Sales Performance Management -- Two Key Levers

It's approaching that time of year. I'm getting calls from clients: "Dave, we will be starting our planning process in September. We will have to commit to 2010's numbers and budget, we will have to develop a commission plan that motivates our sales people to hit the goals..... We're going to need your help."

These conversations got me to thinking about a mistake I think many organizations make in thinking about sales performance management. Too often, people make the mistake of thinking the cornerstone to sales performance management is the commission/incentive plan. "If we get the sale incentive plan right, then we will get the right behaviors, actions, and we will hit the numbers. Performance management is all about getting the right compensation plan in place."

The incentive plan is an important element to help drive sales performance, but it is just one of the levers the organization has. The incentive/compensation plan is somewhat limited in driving performance. It basically focuses on the issue, "here is how you will be paid for what you sell." To the degree that people are money motivated, it is a powerful element to sales performance management.

The more important lever, is the Performance Plan.

Unfortunately, performance planning is not taken as seriously, both as a tool to drive performance and a tool to drive individual development. It is a powerful and underutilized tool that every sales manager should leverage to drive performance.

The performance plan should set the expectations of sales people in a number of areas. The performance plan sets baseline expectations and behaviors that I sometime call "conditions of employment," for example showing up for work is one of them, perhaps keeping the CRM system might be another (I'm not trying to provoke a CRM discussion, just some examples that I've seen.).

But the performance plan can go far beyond that, it should set expectations about how we want to see people sell, the types of relationships we want them to establish, it can talk about how we want sales people to collaborate with their peers and others in the company.

The performance plan is where management has the opportunity to establish the ideal behaviors and best practices for selling, establish goals and metrics (both hard and soft) to drive the highest levels of performance. It becomes the road map to the sales person for outstanding sales performance.

Too many sales managers don't understand the power of the performance plan as a tool for developing their people and driving performance. Most tend to look at it as "one of those tasks HR forces us to do."

Properly utilized, good performance plans, coupled with well designed incentive/commission plans can be two of the most powerful tools for sales managers in driving, measuring and evaluating performance.

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I Just Don't Have Time To Coach! A Crisis In People Development.

It's a familiar complaint. We're all time poor, as a result of cutbacks, expansion in spans of control, expansion of job responsibilities, and the list never ends. Every year I talk to 100's of sales managers and executives. They know they need to spend more time coaching and developing their people, but they just can't find the time to do it.

This problem is more serious than many might think. Two years ago, we conducted a survey of sales managers. In one question, we asked them how frequently they had coaching/mentoring meetings with their people. For companies having revenue of $100 million or more, we found 5% of managers had weekly coaching/mentoring sessions with their people, 27% had monthly meetings, 38% had quarterly coaching/mentoring meetings, and the remainder were either annual meetings or not done with any regularity. Smaller companies were slightly better with 46% of the managers having weekly or monthly meetings.

Coaching is one of the most critical activities a manager can undertake in improving the performance of their people and producing real results. Unfortunately, I think people have a misunderstanding of what coaching is, when, and how to do it. People tend to think of a formal "coaching," meeting, often confusing coaching with performance reviews. While the outcome of coaching and performance reviews is similar, coaching needs to be conducted differently and more frequently than performance reviews.

What Is Coaching:

Coaching usually focuses on the development of specific skills or behaviors. Making sales calls that have higher impact. Developing and implementing territory plans that maximize growth within the territory. Developing deal strategies that have higher probabilities of winning. Working more effectively with team members. Managing time more effectively.

When Do You Coach:

Coaching needs to be integrated with the manager's daily process and routine. It doesn't need to be a separate session, but part of the daily conversations managers have with their people. For example, after every customer call, managers should take the time to debrief the people on the call, looking for opportunities to improve both the overall sales strategy and the results their people produce with calls. In doing account reviews, opportunity reviews, pipeline reviews, manager should look for the opportunity to coach. An account review is the perfect time to develop a person's skills in developing and executing their account plan---not a separate meeting a month later when everyone has forgotten what went on.

"Strike while the iron is hot!" This works perfectly for coaching---managers have the greatest impact in developing their people when there is an immediacy to observing both good and bad practice and discussing it with people. The more time that lapses, the less the impact.

Incorporating coaching into your daily interaction with sales people, the whole process becomes less cumbersome for both the manager and the people she is coaching. It becomes a natural part of the way people work together.

How Do You Coach:

Much of our business culture seems oriented around "telling." We tend to tell people what they did right, we tell them what they did wrong, we tell them what they should do differently.

"Telling" is very ineffective for coaching. We want our people to be thoughtful about what they do, we want them to own the responsibility for their performance and development. We can't achieve this by telling, we can only do this by engaging our people in a conversation or dialogue about their performance in a certain area. The only way we engage our people in this discovery process is by asking questions. Effective coaching is about asking and engaging the person in thinking about what they do and how to improve.

Coaching is critical to maximizing the performance of everyone on your team. It is critical in developing people to reach their full potential. Coaching is easy when you incorporate it into your daily interactions with your people, engaging them in thoughtful discussions.

Leadership and Narcissism

Narcissistic Leaders, we've seen too many of them. In good times, their visions can be compelling. They can be charismatic, inspiring followers. Those positive characteristics are overshadowed by their terrible weaknesses---and these challenging times are likely to accentuate these weaknesses.

Ben Dattner, of Dattner Consulting, has an outstanding summary of characteristics of narcissistic managers. These include:

1. Grandiose sense of self importance, tend to exaggerate achievements and talents, expect to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements.
2. Preoccupied with fantasize of unlimited success, power, brilliance.
3. Believes he/she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by or associate with other special or high status people.
4. Requires excessive admiration.
5. Has a sense of entitlement or unreasonable expectations of favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations.
6. Is inter-personally exploitative, takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends.
7. Lacks empathy, is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings or needs of others.
8. If often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him/her.
9. Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.

We know how to recognize them---they focus only on themselves. Their primary goals are what makes them look good, what gets them ahead, and how they can use others to get them what they want.

Narcissistic managers can't be wrong. It may be difficult for them to be accountable, errors are usually someone else's fault. They become blind to the real issues around them. They don't listen well, so they may not understand what's going on in the organization. This can cause the manager and the organization to be dysfunctional or desperately out of touch.

Because they exaggerate their own importance, downplaying the contribution of others, they need to be at the center of things, seeking constant attention and positive reinforcement of others. They may be threatened with any disagreement or when they perceive they are being kept out of things or not getting the credit.

When things go wrong, they tend to go into denial or to start rationalizing. They tend to over-react to criticism, becoming angry and lashing out. At worst they can act without integrity and compromise ethics--they tend to believe they are above the rules.

Their lack of empathy and extreme Independence make it difficult for them to mentor or be mentored. As Michael Macoby in his classic HBR Article: Narcissistic Leaders, The Incredible Pros, The Inevitable Cons, says, if they provide mentoring at all, they tend to instruct rather than coach.

Recognize anyone? We've seen too many of them making headlines in recent months. We see them in our organizations, at all levels. All of us have egos--even some level of narcissism, but the narcissistic manager can be challenging to work with.

Macoby offers some suggestions:

1. Always empathize with the narcissistic manager's feelings, but don't expect anything in return.
2. Be careful if asked for your honest evaluation. They want information that will help solve problems with their image. They will resent anything that threatens their inflated self image and are likely to retaliate.
3. Give them ideas, but let them take credit for them. If you think your manager is wrong, show an approach that is in the manager's best interest and how they will benefit.
4. Use your time management skills, your manager may give you more than you can execute. Forget those that don't makes sense, he probably will.
5. Narcissistic leaders will call you when they need you, anytime day or night. Make yourself available, be sure to fit their schedule.
6. If your narcissistic manager becomes too difficult to deal with, be prepared to look for another job.

All leaders have egos--some very large. But extremely narcissism and true leadership do not go together.

Sales Force Ineffectiveness, Conjecture On The Future Of The Profession, Part 1 of 3

Let me start with an apology, I will probably gore everyone’s ox in this post. My intention is not to pick on any group of sales professionals, but to start a discussion about the state of the profession and to stimulate ideas on how each of use—as individuals, leaders, influencers might improve the practice of the profession. I’ve actually split this post into two, Part 1 addresses issues that are primarily driven by sales. Part 2 looks at systemic business issues, beyond sales, that impact how we perform. Part 3 focuses on what we can do about these issues, both as organizations and individuals.

I hope you take the time to read and comment on all three. I may just have gone off the deep end and be mumbling nonsense, I hope you correct me (I know you will ;-)

Over the past week, there have been a number of blog posts, comments, and discussions by people like Dave Stein, Niall Devitt, Christian Maurer, Paul McCord and others touching on various aspects of professional selling and why we as a profession are not improving our effectiveness.

Dave Stein lays the groundwork, with a lot of great data on sales training programs, books, blogs, and surveys on sales effectiveness in his post How Do You Fix Sales Ineffectiveness? If you haven’t read it, you should.

Billions of dollars/euros/yuan/yen are spent by companies in sales training, tools, conferences, seminars and other things to improve the effectiveness of their sales people. As both Dave and Paul point out in their posts, everyday some new book, blog, podcast or other offering promises the “silver bullet” to improving sales performance and effectiveness.

Yet, on the other hand, several months ago, one of my posts, Why Do Sales People Have Such A Bad Reputation, stirred up a huge amount of controversy and discussion with some people claiming there was little future for sales people, that customers buying processes were changing and the need or contribution of sales people was being minimized.

So where are we, what does this mean, where are we (sales professionals going), where does “fault” lie—if you want to lay blame. Some thoughts, observations:

Sales people have been the butt of jokes, complaints, and stories since through history. (I think this is a vicious conspiracy fostered by lawyers to take the heat off them.) We always will be, so why waste time on this?

The buzz words for professional sales today is “consultative,” “customer focused,” “solutions focused,” “value-based.” If only we became more consultative and customer focused, we would make the buying/selling experience more acceptable and make customer enthusiastic to see us. When I first started selling, in the late 70’s, the buzz words were “consultative,” “customer focused,”……. Nothing’s changed, so clearly we aren’t executing the practices that enable us to be customer focused.

It always intrigues me that we have continued to have this discussion about the importance of being consultative, but we have made no substantive progress in this area. It is not for lack of training programs, books, articles, testimonials. On the one hand, if we are selling and producing results without it, why bother? To those that claim this, I tend to claim you are underperforming your potential. You can sell more---more effectively, increase customer retention and grow your share of customer with consultative approaches---there is plenty of data to support this.

Consultative selling is difficult—it is disciplined, process based, and requires commitment and follow through on a sustained basis. Our focus on now (at all levels) makes this difficult. I think the issue about consultative selling is more about committed leadership than about skills development. Getting sales management to commit to integrating this into their day to day leadership style is the only way we will make substantive progress. Without this, we are wasting time and money.

Sales, by its nature, is about change. We are trying, for good or bad reasons, to get people and organizations to change. Most people are resistant to, or at least uncomfortable with change—they will tend to be resistant to the agents of change, as well. We have to live with this---maybe even revel in it. As a profession, I don’t think we talk about change management or change leadership enough. If I had to make recommendations for skills development, I would recommend something around leading change initiatives.

For too long, we have treated sales as a “black art.” We have let others wrap sales in a “mystique.” Part of this is the act of selling is usually done at a distance from the rest of the organization---it is done at our customers (Duuuuhh!). So people in the organization don’t see what we are doing. With other functions, you see people every day. You see the factories and talk to manufacturing people, you see materials going in one end and products coming out the back. It may or may not be a good process, but at least you can see something going on. You can say this about most other functions.

We as sales people have reinforced this, keeping people out of our accounts (or shepherding them in carefully orchestrated visits). We have also reinforced mystique by being less accountable for forecast accuracy and other things. “Just trust me, we’ll get a purchase order.”

Related to the previous point, we resist treating sales as a disciplined process. Recently, I have been involved in coaching a new Business Development VP. He did not have a sales background, but he was the best candidate for the job. He had a very rich and successful project management background. As you might expect, he was very concerned with his success in this role. I counseled him to think of sales as a specialized application of project management: You establish goals and objectives, you identify the critical activities to meet the goals, you set milestones and schedules to make sure you are making progress. Five months into his new role, he is well on the way to creating one of the most effective sales organizations I have encountered---all because he is applying the discipline, focus, and process orientation from his project management background to the sales organization. He has had to pick up some new terminology, some new skills (prospecting was his biggest worry, but he is doing fantastic).

While this is not new, I think we need to upgrade our thinking and skills around basic project management, process design/management, and systems thinking. All of what we do is a specialized application of those disciplines.

On a related point, much of what has been done and many of the tools in the quality movement, whether it is TQM, Six Sigma, Kaizen, or something else. These offer tremendous capability to improve performance and put discipline to what we execute.

Customers can be more informed and less knowledgeable: The internet, Web 2.0, Sales 2.0 provide the potential for customers/prospects to do much more research and to be both more knowledgeable on your products, competition and alternatives. At the same time, these tools have eliminated market entry barriers for everyone so there is a lot of crap available as well. Immediately, anybody posting a comment, writing a blog, sending a tweet, knowing how to spell www, becomes an authority.

The noise level---the stuff everyone has to sift through is skyrocketing. Will your customers take the time to sift through the pages of garbage and find good information from credible sources? Are we providing good information that is easy for the customers to find and absorb? The answer to both questions is probably not. This creates great opportunity and challenge to all sales people. The bar for performance is being raised by the sheer availability of information. The challenge to correct mis- or bad impressions is even greater. Sales people are going to have to be much more nimble in understanding and leveraging these tools, as well as making sure customers are truly, accurately, and well informed.

We have done too good a job in training our customers to have a low expectation of sales. Over the years, through our performance---pitching products rather than solving problems, focusing on the deal rather than producing value, getting the transaction done rather than building relationships---our customers have become conditioned to a lower level of buying behavior. I’ve been involved in situations where the customer just doesn’t have the time for a “value based” buying/selling process. Combine this conditioning, their natural wariness of sales people, and the fact they are time poor and pressured themselves, it creates great challenges in responding to the customer needs in a value added manner.

Let me stop here. In the next section addresses systemic business issues that overlay these issues, making the job of a sales professional even more difficult.

Sales Force Ineffectiveness, Conjecture On The Future Of The Profession, Part 2 of 3 -- Not Just A Sales Problem

Sales Force Ineffectiveness, Conjecture On The Future Of The Profession, Part 3 of 3 – What Do We Do?

Sales Managers, Use It Or Lose It.

I work with sales executives and professionals everyday. Many of the organizations have invested millions of dollars/euro/yuan/yen in tools (CRM, Sales 2.0) and training. Yet the results aren't there. The expected improvements in productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness just aren't there. What's wrong, why aren't organizations getting the results? What does it take to get real performance improvement.

At the risk of biting the hands that feed me, the problem is not with the vendors, it's even not with the sales people themselves. The problem rests with sales management.

Let me give an example. Just a couple of days ago, I met with several sales leaders for a Fortune 100 company. Over the years, they had invested millions of dollars in several sales training programs and a coaching program. I knew these programs well, they are truly outstanding programs (second only to those we offer----sorry, I had to throw that in). Yet in meeting with these leaders, they said the sales people weren't performing, they weren't spending enough time planning or in front of customers, they weren't getting the expected results from what they had done.

I expressed my surprise. I asked them: "What happens when you review opportunity, account, or territory plans with your people? What are you seeing on the templates your training company provides?" Their response, "We don't look at those, we trained the people and hope they use them, but we don't use them in our reviews."

I went on and asked, "What about your coaching? That program has some guides and templates, aren't those working for you? Are you using the review process they recommend?" I got the response I expected, but hoped not to hear, "Those are too time consuming, we squeeze coaching in when we can, but the business is too hectic. The program gave us some good concepts to think about when we do talk to our people."

These executives were seeking my recommendations about how to improve performance---and as part of that they wanted a training program and some tools that would fix the performance issues.

As much as I wanted to propose a program to them, I had to tell them, "You don't have a training problem. No training program I could recommend will address the issues that you raise. The 'fix' to this problem is easy---it's you. You need to change your behavior, you need to change how you conduct reviews, you need to start leveraging the tools you have invested in, and expect the sales people use them as well. Use what you have or lose it!"

This isn't unique to this company, I see it in too many organizations. If management isn't using the tools that have been introduced to the sales people---tools intended to improve productivity and results, why should we expect our people to use them.

Management and executives have the obligation to use and reinforce the tools, training and processes put in place to improve performance. If you don't use them, your people will never use them. It's not their problem, it's management's problem. If you don't integrate the tools, processes, training into the fabric of your business; if you don't make it a part of your daily management process, you are wasting your money and your people's time. You will not get the results you expect.

I feel bad about this opportunity, I hate turning away business. But they already had solutions in place, they just weren't using them. The 'fix' didn't require time or investment, it just required a change in management behavior.

Tomorrow, I will give another example of how easy it is for management to set a tone to drive major changes in results and to get the most out of your investments in tools, training, and processes.

Is Everyone In The Same Boat, Rowing In The Same Direction?

So we've completed all the layoff's, we've re adjusted our strategies to recognize the new realities of the global economy, and we are rushing forward at 200 mph to drive business. All of a sudden, confusion, crises, and miscommunication dominates our waking moments. Who does what, to whom? What are our priorities? What about the things that Jill used to do, but she's gone? I thought this was my job, but now you're telling me something different? You're asking me to do the work of all the people you just laid off---I can't cope!

Too often, we are seeing this with our clients and other organizations struggling to adapt with the rapid changes and adaptations the new economy creates. Executives are moving fast, sometimes too fast, and the organizations are left behind. Most often, we see reductions and layoffs, but no change in priorities and workloads. Too few, already overburdened people are forced to pick up the workloads of those that are left. Or, executives have shifted the priorities and strategies, but these changes have been accompanies with clear expectations of what it means to each person in the organization and their job responsibilities.

The outcome:

• Changes that were hoped for are not implemented.
• People are more confused, more overworked, and demoralized.
• Customers are confused, they don't know who to work with, what to do.
• Things that were supposed to speed things up, making the organization more efficient are actually bogging things down.
• Organizations are not producing the results management expected, so now
  management starts looking at further reductions---the death spiral continues.
  

Organizations are going through massive changes. Leaders need to help their people understand those changes and their role in executing the changes. Leaders must assure everyone is in the same boat, rowing in the same direction, and that everyone is in stroke! Organizational Effectiveness in executing the changes should be the focus of management.

In implementing these shifts, leaders should:

• Stop and make sure they and everyone in the organization knows, understands, and has internalized the changes and their roles in implementing them.
• Clearly identify those things that were important and used to be done
  that now must be stopped. What you stop at this time is more important than what you continue doing.
• Explicitly redefine roles and responsibilities of everyone on board. They simply can't pick up the workloads of others. The organization's priorities have changed, make sure everyone knows their role in implementing the changes.
• Redefinition of the roles and responsibilities helps to keep important things from falling through the cracks. It eliminates the issue "I thought that was Bob's job." It eliminated wasteful redundant efforts---two people doing the same thing.
• Communicate your new strategies, priorities, roles and responsibilities to your customers. Make sure any changes you implement make it easier for your customers to buy from you, to get their questions answered, and to get service from you.
• Identify and establish new metrics that support the changes in strategy, priorities, and roles. The old metrics are probably no longer appropriate. After all, they were based on a completely different set of organizational assumptions.
• Monitor--but don't micromanage, but be aware people may still be confused, feel overwhelmed, or haven't internalized the changes. The moment you see problems cropping up, jump on them, clarifying priorities, strategies and the new roles.
• Communicate, communicate, communicate---to your people, your customers, and suppliers. Make certain they aren't confused, make sure they are aligned.

Alignment is critical to every organization. When making changes that many organizations are doing, making sure everyone in the organization, your customers and suppliers are in the same boat, going in the same direction ---- aligned----is critical to success. One of the best tools we have seen to help organizations do this quickly and effectively is the Organizational Effectiveness Profile (OEP).

Organizations are going through massive changes. Speed is critical, but only if everyone is aligned, focused and working together as effectively as possible. Make sure you take the time to get everyone in the boat!

Do Great Sales People Make Good Sales Managers?

There was an interesting thought posed in LinkedIn today: “Good sales people make good sales managers.” It went on to ask the characteristics of good sales managers. The question struck a chord, a dissonant one, provoking me to respond. I’m sure I have missed a lot of characteristics of great sales managers, and would ask for your addition, deletions, edits. Here’s my response and the list I started with:

Great sales people are sometimes the worst sales managers. Likewise, some mediocre sales people end up being stellar sales managers.

There is a long list of leadership skills/traits that are important for managers. I will stay away from repeating these.

Some specific areas that I think are often overlooked for sales managers:

1. Very process oriented. Today's sales manager cannot be involved in every deal, issue or transaction. They have to have a strong process in place, make certain their people understand and are executing the process. The sales manager has to continually monitor the process, taking deep dives in problem areas to help their people address them.

2. Disciplined and performance oriented. Closely tied to the previous point, the sales manager must have a strong focus on performance and performance improvement. This requires having the right metrics in place, making sure people understand what they are accountable for, giving them the opportunity to perform, being there to coach them when they have problems, and being prepared to take the appropriate actions if performance problems are not resolved.

3. Loyalty to the organization and their people. The sales manager is often caught between a rock and a hard place---the objectives of the organization sometimes come into conflict with what is best for the team. Effective sales managers are actively involved in setting organizational strategies and priorities (at least in terms of sales) and engage the sales people in executing them--though they may resist---which requires strong engagement and coaching. At the same time, sometimes the "organization" is insensitive to the sales people. The sales manager needs to defend the sales people to the organization, making sure they are heard.

3. Strong business orientation and focus. Make the right business decisions—both for the customer, for the sales organization, and for the business. Understanding how businesses work and what drives them.

4. Incessantly customer focused. If I have to say more, then we really don’t understand the point of professional selling.

5. Incessantly curious---driven to learn and improve. Incessantly curious about solving customer problems. Incessantly curious about the art and science of professional selling—driven to improve the performance of each individual in the organization, the organization as a whole, his own personal performance, and the business. This means they probably spend much more time asking questions and listening then they do talking.

6. Appropriately compassionate. Understand what drives people—customers, sales people, support people, others in the organization. Able to understand their points of view and what drives them. Able to communicate and work with them in a matter that demonstrates respect and trust. At the same time, able to make tough decisions—but with compassion based on the impact on individuals.

7. Able to sublimate their egos. Sales management is about leadership, growing and developing people, growing and developing the organization, growing and developing the business. It is not about how great you are and your past victories. It requires admitting you are wrong when you are. It requires being able to change your point of view.

8. Problem solvers. Driven by solving problems, finding ways to overcome obstacles, not being wed to the past. Creative and innovative in adapting new approaches to address issues and improve the business.

9. High energy. Constantly moving forward, setting strong examples for everyone around. Note, I am not saying high activity, high meeting orientation. High energy is different than meaningless activities.

10. Value, principle driven. Without a strong value system, a manager has no context in which to make decisions and drive the organization. Without sticking to the values and principles, the organization will wander and not produce results.

11. Thoughtful, reflective, good sense of humor. Self explanatory.

12. Able to leap tall buildings without tripping. Sales managers don’t need to have a big “S” on their chests, but they need to inspire and motivate others.

I’m sure I’ve missed some and could go into much more detail on each item. But I look for all of these in hiring great sales managers!

What would you add? Are there any you would eliminate?

Reducing the Learning Curve: Rapid Onboarding Critical to Sales Performance

Guest Post By Jeffrey Stanley, Director of Sales Excellence, AT&T Mobility


All sales managers know the problem…we’ve spent months recruiting, interviewing and hiring the right person. The great hire has started, all of a sudden management is complaining: Why aren’t they producing sales?

Or even worse, we know that we’ve made a great hire, sent them to training and assigned them a strong territory. However, after 3 or 4 months they get frustrated and leave. Not only do we have to take the time to go through the process all over again, but we have the tremendous expense and more importantly, the opportunity costs. We experience months with no coverage and lowered productivity in a critical sales territory…more months of recovering, re-building relationships, and restoring sales momentum.

It’s a nightmare every sales manager lives and in our experience, there are two root causes to this problem. The first is poor hiring; the second is that organizations do not have an adequate onboarding process.

Much has been written on hiring. However, having a focused, disciplined onboarding process is critical to success and retention. Onboarding for many companies is: “here’s your Blackberry and PC, here are your log-in’s and the bathroom is down the hall on the right”. New hires then receive some amount of product training, their territory assignment, quota and the following question…what’s your forecast for next month? And the result:

- Very long ramp times to productivity—meaning you are losing lots of business;
- Frustrated new hires, resulting in higher attrition;
- Return to go…do not collect $200…Do Not Make Your Numbers!

A proactive onboarding process rapidly assimilates new hires into the organization, makes them comfortable with their role, and gets them productive much more quickly. Sales Onboarding initiatives have demonstrated upwards of 40% improvement in productivity and an ROI within 2.5-3 months.

Regardless of whether your company has an extensive new hire development program, there are some best practices that will help with new hire onboarding, productivity and reduced attrition:

1. New hire onboarding needs to be well thought out and effectively communicated. Document “administrative” onboarding activities (id, systems access, laptop, mobile device, contact lists etc…) and timelines associated with each. Arrange for administrative onboarding items as soon as SLA’s will allow. The more transparent this part of the process, the more quickly a new hire can feel comfortable with the new position and focus in on their development. This helps set the tone in your relationship as a coach and advocate with the new hire.

2. Clearly communicate your expectation of the new hire, as well as the onboarding process. Define skill requirements, sales systems, processes, activities, resources and associated timelines within new hire lifecycle. Determine how this relates to the ramp to full-quota and what is the plan to get there?

3. Utilize the diverse resources that are available to you including: HR, formal training programs, web resources, subject matter experts and multiple levels of leadership. Expose the new hire to company resources, strategic partners and senior executives to better enable their understanding of the “big picture” and provide a model for success in the new organization.

4. Engage the new hire in his or her development. Use an internal assessment if available. If not, get their input as to the level of expertise in certain skill areas. But beware of biased self assessments…validate with observable coaching.

5. Assign a mentor to help a new hire navigate and prioritize their way through the company.

6. Conduct regular 1on1’s with your new hires. Be honest in your assessment of their progress and openly address any issues and concerns. Consistently review activity, sales funnel, performance metrics and expectations vs. results.

7. Start formal and informal training early in the new hire’s lifecycle. Don’t send your seller off to new hire training 5 or 6 months after they have started. At that point they are most likely (hopefully) too engrained in deals and customer engagements to truly benefit from new hire training. Along the same lines, drive your training organization to develop a curriculum that is appropriate to your sellers and your sales process.

8. Develop an understanding of what is and isn’t covered in the new hire curriculum and to what degree. Reinforce and inspect where necessary and work with your new hire to create an individual development plan to reinforce and complement formal training.

9. Make territory planning and reviews a high-priority with the new hire. This ensures an understanding of their module and agreement on the prospecting strategy. It also will help eliminate excuses of inequitable territory assignment should there be sub-par performance.

10. Make onboarding one of your top priorities. If you feel like other sales and operational imperatives make this an impossibility, then perhaps you should consider creating an “Onboarding Sales Manager” who would assume management and developmental responsibility for new hires in their first 4-6 months; ensuring a focus on the fundamental skills, practices, processes and systems necessary for a new hire’s success.

Don’t leave the onboarding of your new hire’s to chance. Manage the entire process proactively and you will reduce the time to productivity and maximize retention.

Jeff Stanley has 20 years sales and management experience focused on telecommunications and outsourcing. Questions and comments can be directed to j-stanley@comcast.net.