Your Culture is Your Best Teacher

It was the spring of 1981 and I had just joined Hewlett-Packard as a sales representative. I was drinking from the fire hose. It was my first sales job and I was learning a new career as well as a new company.

It was a heady time for HP. We were undisputed leaders in our market and were growing rapidly in the general business expansion of that time. What I observed around me was a great deal of youthful energy, and the primacy of our new products and their contribution to the markets we served. One example of that was how we interacted with our product divisions. When the divisions came to town, it was a natural rallying event for the sales force. We gathered after hours, shared drinks and refreshments with the visitors, and then grilled them mercilessly for the latest intelligence about markets, competitors, new products. They in turn grilled us for what we were seeing on the front lines. It was intense, but it happened in an atmosphere of shared commitment and collegiality. I found it wildly invigorating.

Looking back on it, I was learning powerful lessons from the corporate and local cultures within HP. As a company, our values included a commitment to technology and making a differentiated contribution to the state of the art in our markets. That had started with Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in 1939 and it was a cornerstone of HP culture. The behavioral norms I observed in the Dallas sales team included:

1. The willingness to dedicate after hours time to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the visit.
2. The importance of blending professional and social interaction in building teamwork across the company.

I was also figuring out how to get things done inside HP. The factory relationships that I built over a beer and snacks would enable me later to find my way to the right product development team to get a special feature I would need to close a major sale. I didn’t learn that in a breakout session within a newcomers’ orientation course. We were living it every day, and I learned it in a way that no workshop could teach me.

As a consultant, I have seen many very promising initiatives die on the vine for lack of full adoption. I believe that there are important considerations here for leaders who are considering some form of training to drive an organizational change:

• Aggressively test the new ideas and behaviors against the prevailing cultures. Are they complementary or likely to clash?
• Where the new behaviors are not tightly linked to or supported by the culture, treat the project as a change management challenge. Acknowledge the time, effort, and money it will take to integrate them into the DNA of the organization. Does the benefit justify the investment?
• Consider the long-term impact that you are seeking. As cultures take years to form, it will likely take years for the organization to fully embrace the new ways as “just the way we do things around here”. Can you afford the time? Will the benefits endure over the time it takes to realize them?

Your culture is your best teacher. Put it to work on your most important change initiatives.

You Don't Have to Tell Them How

I was facilitating a workshop this week which included a significant amount of sales coaching content and practice coaching within it. At one point, I broke the participants into small groups and sent them off to coach each other on the pursuit of one of their key opportunities. When they returned, I queried each of the teams on how their sessions had gone. Two of the teams reported sharply different outcomes of their coaching process. In one group, the participant who had received the sales coaching reported back strong success from the exercise. She and her coach had creatively explored the sales situation, and she reported some significant and real insights into the best approach to winning the opportunity. She was energized by the process and ready to go try the actions they had defined together. In the other group, the result was not so positive. After a little prodding, the person receiving the coaching painted a much different picture. He reported being discouraged by the lack of accomplishment and he reported no meaningful progress. Worse yet, he said he felt disrespected by the coach, and reported going along with the heavy handed solutions doled out just to get the exercise over with. All of these participants were successful sales reps and sales managers. What happened in these two sessions and why were the results so different?

In the successful session, the coach respected the front line knowledge of the rep, and listened with an attitude of curiosity as the rep laid out the story. They did not leap to a personal agenda of what the rep should do or how the deal should play out. They used their knowledge and experience to ask open ended and powerful questions that let the rep expand the level of detail of the story. Throughout, the rep was doing most of the talking. The coach fed back what they were hearing in a way that enabled the rep to see issues and gaps in their strategy that hadn’t to that point become evident. The discussion was producing clarity and awareness for the rep which enabled them to build on their own detailed situational knowledge to building a new and powerful plan that was theirs. Together they detailed out what the rep would do to take advantage of the new clarity. The rep’s personal ownership of the plan directly drove their commitment (and excitement) to play it out in their live sales situation.

The less successful coach made it about them. They listened just long enough to trigger a memory of how they had done it in the glory days. They went into telling mode - how they would attack the opportunity. They were teaching. The more successful coach made it about the rep. They let the rep explore the landscape and the options. They let them formulate their own strategy with the knowledge and skills they already largely possessed.

In that difference is the key to successful coaching. The successful coach believes (even if the rep doesn’t quite yet) that most if not all of the ingredients for success are there before the coaching begins. They understand that the coaching agenda starts with the rep and what they want to accomplish. They understand that effective coaching is all about helping the rep learn, and not about teaching them. The trick is for the coach and sales rep to work together to release the power that is already there and put it to work in the hands of the rep to create success.

Professional coaching - a new tool for the sales manager?

In my 20 plus years of sales management, the term “coaching” is commonly used to mean that in-the-moment performance feedback that sales managers give their team members after a sales call or some other significant event in a sales cycle. It also very often has a negative connotation, as it takes on a remedial tone.

As the business world is increasingly embracing the value of professional coaching to improve individual and organizational results, it might be time to expand the coaching lexicon to include the role that professional coaches can play in developing your sales team, and especially your high performers.

What is Professional Coaching?

The international Coach Federation defines Professional Coaching as “a professional partnership between a qualified coach and an individual or team that supports the achievement of extraordinary results, based on goals set by the individual or team. Through the process of coaching, individuals focus on the skills and actions needed to successfully produce their personally relevant results.”

How does it work?

The heart of the process is a dialogue between an individual or group and a professional coach. The discussion will focus on a topic chosen by the coachee. Topics often come from their professional life: an important near term challenge to be met; a need to increase their knowledge; a need to improve their ability to perform an important task; a need to increase their overall level of job performance. Personal or life goals usually relate strongly to our performance in the business setting. In that sense, the coaching might also address some of the following goals: identification and leverage of personal strengths; improving and work or communication styles; a need to make critical life or career choices; work-life balance; personal organization and life management.

The role of the coach is to help their client achieve clarity on their goals, a plan to achieve the goals, identification of barriers and inhibitors, and a specific plan of action. Regular dialogue with the coach facilitates the formulation of the plan and helps the client make steady progress and hold themselves accountable to the action plan.

In the coaching sessions, coaches apply a range of techniques drawn from professional management practices, the behavioral sciences, and best practices drawn from their personal experience and research and the support of organizations such as the International Coach Federation.

How does it differ from what I do in the course of supervising my team?

The manager and the coach share an important goal: That the coachee become successful and make significant contributions to their company and their individual careers.

The professional coach brings a different perspective to that goal. They approach the coaching engagement as a partner rather than a supervisor. That perspective enables them to afford the coachee a level of safety and confidentiality that they may not feel with their manager. The coach, as a third party, is able to achieve a level of objectivity that may be difficult for a manager within the organization to achieve.

The coachee recognizes that the manager and the company are making a visible investment in them and their future. That can pay benefits in their personal level of motivation, and their loyalty to the company.

How can I include it in the development program for my team?

Coaching can take a number of different forms.

It can occur individually or in groups. Coaching clients can be high potential employees where the company is wanting to accelerate their personal and professional growth. On the other hand, coaching clients can be employees with job performance issues where the company is seeking to go the extra mile in affording them the opportunity to improve their performance. While those two examples hit both ends of the performance spectrum, every sales professional can benefit from assistance in clarifying their goals, and building an actionable plan to reach them.

What are the signals that indicate that professional coaching might make a real difference?

Take some time to evaluate if there is something in your sales environment that might provide the “compelling event” for putting professional coaching to work with your team:

• Is there a critical challenge at stake that will make a material impact on the success of the company?
• Is there a compelling need to address it quickly?
• Is there a visible and critical gap in some aspect of your team’s ability to be successful?
• Has the organization missed a key objective and you are looking for a way to get them back on track?
• Has one of your successful team members experienced a step function decrease in their performance?

How would I get started in putting professional coaching to work with my team?

Drop me a line and I would be happy to discuss your situation with you. I’ll take you through a sample coaching session, using your performance improvement goals as the topic of our short discussion. You’ll get a sense for the coaching dynamic, and we’ll talk about the best way to put it this powerful process to work for you.

Helping Farmers Hunt

It was ten minutes to ten on Wednesday morning - almost time for the weekly business development call. Garrett had come to dread these calls. He knew he would have to report another week of little progress on deepening his funnel. While Garrett knew that he had to generate new opportunities, it was easy to get buried in the activity of serving his existing clients. Every week, Friday would come and he had spent virtually the entire week dealing with issues and urgent requests. His customers were a demanding bunch, and they were investing heavily with Garrett’s company. He was actually ahead of his annual sales goals. It’s just that he knew that his selling activity was out of balance. If his current level of business with this client dried up, he was in big trouble.

Sound familiar?

Most of us in our selling lives have had to deal with this paradox. Our sales people deal with it every day. As sales leaders, we have to help our teams balance the short and the long term demands of their jobs.

In current sales writings, people often use the hunter-farmer metaphor to describe the difference in selling styles between those sales reps who are predominantly caring for the needs of established customers (“farmers”) and those who are predominantly establishing new business relationships (“hunters”). Conventional wisdom holds that sales reps fall naturally into one style or the other. These preferences are often driven by whether the sales person is extroverted or introverted, their orientation toward working in teams versus individually, their level of energy and persistence, and other traits and skills. One well respected consulting group administers a 50 question web-based personality test, sends respondents a report which grades them on their hunting and farming orientation, and suggests the sales roles that are most appropriate for them. Some sales managers go farther to suggest that a sales rep with a predisposition toward one of the styles will not be successful in the opposite role.

While the argument for role specialization is a sound one, the reality for many sales managers is that they cannot afford the luxury of specialized roles. The sales manager must coach their team to play both roles successfully. Sustainable business results depend on the continuous development of new customers while taking excellent care of existing customers. That leaves the sales manager with the challenge of ensuring their team’s success in mixed assignments.

Here are ten tips for helping sales reps balance their hunting and farming activities to optimize their long term success.

Be clear about the sales results that are required for the rep to be successful

1. Set specific, measurable, and balanced goals: Acceptable performance can’t be reduced to just meeting short term quota goals. Sales reps need clear performance expectations around developing new business and in successfully executing all the selling activities laid out in their territory and account plans. It has to be clear that the sales leaders expect their team to meet ALL of their objectives.

Plan the selling activity

2. Analyze the territory, accounts, and opportunities: The territory and account planning must identify the key sources of business and how that business will be achieved. That analysis must be used to build the business results and selling activities which will form the basis for a balanced plan of selling activities.
3. Establish the results and success metrics that should be achieved for each component of the territory plan: Installed accounts may have straightforward goals for revenue retention and growth. New accounts or new target markets may require more modest goals which are appropriate for new business development. A modest revenue or account penetration goal in a new account may not move the revenue meter significantly but yet may represent much greater long term value to the company.
4. Identify specific selling activities that will achieve those results within the next review period: Once the desired results are clear, focus on what selling activities are required to achieve them. Make the activities clear and measurable so it will be easy to assess whether they were met.

Inspect what you expect

5. Conduct regular reviews: Sales people are masters at delaying real change in their selling behavior to let the boss move on to a new fad or approach. Regular reviews with a consistent focus are critical to signalling to the sales force that new behaviors are expected and will be measured. Many reps will not believe you’re serious until you have repeated the review cycle several times.
6. Balance the reviews across the the specific goals: Again, the review has to assess more than short term quota achievement. Review each goal and interim result in its own right.
7. Candidly assess shortcomings against the plan: What went right? What fell short? Why?
8. Be specific about what you learned: How can your team apply what they learned to assessing their territory more effectively, to writing more appropriate goals, to executing their plans more effectively?

Adjust the plan for the next period

9. Validate the goals and objectives: Have things changed? Are the goals still the right ones? Have new opportunities arisen that might change priorities?
10. Apply the learnings to planning the selling activities for the next period: Repeat the planning in steps 2-4 above. Set your team to succeed or to learn what held them back and to ready to address those issues in the future.

Successful sales managers help their sales teams see their selling plan as a series of campaigns with distinct beginnings, middles and ends. By balancing the selling activity and tracking achievable results across the entire sales process (not just the closing stages), they help their teams achieve short term success while laying the foundation for next quarter’s and next year’s business growth and sales quota achievement.