“The most important thing we do as coaches is communicate. If you can’t get your message across or hear what the athletes are saying, I don’t think it works.” – Bob Bowman, coach for Michael Phelps, winner of eight Olympic Gold Medals, Beijing.

Mary meets Jack to discuss his sales performance. They dissect his previous month’s results and discover that, for the third month in a row, Jack has missed performance expectations relating to both sales numbers and required activity, and that he has failed to “do what he said he would do”. They look forward and choose key actions. Jack makes a new commitment, cognizant now of the consequences of failure. In Mary-s opinion, the meeting went well.

Fast-forward two weeks. Jack submits his resignation. In his exit interview he claims that Mary didn’t support him.

Sales Managers like Mary address the poor performance of salespeople daily. In most sales environments, performance is easily assessed: you made your sales target or you didn’t. Often, the feedback is instantaneous. This transparency and the relative ease of assessment of results, enables Sales Managers to confront performance issues swiftly.

In Jack’s case, Mary acted as so many Sales Managers do, jumping on the gap in performance with helpful coaching. But what was the specific nature of the coaching that was delivered?

The blog is in French, but feel free to contact us if you have any questions! Here is the link:

http://martinmcnicoll.blogspot.com/2007/08/de-nouvelles-applications-en-mode-saas.html

Many business executives have questioned why their sales organizations have not been able to produce the results desired. Traditionally, the executive turns his/her attention towards the salespeople, wonder­ing whether or not they are properly trained, motivated, incited, etc. My experience, based on working with over 5,000 business-to-business sales forces, tells me that the culprit, more often than not, is the sales process that the organization is using.

It is a little known fact that the first documented sales training manual was written in 1873 by the founder of NCR, John H. Patterson. Patterson trained his salespeople to use a process that has become the de facto sales process for all business-to-business sales forces. Ironically, the process has not changed since 1873. The purpose of this article is to give you some insight into whether or not your process is helping your salespeople produce the results you desire or hindering them.

* Selling Time: Let’s look at the correlation between time and sales production. Selling time is a finite and extremely limited commodity. Your sales team only has eight hours a day to go out and find, acquire and keep customers. Many companies have reduced that amount of support available to the sales force in a flawed effort to lower costs. I call this effort flawed because, in taking administrative support away from the salesperson, you are inadvertently reducing their ability to produce revenue.

One of the first things you should do, if you are interested in investigating the impact your process make on your top and bottom lines, is to understand the way your salespeople spend their selling time. This can be easily accomplished by asking your sales team to log all of their activities on a quarter-hour basis for five days.

The average American business-to-business sales force spends approximately 34% of its day doing administrative work. 60% of that time is the result of a mistake made by someone other than the salesperson. This directly impacts the amount of time the salesperson has available to sell, and my research shows that the average salesperson spends approximately 29% of the day selling. Increase the amount of time available for selling and your salespeople will sell more.

* Prospecting: This is a time-honored process that is traditional in virtually all business-to-business sales forces. Unfortunately, prospecting “ain’t what it used to be”. The buyer’s world has changed such that prospecting, in today’s market, is extremely ineffective. The return on time investment, from the salesperson’s point of view, has gone down dramatically in the past two or three decades.

A far better strategy is to create a team of dedicated prospectors who do the initial calling into accounts to profile accounts and to ascertain the account’s interest in buying your products or ser­vices. Once the account is properly profiled and qualified, then and only then should a salesperson be assigned to the opportunity.

This deployment of your resources ensures that your sales force will have a nonstop supply of high-quality leads. This has a significant impact on morale, commissions paid to the sales team, as well as your profits. Again, the process is the culprit in this arena.

* Following Up: In today’s world, it is far more challenging to stay in touch with all of the decision-makers in a salesperson’s territory or market. This is due to the fact that the decision-makers in today’s world are busier than ever. Consequently, following up and staying in touch with these individuals is increasingly challenging.

At the same time that the pace of the world has increased, the insecurity of today’s decision-makers has gone up geometrically. These two phenomena conspire to dramatically reduce the ability of the sales professional to find, acquire and keep customers. Adequate levels of follow-up, utilizing tradi­tional methods, are virtually impossible as a result of these circumstances.

Consequently, I suggest that you implement a fully automated follow-up system, which relieves the salesperson of this burden and returns more selling time to the salesperson.

In closing, I would like to say that, in my opinion, when it comes to sales productivity problems, it is more than likely not your salespeople but rather your sales process. The process causes companies to overpay while their sales team is underperforming. Fix the process and your company will enjoy record growth, productivity and, most importantly, profitability.

During the course of my 28-year career as a consultant, I have been asked many times the question, “Why does sales training fail to produce permanent results?” The purpose of this white paper is to provide you with answers that will help you, as you go into 2006, to build a sales development program that will produce the results you desire… permanent, significant improvements in profit.

1. Failure to change beliefs: Virtually all sales training offered today focuses on changing the salesperson’s behaviors. This training encourages them to make more calls, to make better calls, to listen better, to close better, etc. Unfortunately, you cannot change an adult’s behavior until he/she changes their belief set.

If a salesperson believes he/she should not be successful, then no amount of skills training will help them become successful. I frequently encounter salespeople who believe that prospecting is beneath them or that it is something they did when they were a rookie but, now that they have a number of years of experience under their belt, they no longer need to do it.

Beliefs like these cannot be overcome with skills training. So, if your staffing system allows you to hire people who have inappropriate beliefs, there is no amount of sales training that will produce the results you desire.

2. The sales cycle: Assuming you have impacted the salesperson’s beliefs, very few sales cycles are short enough to allow a company to see any change in that salesperson’s behaviors within a reasonable timeframe.

If your sales cycle is just a few days long, you should see some change in your team’s behavior during sales cycles immediately following the training. However, if your sales cycle is longer (as most are), then the effect of the training will fade before you can realize a change in your team’s behavior.

Research shows that sales training typically has a half-life of approximately five weeks. If your sales cycle is ten weeks long, your team will retain (on average) only 25% of the knowledge, skills, tactics and strategies they learned. If your sales cycle is twenty weeks long, then your team will retain just 3% of the knowledge or skills transferred during the training session.

Please note: These statements assume that your company will not (as most companies don’t) reinforce the lessons taught during training. As a result, while management is looking for an increase in sales, your team (being comprised of normal human beings) is forgetting most of the information they learned.

The only way to remedy this is to ensure that your management team regularly reinforces the skills, tactics and strategies taught during the training session. Failure to reinforce training contributes significantly to the poor results that most training produces.

This, combined with the fact that most sales cycles extend beyond the timeframe in which you would have an opportunity to see any impact the training would have on your team’s behaviors, is the reason most training produces unsatisfactory results.

3. Your team’s motivation: A common mistake I have observed is that management assumes their sales force wants to improve. That is not necessarily true. Many salespeople are quite comfortable with the status quo. As a result, training that focuses on helping the team to sell better, to sell more effectively or to sell higher volumes will produce substandard results. This is a function of several factors.

First is your staffing system. If you hire people whom you like but who do not have the proper belief system and/or DNA to seek constant improvement, then they may view training as nothing more than an irritating interruption. To protect yourself against this, make sure that your staffing system brings highly motivated people who have demonstrated throughout their life the behaviors you desire.

Another common contributor to unsatisfactory results is management’s assumption that their compensation plan motivates the team to sell more. You cannot make other adults want to earn more money than they want to earn. Again, if your team is satisfied with their current income and production level, they will view training as an irritating interruption.

4. Misalignment with your sales process: Don’t, for a second, believe that “sales training is sales training is sales training”. Nothing could be further from the truth. That is analogous to saying that sports training is sports training is sports training, assuming that the skills taught to a basketball team will work for a football team or a golf team or a tennis team!

When you select a sales training program (especially if it is being brought in from the outside), make sure that the sales training and the trainer who will deliver the training understand your organization’s sales cycle, primary value propositions, as well as the buying modus of your customers.

If you bring a training program in that does not align with the reality of your sales environment, your team will reject the ideas from the outset and you will have no improvement and, candidly, will have wasted your money (the least of which would be the fee that you paid the trainer).

5. Lack of accountability: If you do not hold your people accountable for changing the processes they use to find, acquire and keep business, then no skills training can have a permanent impact on your organization. Research has shown that sales representatives reach a proficiency plateau (from a skills point of view) within three to five years of starting their sales career, regardless of how they learned to sell.

The real key to generating productivity improvement is to offer training to your people that focuses on managing the sales process in a more effective fashion. Even though this training is designed to target the real issue (it’s not your people, it’s the process), you must hold your team accountable for implementing the tactics and strategies taught during the session.

If accountability is not a core component of your training program, then save your money and your time. All the training will be is an entertaining event, which won’t produce the results you desire. Process change and accountability are the only two things I know of that guarantee permanent and measurable productivity improvements.

One word of caution: Accountability without consequences is an exercise in exerting a lot of energy with no effect. We humans don’t change our behaviors, unless we are aware of the consequences of not changing. Take a look at yourself. For example, why don’t you drive faster than the speed limit? After all, many of us view speeding as an exciting and fun activity.

Most of us obey the speeding laws because the consequences of breaking those laws are undesirable. We run the risk of either a ticket, a fine or, even worse, an accident and some injury to ourselves or others. This foreknowledge of the consequences of violating the law is what keeps most people from violating the laws and breaking the rules.

Now, let’s take a look at your sales organization. What accountability do you have within your organization? What are the consequences to your team if they fail to comply with your wishes with regard to changing their behaviors, tactics and activities? If there are no consequences, then you will never get the behavior change you desire.

I hope this article helps you understand why traditional sales improvement strategies fail. Although the title of this article is “Five Reasons Why Sales Training Fails”, I really could have called it “Five Reasons Why Sales Improvement Initiatives Fail”.

Here’s a way to improve performance appraisal. And a way not to.

First, we need to forget about 360-degree feedback, at least for performance-appraisal purposes. Certainly, 360-degree feedback may have a place—a minor place—in helping people get a better understanding of their development needs. But it has no place in conventional performance appraisal. To allow anonymous employee assessments into part of the formal evaluation tool does more than just encourage biased and self-serving responses—it poisons the entire well in terms of the original objective. It is particularly inappropriate to tie pay, promotions, development opportunities, and terminations—the things that a strong appraisal system controls—to anonymously provided assessments. The issue is not whether underlings and co-workers can provide relevant information. They can. The issue is whether they should be allowed to do so in a context where they cannot be held accountable.

What we need to do is add some element of forced ranking to our performance-management processes. Forced ranking requires senior managers to look over the organizational talent pool and, based on their performance and potential, identify the organization’s top talent (the A players), the solid-performing middle (the B players), and those bringing up the rear (the C players). Forced ranking can drive the truth into performance management, since not only does it force managers to identify the organization’s most and least talented members (and in the process provide the organization with useful data on managers’ ability to spot and champion talent), it offers independent verification of performance-appraisal data, something everyone agrees is important.

Conventional performance appraisal involves an absolute comparison — how well did the individual perform against the goals and key job responsibilities and competencies that were agreed at the start of the year? Forced ranking requires a relative comparison—how well did this individual perform compared with how well other people in similar jobs performed? Both questions are important to ask to get a complete view of a person’s performance.

Sure, there are challenges involved in implementing a forced-ranking system. Some employees and some managers, particularly those with low standards, don’t like it. And it’s inevitable that some mistakes will arise—you’re bound to miss a few late bloomers and overrate a few glib duds.

But combining a forced-ranking system with a conventional performance-appraisal system, with senior managers holding their juniors accountable for excellence in performance management (just as they hold them accountable for excellence in all the other parts of their jobs), will produce an organizational climate in which people know what’s expected of them, are held to high standards, and know exactly how well they’re doing. Sounds like a great place to work!

Dick Grote is one of America’s most successful and best-known authors, consultants, and business keynote speakers on performance management. He is the Chairman and CEO of Grote Consulting Corporation.

When I think about leadership I find that I agree with John Maxwell, (internationally recognised leadership expert, speaker and author), when he says that leadership is about influence, nothing more and nothing less.

One of the ways to gain influence is to become an expert on understanding the effect that you have on others when you interact with them, and what changes you should make for your interaction to be a positive experience for both parties. This is something that can be learned, although it can be hard to do so without appropriate self awareness or the help of others.

Social Intelligence is not as well known as Emotional Intelligence and confusion remains between the two of them. Salovey & Mayer (1990) described Emotional Intelligence as “a form of Social Intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and action”.

This is a fantastic description and accurately describes how Emotional Intelligence relates to the individual. I see Social Intelligence as the ability of taking Emotional Intelligence and applying it to social situations. It concerns itself with how you interact with others and how you assess the situations/environments around you, to achieve a win/win solution or best agreed alternative solution. Social Intelligence is also about how you respond to the different situations and environments that you find yourself in.

Becoming better at navigating your way through social situations can be invaluable in your personal and business endeavours. Research by the Center for Creative Leadership has found that the primary causes of derailment in executives involve deficits in emotional competence. The three primary ones are difficulty in handling change, not being able to work well in a team, and poor interpersonal relations – Cary Cherniss, Ph.D. Rutgers University.

This means that if you really want to get ahead in business then mastering the social interplay between you and others is an imperative that you just can’t ignore. There are many people that have the same skills as you but not everyone will have the same social competence – it is this that defines and sets us apart from others.

In another study, individuals who scored higher in the ability to perceive accurately, understand, and appraise others’ emotions were better able to respond flexibly to changes in their social environments and build supportive social networks (Salovey, Bedell, Detweiler, & Mayer, 1999). This is important not only for those who need to network up and across the corporate ladder but also those that are running a business.

I’m seeing a worrying trend at some large organizations. And it’s not just confined to traditional organizations, but seems widespread at large consulting houses too and other service businesses. What is it? Lack of people… Sound crazy? Maybe I am – but it seems like everyday I’m talking to clients and leaders at large organizations who have a culture or change problem, or just a plain ’shorthanded’ problem. Why – because the people who ’survived’ the downsizing and cost cutting over the last few years, may not be the people who want to grow and change the organization.

Its one of those Pavlovian things – you incent certain behaviors and those are the behaviors that are going to stick, and it takes a lot of reprogramming to make new incentives work. Afterall we’re talking about human beings here, not rats in a maze… So let’s see – there were bubble times, where the ‘creative’ and up and coming types were perhaps involved in more risk taking things like incubators, venture units and intrapreneurship. Pop went the bubble, and the first to go were the loss making wild ideas Now, I’m not saying that was all bad, because the bubble did encourage a lot of ‘dumb money’ to enter the game, and many companies did do stupid things destroying any potential margins in new business areas. But it had the effect of tainting the people who worked in these areas and I’m sure they were the first to go. So who’s left after those who were close to retirement, voluntarily or involuntarily, departed? The people who don’t like to take risks, who embody the traditions of the company, and kept their heads down during the cost cutting. Now, most organizations incented these behaviors during cost cutting, and now suddenly enterprises are waking up to the fact that employees have retrenched and are probably feeling highly over worked and under valued. So let’s pull the rug from out under these people, and try to change the culture, threaten them with offshoring and the need to grow… I hate to think of the consequences…

If as a leader in an organization, there is one message you should know and take to heart about leadership, it’s that a big part of your job in good times and bad times is around managing talent (including yourself ). One of the first processes that get broken during reorganizations is the talent management process – and yes, I realize it’s really hard to think about the future and encourage junior people to develop when you’re dealing with which colleagues who’ve been with you for decades, need to walk. But if you don’t – you’re putting the organization into a potential death spiral, or at the very least, making it easier to acquire… And the same thing is happening at large consulting houses, so don’t expect to be able to backfill from there either.

Business Performance Management (BPM) is a methodology that focusses on organizing, automating and analyzing business processes, metrics, and systems that drive business performance. Based on an organization’s strategy, performance areas are identified for which management information is needed. Subsequently, Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are defined in order to measure present results and to prescribe actions needed to reach targets.

Performance areas (or ‘themes’) and KPI’s form the basis for constructing specific performance reports and dashboards in a reporting application. This article focuses on the process of building reports for a performance theme, and the complexities that arise between Business Analysts and IT specialists in a large-scale business performance management program; the choice of software vendor and/or application is out of scope of this article.

In a large-scale business performance management program several performance themes are in scope at the same time. To manage this program and to standardize report building for each theme, certain process steps, milestones, and tasks are defined. A model that can be used to summarize these steps is the Deloitte BI (Business Intelligence) Business Cycle (see figure below).

In the BI business cycle, Phases I and partly phase V are often business driven, while phases II through IV are frequently technology driven. In large-scale performance management programmes, different project members are frequently responsible for completing either business driven (the “Business Analyst Team”) or IT driven (the “IT team”) process steps and tasks. This split in Business Analyst and IT teams is made to maximize the competencies of project team members and acquire economies of scale. However, assigning project members to either the IT team or to the Business Analyst team also has its limitations.

An issue with splitting up in a Business Analyst team and an IT-team is that the tasks mentioned in phase I are often completely conducted by the Business Analyst team and no IT members are completely involved. User requirements and goals regarding functionalities may be hard to meet because of technical restrictions of an IT application. These technical restrictions (both front-end and back-end IT) may become clear in later phases, for example when prototypes are built (in phase IV!). If an IT team member is involved in phase I, the Business Cycle of a performance report can be shortened because technical limitations of functional requirements are addressed in an early stage which also means that the expectations of the business can be managed.

Another common flaw is that a Functional Design (phase III) is presented (because the Business Analyst team is mistakenly assumed responsible for creating the Functional Design) while the tasks in phase II, source and data analysis, have not yet been conducted. Many end-user requirements could not be met based on the current sources. This sometimes means that large parts of a Functional Design will not be realized, and eventually this must be communicated to users. Consequently, a new Functional Design has to be created. This delays the completion of a performance report and users may become less eager for the end deliverables.

In conclusion, all phases of the Deloitte BI Business Cycle should be conducted by a heterogeneous team consisting of both Business Analysts and IT specialists working collaboratively. Although the steps between phases in the Business Cycle are reciprocal, the phases themselves should never be reshuffled.