My last post mentioned the poll I put up on LinkedIn - What is the most important thing for sales reps to succeed in doing… and I had some very interesting results and a good number of comments. I believe the comment from Peter Styles is most apt for this post… “Sales budgets drive the business therefore achieving sales targets are most critical”. Let’s break this sentence down into the two points:

“Sales budgets drive the business…” uh-huh… makes me think that sales are important part of running the business…

“…therefore achieving sales targets are most critical”… uh-huh again… me thinks achieving target is also important.

Fact is, apart from share capital, loans, overdrafts and the like, the only way the company is going to get the money to do what it wants is through sales… sales are the life blood of the company… uh-oh… so if this statement is true, which it is, then why o why do most companies do their best to restrict selling… I know this happens because CRM systems are implemented; and these systems stifle the sales effort by sucking in irrelevant data for the benefit of management. These tools and the data within them are often so political that the sales professional has no choice but to play the political game in order to keep their job. We want people selling rather than having to worry about politics and keeping their jobs!

If you want to turbo charge your sales effort then you need to take heed of our second manifesto item (there are ten in all).

Manifesto #2… Winning companies treat sales people as entrepreneurs running mini businesses within companies.

This means not only treating them differently, but also providing them with the right tools. Away with the tools that look to manage their activity to giving them the tools to do the job – tools to help them sell… not tools to help manage them. Put a proper tool in place that helps the sales professional to plan how they are going to make their number, provide the tools for developing the opportunity and provide the sales management support that adds value to the entrepreneurial spirit and you will find that more people will hit target… after all, is this not why sales people are employed… to hit target?

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Currently, one of my favourite quotes is often attributed to Albert Einstein and his definition of insanity…

“Doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.”

The reason why I find this quotation so appealing is that it is for our times… most of the world is in recession and therefore for many organisations are reporting that their sales are down. I was looking at the latest quarterly results of a potential new client today to read that sales are forty percent down on the same period last year. This is not uncommon. As a consequence, some organisations are letting many of their sales professionals go… they can’t afford people who no longer bring home the bacon. If you did not know, the idiom ‘bring home the bacon’ is generally agreed to mean… to earn money to live on. If sales don’t bring home the money then the organisation can’t live and so they need to reduce their outgoings accordingly and the place to start is often with those that no longer seemingly contribute. As my wife often says, there is no point keeping and feeding a hen that doesn’t lay; and who am I to argue… particularly if I want my Fitch! My wife keeps many hens and feels no anguish in having to dispatch a hen that no longer brings home the bacon or in chicken parlance… lays eggs. Now that would be doing something different hens producing a full breakfast… bacon and eggs!

The idiom of bringing home the bacon is, it appears, attributed to a church in the English town of Dunmow. In the twelfth century, the church promised a side of bacon (also called a Fitch) to any married man who could swear before the congregation and God that he had not quarrelled with his wife for a year and a day. A husband who could bring home the bacon was held in high esteem by the community for his forbearance. The side of bacon is a tradition that continues to this day with the Dunmow Fitch Trials and is open to any married couple from anywhere in the world. So if you need to bring home the bacon you know where to go.

I don’t have any statistics of how many brought home the bacon, but I suspect that if there was a structure in place to support the individual husbands’ in the art of forbearance then I suspect there could have been many more carrying home their Fitch. Providing support to the individual is just the segue I needed to bring this post back on course and introduce the first of ten manifesto statements that explains my vision for the development of sales productivity…

Manifesto #1… The sum of the parts is greater than the whole. Focus on the individual salesperson, not the organisation.

The traditional way in which many organisations look to improve the productivity of the sales team is to introduce sales tools. All sales tools seem, over the last few years, to have morphed into the ubiquitous CRM platform. CRM is a top down approach and the tool is implemented for the benefit of the organisation not the sales professional. As our Manifesto #1 states; salespeople as a collection of individuals are more important than the organisation as a whole. This is because each sales professional has a sales target to achieve and if you want the organisation to make its number then you have to make sure each and every salesperson makes theirs. Focus on the individual, not the organisation. This is a bottom up approach and it means providing the sales team with the tools that help them do their job, not tools that help the organisation to keep an eye on them.

The problem as I see it is that CRM has had its day. Expecting CRM to provide improved productivity is about as likely to happen as pigs are to fly. (Notice a theme coming through!). Keep pushing in the hope things will be different is pandering to Albert’s definition of insanity… “Doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.” If an organisation is to survive in this current climate then they need to up their game. People are still buying, there is still money going around, but to get hold of it you need to do something different and the first place to start is providing tools and support that help each and every one of your sales team to do their job. I’ll explain in coming post what some of those tools should be, but for now just remember it’s about focusing on the individual, not the organisation.

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