Understanding the Sales Force

Last week I wrote an article, Now That You Have a Sales Process, Never Mind, that was very critical of an article that appeared in Harvard Business Review. The authors were nice enough to clarify their position and, even if you read my original article, it’s worth revisiting because of the additional discussion that took place after it appeared.

I subscribe to several newsletters written by medical doctors who practice natural medicine. They not only provide healthy nutritional advice and natural cures, but also expose the mainstream media, doctors, FDA and pharma for pulling the wool over our eyes and publishing so much misinformation. And the misinformation is killing people!

I’ve seen this happen in youth baseball so many times. Let’s say it’s a ground ball and the third baseman boots it for an error. Of course, the next ball is hit right at the third baseman again and this time he fields it cleanly, but makes an error on the throw. And just as if it were programmed to happen, the third baseman is suddenly a target, balls coming at him and him alone, as he appears helpless and unable to make a clean play to put a merciful end to an inning. You could say he has been busy, but not very successful.

I had two conversations that were in stark contrast to one another.

The first was with an executive who told me that the company must have their salespeople selling more consultatively to better differentiate themselves in the global market, so they began training on SPIN selling – a year ago. I told him that was a good start and wondered if they experienced the same thing as most companies that train on SPIN selling – it is a great questioning strategy but their salespeople simply can’t apply it or execute it.

We hear those words a lot.  Some companies aspire to it.  Others claim to be there already.  You are more likely to hear claims like those from a large enterprise, but you have better odds of actually finding it in a small-to-midsize company.

One of the comments on my article, The Validiation of the Sales Assessment Validation, mentioned the reluctance of CEOs and Presidents to redeploy or terminate ineffective sales managers. That topic deserves an article of its own, making 3 of my last 4 posts about ineffective sales managers. That will surely upset and perhaps eliminate a significant number of my regular readers.

Just like the salespeople who work for them, CEO’s come in all different sizes, shapes, styles and flavors. As you can imagine, those variances influence the outcomes of sales force evaluations, sales infrastructure, sales and sales management development and sales recruiting. Here is a sampling of how some of the CEO’s react to what I tell them about their sales force:

Yesterday, I had my annual physical and my doctor ordered the usual array of blood tests. It didn’t matter that I felt terrific. It didn’t matter that he observed my blood pressure, throat, eyes and ears to be perfect. It didn’t change his mind when he listened to my heart and lungs. And he was still ordering those tests after he felt for things and didn’t find anything. The tests he can do in his office – basically the eye test – are observations. How I report to be feeling is my version of the eye test – it’s based on my own observations. And the reason for the blood and urine tests is that we don’t know what we don’t know.

A title like, “Presidents & CEO’s: 4 Out of 5 Sales Managers Are Ineffective”, will cause some Sales Directors, Sales VP’s and Sales Managers to click and read the article.  That’s OK, but a spoiler warning:  if you feel threatened by hearing the truth about yourself or your sales team, or would be uncomfortable sharing the truth about you or your team with the President or CEO, you should probably exit this article right now.

HR Directors love our sales candidate assessments because when they finally learn to select the right salespeople, their job becomes easier and they become heroes!

Promises of great success would lead you to believe that this is not a difficult sale, but it doesn’t always go that smoothly.