In my last post, I explained how the most important sales-specific skill a manager can have right now – much more important than resource allocation and just inching out coaching – is sales innovation.  But innovation and creativity are not words we frequently use in Sales (at least not in a good way).   So what do we really mean by sales innovation, and how do we get it?  I’ll answer that here, and sprinkle in some links to relevant cases that SEC members can access.

Let’s start by talking about the military.

In the Army, there’s an old saying that applies equally well to Sales:  “No plan survives engagement with the enemy.”

No matter how carefully one plans for battle, the reality on the field will inevitably present in a different way.  And as a result, over the years, army leaders have adopted a style of leadership known as Commander’s Intent.

Commander’s Intent is just that:  a clear, concise statement of the specific goal a commander is looking to achieve. Something like:  “Capture and hold that hill until reinforcements arrive.”

In this approach, Army leaders have stopped giving step-by-step instructions on how to actually go about capturing the hill, because they’ve learned that once the team gets out in the field and engages in battle, they have to quickly adapt to the situation on the ground in unanticipated ways.

Not surprisingly then, the field leaders who excel in the Army have to be creative, innovative, and adaptive to survive. 

Now, Sales is not exactly like war, but it is a series of (hopefully friendlier) battles to win ground over competitors.  And given that these days those battles are less predictable than ever before, it makes sense that deviating from the plan is now increasingly necessary.    Read More »

Our recent work on manager effectiveness – where we did a large quantitative survey about manager skills, attributes, attitudes and activities — found robust correlations between how managers are rated by their direct reports and how they’re rated by the company.   In other words, most of the time, reps and the company will rate a given manager the same way:  both good, or both bad.

However, the correlations aren’t perfect.  Sometimes, there is a significant disconnect between how what the rep says and what the company says. We’ve started to generate a picture of where these disconnects come from.

First, there are reps ‘incorrectly’ assessing the manager, which comes in two forms:

1)   Rep performance issues:  Reps who have performance issues can resent the manager for holding them back.  Interestingly, for companies we have been tracking for a while, this effect tends to go away as the rep realizes the manager is helping them perform better. These managers typically need some appreciation for the hard job they’ve been asked to do.

2)   Long-beloved managers: There are well-loved managers who have been around a long time.  Reps love them, but the company can often more clearly see the skills they lack.  While they might not always have the competencies to progress to the next level or be the highest achievers, they do a lot for the organization and the company should recognize the loyalty that these managers engender in reps.

More problematically, there are cases when the organization ‘incorrectly’ assesses the manager, again in two forms:   Read More »

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In my last post I talked about how changes in customer behavior have made our growth goals harder and harder.  Specifically, customers may be more open to buying a vision, but getting a deal to completion has gotten a lot more challenging, and less predictable.  And our biggest leverage point for helping navigate customer organizations to get a deal done?  Managers.

The first-line manager has arguably always been the most important (and least-defined) role in a sales organization.  But recent changes in customer behavior, coupled with the shift to solution selling, have changed what matters most for managers.  So here’s the new story of manager excellence.

As a reminder, we amassed a huge dataset from our Manager Effectiveness Survey – over 5,000 returned surveys regarding over 1,000 managers – to explain the primary drivers of manager excellence.

Our first finding is no surprise:  managers need to be good at the fundamentals.  These are things like integrity, reliability and listening, which are important to any manager, not just sales managers.   Luckily, it turns out most managers are good at these.   For the 3.5% of our sample who failed at the fundamentals—they’re probably not cut out for a job in management.

More interesting are the sales-specific activities that matter most.  These fall into three high-level categories, with the impact on performance in parentheses:

• Selling (26.6%) – being personally effective at selling, particularly the Challenger™ behaviors
• Coaching (28.0%) – helping others improve, particularly with tailoring and asserting control
• Owning the Business (45.4%) – when managers run their territory as if it were their own business

Owning the Business breaks down into two parts:     Read More »

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In my last blog post, I introduced the idea of sales innovation, and how it is the most important thing a sales manager can do to drive growth.  I left you hanging about the specific activities inherent to sales innovation–and I promise to get there–but to really understand the concept, we need some context.

This story starts with why growth is so hard right now: changing customer behaviors.  There has been a lot of change in customer situations–increased price pressure, decreased budgets, etc –but while these changes may dissipate over time, we see a few trends that we think are here to stay:

1. More customer stakeholders involved with the deal
2. Customers pushing risk onto suppliers
3. Rise of third party consultants auditing deal agreements

What this means at the 10,000-foot level:  it is getting harder and harder to get a deal to close.  Looking closer, you can see that it’s getting harder in a very specific way that relies on the manager.

It helps to think about the path of a sale in two main stages:

• First, selling a customer on a vision
• Second, getting them to buy an offering customized to their specific needs

Think about it:  with every sale, we begin with the customer in some sort of status quo—uncomfortable as it may be, given the tough economy of late—then, through the recognition of a need, the customer agrees on a vision.   Read More »

I recently had a member ask me this …

“Tom is one of the best reps we’ve got. In the past three years, he has exceeded every target that’s been assigned to him. But recently, his performance seems to have slipped. He barely manages to hit his goal and has almost stopped going that extra mile. We’re worried we may have burnt him out!”

Now, there can be many reasons to why Tom is underperforming.  We discussed the economy and how things were only beginning to look brighter. We spoke about compensation and how that might affect performance. We even tried to speculate if everything was okay in his personal life.

But none of it seemed to quite hit the nail, till we came to his manager.  The member told me that Tom’s previous manager had resigned, and the position had since been filled laterally by a sales manager from another division. Further probing revealed that the company had heard a few disgruntled voices from his team, but hadn’t taken it up very seriously. We took a closer look at what they had heard from his direct reports:     Read More »

As many of you know, we’ve spent the last nine months looking at what drives sales manager performance.  Along the way, we amassed a huge dataset from our Manager Effectiveness Survey – over 5,000 returned surveys regarding  over 1,000 managers – and you’ve seen bits and pieces from this analysis here on this site already. 

Now it’s time to start telling the whole story about what we found, not just nuggets of data analysis.   

When we took a hard look at the data, we found some very clear conclusions for what managers should be doing differently to succeed in today’s environment.  We’ve started presenting the information in day-long sessions and executive breakfasts around the globe (SEC members, click here to register for one of our upcoming events or teleconferences on the subject).  As you can imagine, there is too much to be communicated in one post, so I’ll use a series of posts to cover our major conclusions.

The top line from our research?

2010 is all about growth.  That’s not news, as we all know it’s not OK not to grow this year.  But changing customer behavior has made growth a real challenge.  Everyone also agrees that sales managers are the vital linchpin for driving a return to growth in 2010.

While coaching is absolutely crucial to sales manager success, it turns out that when it comes to growth, there is a whole other category of manager activity even more important than coaching.

Therefore, what is that category of manager activity that most drives growth?  We call it ‘Sales Innovation.’   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 »