I love summer reading lists – they give me ideas and it’s fun to see what other people want to learn more about. With that said, below is a reading list of books somewhat related to Sales. This is a personal selection and I’m hoping that everybody will chime in with their own ideas below.

Though it’s nice if the book has some relevance to business, that isn’t necessarily the most important thing. In fact, I find it’s often things that are only tangentially related to Sales that provide the most stimulus for me.

First, I’m going to recommend some older books. These seem especially relevant because of the current economic environment in which we cannot rely on continued private sector growth and where sales organizations have to work hard to get customers over their fears.

1)      Everybody in Sales and Marketing needs to have read “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert B. Cialdini. This is one of the best-known books examining how we make decisions and how we prioritize different kinds of information. It has some obvious implications for how to position and leverage the sales process, but it’s also a great read. And once you’ve read Influence, you can skip the mountain of related books such as Nudge or Predictably Irrational, all of which, to greater or lesser degrees, are based on the idea that we are all systematically prone to making the same mistakes over and over when it comes to making decisions.

2)      Similarly important is “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind” by Al Ries and Jack Trout. While the stories and anecdotes are beginning to show their age, this is probably the single best book on Marketing that I have ever read. It ties in nicely with the Cialdini book because the authors leverage many of the same behavioral insights, though theirs were substantially derived through practice rather than formal analysis; and the book is none the worse for it.

Moving on to some newer books, here are a couple that recently stood out for me – and please use the comments section to add yours below.     Read More »

Sometimes the things you don’t find in a study turn out to be as interesting as the things you do find. One very consistent “non-finding” concerns the effectiveness of the classic ROI message. We’ve asked customers to rate the effectiveness of the ROI pitch they hear and assessed reps and managers on their effectiveness at delivering this pitch, trying to link the effectiveness back to a variety of commercial outcomes.  To our surprise, we’ve never found the delivery of the ROI message to have any significant explanatory power.  And since zero correlation means no causation, this is a finding that deserves some exploration.

I’m reminded of a recent conversation with business owners at a software company, who developed a new way of thinking about certain data problems.  Though customers generally agreed that this was a better way to handle the data problems, the solution spanned many departments, and the software company couldn’t convince customers that the hypothetical returns were worth the extra coordination efforts. Failure to generate a positive emotional response likely explains our non-finding with regards to the effectiveness of the ROI pitch.

It’s not that customers aren’t influenced by ROI calculations; it’s just that few people make complex business decisions based entirely on somebody else’s ROI calculations. Senior buyers are pretty savvy people – they know their own ability to derive a set of returns that will look sufficiently attractive. They also likely recognize that they are constantly pitched things that they are already inclined to like.

In other words, buyers become perfectly cynical about value at the point at which the entire conversation becomes dominated by claims about value. It’s a subtle notion, but the hypothetical existence of value simply doesn’t challenge the customer.

This finding has profound implications for how Sales needs to think about building and delivering messages, and reinforces many of our findings around commercial teaching:   Read More »

So far, my blog posts have all been about the things that sales managers find the hardest to do. But there are some management behaviors that people are generally pretty good at.  There are six ‘easy’ behaviors that break down into three categories.

The first set of these “easy” behaviors is really about being a good person:

• “having integrity and demonstrating honesty”
• “being reliable”

It turns out these are essentially binary – you are either good at them or you aren’t.  Luckily, less than 5% of direct reports score their managers as lacking integrity and only about 7% think that their manager is unreliable.

This means if somebody’s direct reports score them low in these behaviors, then it’s a good predictor that that person won’t be an effective manager.

The second category of attributes that people scored well at is around following the rules:

• “Considers compliance and general risk implications”
• “Drives compliance with the sales process”

The third category of attributes is about managing upward:

• “Garners respect by senior management”
• “Champions corporate initiatives”

The good news about these categories being ‘easy’ is that, for the most part, managers are listening to what you tell them.  They make sure reps are doing the right activities and they communicate what senior leadership says they should.  And they are fundamentally reliable and honest.

What does this mean in practice?   Read More »

One drawback of being a consultant is that the first response to most questions can end up being a variation of “it depends”. It’s thus a wonderful thing that the question we are asked most often here at the Council has a simple, absolute answer. The question is about the number of direct reports that a sales manager should have. And the answer is: 8.

In our 2010 study of sales leadership, we found that the median span of control for a sales manager was 8 (the average was a little higher at 9.84, basically at 1:10). In 2008, the median was again 8. In 2007, the median span of control was a little lower at 7.4.

Part of why this number has to be 8 is driven by how a sales manager spends their time.  Assuming that a sales manager spends their time in a standard fashion, they will have approximately 8 hours a week to devote to coaching. And if we assume that a meaningful coaching interaction is about spending 3-5 hours with somebody per month, then that means that your average sales manager can coach 2 people per week. Assuming 4 weeks a month, that means that your average sales manager can manage a maximum of 8 people.

If you were ambitious, then you might assume that a sales manager can spend up to 3 days in the field, which would suggest that the maximum number of direct reports a sales manager can closely manage is probably around 12 people. But the manager with that many direct reports cannot be long responsible for too many reports or too many other things; they simply don’t have the time and they will likely leave a cross-section of their direct reports to essentially fend for themselves.

But there’s something about the consistency of the number eight across firms that is fascinating, and it made me wonder if others had observed a similar thing.  Read More »

Recent economic uncertainty has put pressure on sales managers to take on more responsibility. Specifically, sales leaders and the corporate center have increased the volume of reporting requests on managers. Fearing disproportioned time allocation, members asked us this year to conduct an audit of manager time spend.   

When we asked sales reps to indicate how their managers spend their time, a reasonably clear pattern of sales manager activity emerged:

1)   17% of manager time is spent on ‘sales and customer relationships’.

2)   19% is spent on ‘coaching, developing, and motivating individuals’. (For more information here, check out my previous post which shows sales reps essentially spend no quality time with their manager.)

3)   14% of time is spent on planning and analysis and a further 10% on strategizing and deciding what direction to give.

4)   Another 8% is spent on the manager’s own career and development.

5)   The last grouping is a large one and fully 31% of a manager’s time is spent on “fulfilling administrative and corporate requests” and “managing interruptions and dealing with problems”.

It’s this last piece that turns out to be a robust predictor of how reps at any one company perceive the quality of their managers.  Read More »

For many years, the Council has been preaching the mantra of having sales managers spend at least 3 hours a month on coaching and developing each direct report. This year’s work on sales manager effectiveness has dramatically re-confirmed that advice.

It is once again true that the average amount of time a manager spends with their direct reports is the best, single predictor of the quality of the relationship. Once somebody spends a material amount of time with their manager, it is then more of a matter of what happens in that time.

The alarming part is that 47% of reps report receiving under the magic 3 hours and 6% of reps report receiving no coaching at all. Thus, for many sales leaders the simple advice is to start by inspecting how some managers spend their time. When you don’t see an average of 3 hours occurring, then you should try and engineer an occasion where you can observe the manager and the rep work together.

Sometimes you will find that the rep has no great desire to spend time with their manager. Depending on the rep’s performance level this might be an acceptable reaction, though not one you would like to encourage. This is when you might want to consider moving reporting relationships.

A lot of the time, the issue is simple lack of staying power. The weekly pull-ups are too easy to push off since something else will always seem more urgent. This is where a simple coaching pulse survey can work wonders as it permits periodic inspection and sends a clear message that senior managers value these interactions. Read More »

In a post last week, I revealed some of the very preliminary findings from our ongoing study of sales manager performance, and now I wanted to share one additional finding that has come to light.

After analyzing the data, we have identified one management behavior that proves to be absolutely poisonous and must be avoided at all costs. Not a huge surprise, but “playing favorites” is something every manager should avoid.

The survey question assigned to this “playing favorites” behavior was worded much more diplomatically – in fact, it was “[manager] places bets on certain individuals and then spends most time and resources with them.” But it has emerged as a great tell of whether or not a manager is fostering big problems within their team.

Thus, here’s some easy advice – when trying to gather feedback on your managers, always ask whether or not somebody is perceived to be playing favorites. Chances are, there is an easy explanation, but since perceptions are everything when it comes to working with people, the appearance of playing favorites is something that needs to be avoided at all costs.

2005 was the year the Council first investigated how sales managers should coach their direct reports. At this point in time, we had never heard of credit default swaps and while everybody said they were worried about inflation, unemployment numbers were low and members were relatively sanguine about the prospects for continued growth. The pressure on the sales force was really centered on trying to accelerate the sales cycle. Buyers themselves were often looking to add capacity and were generally willing to cooperate with efforts designed to speed up decision-making.

Today, things couldn’t be more different from an economic perspective and the sales force is more worried about closing the sale than trying to accelerate the sales cycle per se. And so, we have returned to the topic of sales management this year and are investigating what new requirements are being placed on sales managers.

While we are still collecting data from our sellers in terms of the behaviors they observe from their manager, we do have some early observations. First, sales reps continue to score their managers low in terms of the coaching they provide. Fully 66% of sales reps indicate that their manager does worse at coaching as opposed to the other behaviors that a sales manager will need to demonstrate, such as planning, assessing risks, championing new initiatives or even delivering bad news to senior management. Read More »