“I don’t have time for another one of these!  I’ve got to be in-front of my customer!”

Have you heard that from your sales force lately?  Maybe someone’s even said it today.  The “these” referenced above are the multiple internal tugs at a sales force’s time…things such as meetings, surveys, reviews and trainings that internal partners hold.

Why are these things so problematic? Because time spent fulfilling internal company requests is time NOT spent selling.

So how do you ensure that the sales force has time to achieve its primary objective of selling while still meeting the demand of valuable internal requests?

We profiled an organization that tackled this challenge head on…Schneider Electric (one of the world’s largest manufacturers of equipment for electrical distribution and industrial control and automation) came up with a pretty straight-forward solution: they put a communications screening process in place.  Read More »

When The Home Depot decided to audit the number of messages received by the average store manager in a 30-day period from multiple functions across the firm, here’s what they found:

Time Required for Managers to Process Company Communications

Company messages received:               3,000 per month per manager
Average time to process:                      1 minute per message
Total time required to process:              3,000 minutes per month per manager

That’s about one week per month in responding to internal messages!

Home Depot’s managers are not alone. We all are constantly bombarded with messages at work from internal stakeholders. The problem is more acute in Sales though, where reps struggle to keep up with the barrage of e-mails, voicemails, and now social media while in the field. In the absence of an established communications policy, reps use their own discretion to determine message urgency and importance, resulting in them either spending time away from value-creating activities or ignoring business-critical messages.

In our discussions with member companies, we’ve uncovered four key tactics to reduce the volume of communications to the sales force, while still ensuring the flow of critical information: Read More »

(This is a guest post by Rick DeLisi of the Communications Executive Council, our sister program for communications professionals.)

When I was a kid, we had a piano in our house. It was an attractive piece of furniture in our family room. I say that, cause no one in our family knew how to play it (beyond say, “Chopsticks”).

But (for reasons which still elude me), we once had it professionally tuned. Now, I’d seen pianos being tuned before. It’s done electronically with a device that analyzes each note and indicates whether it’s flat or sharp. But the guy who tuned our piano had no device — cause he was totally blind.

Think about it. A blind piano tuner. Born without sight, this guy’s hearing was so super-sensitive, he could immediately detect the slightest imperfection in each note, and adjust it back to pitch-perfect just by listening.

To him, an out-of-tune note is like a physical discomfort, and he’s the doctor who relieves patients of their pain.

In some ways, that’s what we communicators and sales professionals do. Only not with musical notes, but rather, with words. Read More »

Do reps in your organization complain about having too many initiatives and too little time? When reps feel bombarded with requests from all directions, they often struggle to prioritize (or even distinguish between) them.

As the old adage says: if everything is important, nothing is important.

Responding to the myriad requests from all parts of the organization can take away large amounts of selling time, leading to reduced productivity and sales. A constantly shifting set of initiatives also confuses and demotivates reps.

In order to tackle this problem, Kodak created a rep initiative screening process by which it screens and prioritizes all inbound requests of sales force time through a rigorous set of filters:

• Filter #1 – Alignment with corporate priorities: Evaluates how well-aligned a request is with corporate strategy and to what degree Sales can contribute to its execution.
• Filter #2 - Alignment with sales priorities: Reviews all requests in the context of its channel strategy, financial returns, and sales capacity.

Screening requests with these filters helps Kodak settle on one manageable set of initiatives and  send one unambiguous message to the sales force around what they should be doing.

SEC Members, find out more about Kodak’s Rep Initiative Screen and how the process helps keep reps engaged and effective at their jobs.

(This post was written by Tim Stafford of our Finance and Strategy Practice.)

Last month we looked at how everyone can learn to be more influential in their roles, but we have also seen from our work with executives that there are some straightforward lessons that will help managers be more influential.

As well as helping to get tasks accomplished effectively and quickly, these four tactics are useful ways to get more from your team without offering financial incentives.

Four Ways to Get More From Your Team

1)  Get personally involved: One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned from talking to managers all around the world is that employees invariably respond well to personal interaction. One former CEO wrote recently about the power of face-to-face meetings. Managers tell us what a big difference it makes when they make a trip to meet team members or, even better, convene the entire team in one place for a few days.

People respond much better to questions and requests when they’ve had a chance to put a name to a face. Also meeting each other in person gives the whole team a chance to better understand personalities and context for the hundreds of phone calls, emails, and videoconferences that will follow in the months ahead.   Read More »

There are probably no individuals more time oppressed in your sales force than your sales managers.  And a perennial focus for sales organizations is making sure that managers have enough time to spend on high-value activities.

A big problem standing in the way is admin. In fact, our sister research organization, the Communications Executive Council, profiled how The Home Depot sized up the problem.  They created a dummy manager inbox on their email system and let it run for one month.  Guess how many emails were waiting there, unopened?

3,000! And if you estimate that it takes about a minute to read each of those emails, they cost 50 hours of on-the-job time – and that’s not even factoring in the time to type a response!

So are your managers buried by too many administrative requests? Read More »

(This is a guest post by Kayleigh O’Keefe of the Communications Executive Council, our sister program for communications professionals.)

Organizations need to constantly adapt to meet the demands of continuously changing business environments. Communication teams are doing their part by driving employee support of change initiatives and keeping morale high. The most common tactics we’ve heard involve building the visibility and credibility of leaders.

We’re learning that companies can’t drive agility with inspiring words from the top. Instead, they need to build an environment that encourages action from the bottom up. That’s why the best communicators are knocking down barriers to communication and encouraging employees to embrace and share new ways of thinking and working.

Admittedly, Communications cannot build a change-ready organization on its own. It can, however, play a significant role by focusing on three key drivers of employee agility.   Read More »

In addition to the human impact of the tragic events unfolding in Japan, many companies are facing the potential of a disrupted supply chain as production slows and in some cases comes to a halt at factories affected by the earthquake.

To help our members respond to crises that have the potential of impacting customers, I interviewed Rick DeLisi, Senior Director with the Communications Executive Council, who has worked with members on responding to a crisis.

(If you would like to donate to the relief effort in Japan, please visit The Corporate Executive Board Giving Campaign to support the American Red Cross.)

According to Mr. DeLisi, for sales executives, the primary impact of a crisis is the “creation of a significant amount of uncertainty with customers.  Any crisis heightens the amount of the ‘unknown.’”  As a result, members should be asking themselves, “are customers likely to make poor decisions with the information that they currently have?”

In response to a crisis, DeLisi recommends that the “frequency of communications needs to be significantly higher.” The worst thing that a company can do is to “clam up and neither proactively reach out to customers nor respond to customer inquiries.”  For sales executives, this means proactive communications to customers, especially key accounts or other large customers. The key thing is to up the frequency of communications with customers.   Read More »

I’ve been getting a large number of M&A-related questions lately, specifically on how to integrate two different sales forces, the challenges posed by new or changing roles and responsibilities of reps and managers, as well as the shuffling of accounts that normally accompany a merger. To help, I’ve compiled here some key learnings gathered from members who have integrated two different sales forces into one.

There’s not much here regarding the HOW – and that is by design – the idea of this is to validate what you’re doing as well as identify some areas were you could be putting a little more rigor.  At that point, we have resources (tools, templates, processes, etc) we can share with you to help you execute more efficiently and effectively in all of these areas.

At the highest level, you should think of M&A challenges on three levels:  customer, rep, and manager. And interestingly, of those three levels, the place most companies struggle isn’t the rep level—where they focus all of their time and energy—it’s the manager level.

Let’s review some of the key considerations you must take into account for each level:   Read More »

By Andrew Kent

With mounting pressure from the cost police to “do more with less,” we at the SEC frequently field questions about if face-to-face time—whether with customers, during training, or between team members—can be replaced by virtual channels like teleconferences or webinars.

Here’s a question for the cost police though: if technology can displace human contact so easily, why do the companies who make that technology place such a premium on human contact in their own business?

Via Ezra Klein, a new book called The Triumph of the City notes “the apparent paradox of cities becoming more expensive and more crowded even as the cost of communicating over great distances has fallen dramatically. New York is a good example of this, but Silicon Valley is a better one:

The computer industry, more than any other sector, is the place where one might expect remote communication to replace person-to-person meetings; computer companies have the best teleconferencing tools, the best internet applications, the best means of connecting far-flung collaborators. Yet despite their ability to work at long distances, this industry has become the world’s most famous example of the benefits of geographic concentration. Technology innovators who could easily connect electronically pay for some of America’s most expensive real estate to reap the benefits of being able to meet in person. Read More »