vision. Are the marketing messages being delivered as you had imagined them? Is product knowledge sound? Is the sales methodology being followed?

Understanding this ground level information provides the insight and power necessary to fully engage with the team, and with field sales management. Meaningful daily coaching can occur on the topics that matter the most in driving revenue. A common vernacular arrives just in time to help deliver the marketing message or corporate vision, and sales people will buy in as they feel the sense of understanding from senior management and they know what they do drives the business.

What we are really talking about is affecting and managing behavior, which is typically not captured or tracked. This is a process that cannot be done with technology alone. Sales people get engaged through the human element of being coached daily and real time communication of the knowledge they need. Often companies will try to take the short cut and go directly to their existing systems like business intelligence or CRM to try to manage this process, but inherently behavior cannot be captured, tracked and acted on within a spreadsheet.

McKenzie Consulting, a leading research firm focused on sales effectiveness, has indicated that engaging and coaching has proven to deliver the fastest and most effective sales improvements, amongst the arsenal of tools Sales Managers have, driving their sales team’s production consistently upward. “Effective coaching works with Sales Executives to develop their proficiency in selling capacities and planning and increase their individual sales productivity.

Sales Performance Coaching creates awareness, purpose, competence and well being amongst participants. Top Sales Producers use one on one coaching as a means of helping them achieve their own personal and sales goals and strategise their up-coming sales approaches.”

The process to engage sales people must be ongoing, living, evolving and organic. It must have structure to make it simple for field level managers to better understand, and technology must be infused into the process to allow for tracking, measurement and data comprehension.

Patrick Stakenas, President and CEO, ForceLogix Inc.