There is no easy way!
I had a great conversation with a sales leader this week of a great corporation. He is working his way through reframing the reconstruction of his team. There is no easy way to do this. And he is doing ALL the right things. And he will forever transform his BIG company if his leadership can just “buy-in”. I believe they will in this case.
What does making that shift look like?
Start with understanding your WHY (see Simon Sinek – YouTube videos galore). Make sure that you have a clear picture of what your corporation is working to accomplish. Think big picture “humankind” type of objectives. Then make sure that what your own team does to fit into that bigger picture. Not a revenue contribution discussion. A true understanding of PURPOSE. AND to work, it all must be outward centric. About the world, the clients, the people outside of your own team. No silly euphemisms about “world-class”, “number one”, “biggest”….all “meisms”.
Now that you slog your way through that minefield you have to dig into WHAT it is that your team will DO to truly “make a difference” with your clients. You don’t get to simply deliver “different”, your focus must be on the co-creation of value that the client recognizes is UNIQUE. Not something that everyone else is ever going to attempt. That’s a deep well. Keep digging till you hit true paydirt on this one.
Ok, we’ve got it figured out and we need to dive into structural discussions about roles, responsibilities, and compensation. Here is where almost everyone struggles…. The compensation. Many times in conversations with sales leaders working to pull all this together their true struggle is with the variable compensation part of the rebuild. I won’t go into the discussion about Commission POISON here (see my prior blogs). EXCEPT there is an “out” that folks try to use. Instead of paying individual compensation based on performance to quota etc, the idea pops up that “hey, we will pay commission based on team/client results”. That sounds reasonable, and they head down that path all excited that they have neutralized the poison. Nope… just changed how the poison will get manipulated and injected. Let’s examine that a bit. The harsh reality is that leaving any sort of variable compensation that is this narrowly focused will still have all the same effects as a personal commission, it simply redirects the focus of how the outcome will be manipulated for the good of the compensation. Any remaining element of such a measure will still taint the service to the client and defocus the team from pure service. So how do we lead these strange folks called salespeople? If not by money…how? See my blogs on Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose by Dan Pink. In short, you must coach and lead them just like you should do with every other person in your corporation. And that’s where most often this move to rebuild a team and have them focus on the client and not their compensation dies…. When sales leadership suddenly realizes that they will lose their compensation “control” and manipulation of people and actually have to do the hard work of coaching and leading they freak out and proclaim that this can never work here…. NEVER.
As I said at the beginning… there is no easy way. We create greatness through a lot of hard work, not by manipulating people, but by helping them grow.
In Satya Nadella’s book (Hit Refresh) about the transformation of Microsoft, he talks about creating a company driven by a sense of empathy and a desire to empower others. He goes on to talk about his passion to put empathy at the center of everything he pursues. He writes about the culture that they are building that has a “growth mindset”. Critical to note here is that his reference it to “growth” of the individual, not the bottom line. Where in any of this brilliance is there room for the manipulation of people through their back pocket?
For a bit of a twist, however…
There IS room for a variable comp part of the plan. And it works GREAT. We have been doing this for more than 2 decades. Fundamentally, everyone, including sales, has a small percentage of their compensation tied to a handful of global corporate goals. These should be something that everyone can relate to and see that they can have contributed towards. A few examples would be corporate revenue growth quarter over quarter; corporate gross margin (you want to have salespeople stop lowering prices, teach them gross margin). You can include revenue growth of specific areas of focus for the corporation, cost controls in specific ways. Many different metrics can be deployed. I suggest that they be consistent across the entire corporation. It helps greatly if you truly want to get everyone rowing the boat in the same direction.
And to not leave you without answers to coaching and leading… Here are the 2 best in our space.
Hendre Coetzee is the world’s best coaching coach… www.hendrecoetzee.com
Dave Brock is the best sales leader that you will ever see… partnersinexcellenceblog.com
There is no easy way to create the BEST!
So let’s go do the work!
Mitch Little
And in the beginning, there was “stuff”. Folks made “stuff”. Other folks used that “stuff”. And it was pretty direct. Then the world evolved and the people that made “stuff” wanted more income so they hired a new breed of a person called a “salesperson” whose job was to go out and find additional people to buy the “stuff” they were selling. For the most part, it appears that this all started with the barter system as early as 6000 BC. Trading goods for goods or service worked pretty directly but did not scale well. Somewhere around 3000 BC, basic product selling started to take a foothold. That seems to have stayed pretty stable for a LONG time…
In the mid-1800’s we morphed into an influential way of talking folks into what we wanted them to believe, and buy…. Some have called this the “snake oil” era. In the 1900’s we worked our way through fundamentals driven by brilliance by Dale Carnegie and onto offerings like PSS, Solution selling, LAMP, Value selling, etc, etc, etc, and on to Challenger. And every one of those had value and taught us a great deal. Social media now seems to drive the world for good and bad and now we need to figure out what that looks like in the brand new B2B world. Considering the events of 2020 I can say that we do not really have an idea of how this will all unfold, AND it will be different than what we view today in many respects.
I do also believe that the guiding client elements that we need to stay focused on, going forward, are the same BIG3 client elements that have always been key.
We define the BIG3 as helping the client…
We know from serving 120,000 clients around the world that regardless of role, country, or business model, the BIG3 is critical to every person we serve.
If you can put what you DO into one of those 3 elements you can have great 2-way conversations with people that make a difference to them and that matters to us both. Products, technologies, hardware, and software, are all vital, and if you don’t have world-class in those, you should consider your options. However, all of them are now table stakes, the price of entry into the game, the starting point for the race. They are absolutely critical and we had all better know our “stuff” very well.
And yet that is not enough. Not really. The real battle is in the mind of the client and what we each DO to help them make a difference in their world and with their clients. Stuff is great. Stuff is needed. Stuff is not enough. YOU are the differentiator!
There are a great number of new things that dealing with COVID-19 has taught us, or more accurately, reminded us of the importance of. To me, the ONE thing that will stick out and that I will work to make sure we all keep is the value of PLANNING. Preparation before every call, planning before every conversation, every email, every video. The time that we have with people is precious. We have been way too casual about wasting other's time and that has been reflected to us over the years as we study what clients value, or don’t when we work with them. Making sure that we value other's time and ensure that every interaction we have makes a difference is what we owe those that we serve. It takes serious planning to accomplish that. Where I work we use the thinking of….
PLAN/DO/REVIEW
Prepare well for everything. Execute according to plan, which seldom gets to happen. Review and learn from every action. The after-action review is not a new concept. We just need to live it!
Be well, stay safe, make a difference!
- Mitch
