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WORLD CLASS SALES ROUNDTABLE:
Coaching and Motivation
"It is extremely useful to learn from other people's successes and failures and to listen to their advice."
-- Cindy Shulman, Exxon Chemical |
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By Gerhard Gschwandtner
Publisher, Selling Power
Photos by Debra Celecia
Selling Power: What motivates your salespeople besides the participation in the profits of UPS?
JOEL ROSSMAN: Our salespeople don’t receive commissions, but we have a go-year history of upward mobility. Most of our senior managers come from within the organization. As you travel through the country, it is not uncommon to meet people who have been in the business for 25 and 30 years. We are a privately held company and we reinvest our profits. We have created a very solid company with exciting opportunities for our partners.
Traditionally managers reward people for delivering high performance; does anyone have a program that is different?
RICK BUYENS: At AT&T we have had a long tradition of rewarding the high performers. For example, this year the top 3 percent go to Hawaii, the top 25 percent in my organization go to Naples, Florida. In addition to positive recognition, I believe that there is a need for a program that deals with the poor performers. I asked myself the question, what do we do with those people who are not meeting quota? Why do nonperformers continue to receive base pay? To develop a high-performance team, managers need to do both: reward excellence and deal with poor performers. People need to know that there are consequences when goals are not met. I don’t want salespeople to fall into the entitlement trap. I believe that a sales organization needs positive tension. People need to be held accountable for performance.
ISABEL KERSEN [Professional Society of Sales & Marketing Trainers]: I agree. In many sales organizations there seems to be a widespread tolerance for mediocrity. These people are not absolute failures, but they are not doing poorly enough to be fired and they keep just going and going.
How does coaching fit with sales management?
PETER DANIS [Boise Cascade]: I believe that coaching is increasingly neglected in American business. There is a lot of performance planning, a lot of reviewing and very little coaching.
MARY COMMITTE [Marketing Mastery]: I think that it is not done because sales managers don’t know how to do it.
HOWARD STEVENS [H.R. Chally Group]: We have learned from our benchmarking research that finding the right span of control is very important. If you are a sales manager who supervises I5 or more salespeople, you have little time left for coaching the sales team. The administrative tasks and the paperwork become too demanding.
MIKE WINES [Reynolds & Reynolds]: We have to encourage our front-line managers to manage people, not things. Get them out of the habit of managing numbers, move away from over-analyzing how many products have been sold, etc. Our front-line managers should focus more on developing their people, helping them with skills development, market development and customer development.
What system do you have in place for coaching at AT&T?
RICK BUYENS: We want our sales managers to spend about 40 percent of their time coaching. We roll out our coaching class to all managers. I try to sit down with my general managers twice a year in a formal session and provide informal coaching more frequently.
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"If you ask managers whether they think they have good coaching skills, they say yes, but if you ask them to describe the process, they aren't able to do it." -- Isabel Kersen, Professional Society of Sales & Marketing Trainers |
ISABEL KERSEN: Most sales managers don’t understand the coaching process. If you ask managers whether they think they have good coaching skills, they quickly say yes, but if you ask them to describe the process, they are not able to do it. If they can’t describe it, they can’t apply it. Most managers confuse coaching with giving directions. They think that if they tell someone to do the job in a certain way, that it means coaching.
CINDY SHULMAN [Exxon Chemical]: I think it is important for salespeople to have strong internal and external industry networks. Mentors also play a key role in providing guidance. It is extremely useful to learn from other people’s successes and failures and to listen to their advice. In larger companies salespeople have a vast experience base to draw on to develop effective and efficient road maps to results. Coaching through mentors, colleagues and supervisors is a valuable and important responsibility.
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Excerpted from Selling Power magazine,
January 1998
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