WORLD CLASS SALES ROUNDTABLE:

Leadership

" Our sales team is compensated based on how quickly and how efficiently they achieve customer satisfaction." -- Richard Harrison, IBM Story by Gerhard Gschwandtner Publisher, Selling Power Photos by Debra Celecia

Selling Power: How would you define leadership?

PETER DANIS [Boise Cascade Office Products]: Good leaders can take an organization to a place that they would otherwise not have gone.

DUANE MILLER [ACDelco]: First of all, good leaders give clear direction. They have a vision and also have a mission. The best leaders are often good salespeople.

RICK BUYENS [AT&T]: I think that good leaders have the ability to create a new vision. They communicate that vision throughout the organization, help people understand it and motivate them to work toward that shared vision. Ethics and personal values are very important characteristics of good leaders. Another important factor is the corporate culture.

We are in a business world where complexity has increased tremendously. There is no leader smart enough in any of our companies who can understand the complexity of the marketplace in order to set a single strategy that can be implemented throughout our organizations. The challenge for leaders is to create a set of loose principles to tap into the creative energy of every individual in the corporation. We need to allow people to create change and make their environment successful, yet we need boundaries, and we need to achieve ambitious goals. Managers need to encourage people to learn, stretch and grow. We need to create learning organizations that use the full skills and brainpower of all individuals.

"The challenge for leaders is to create a set of loose principles to tap into the creative energy of every individual in the corporation." -- Richard Buyens, AT&T

How do you create a world-class sales team at IBM?

RICHARD HARRISON: We want our sales force to be viewed as a solution provider. We built a responsive team that focuses on relationships as well as product excellence. Our salespeople benefit from many specialized resources. We try to aggregate the right resources to meet customer needs.

The job of an IBM salesperson is to represent the entire IBM organization to the customer. We follow what we call a customer relationship management process where we organize a team around that opportunity. The computerized opportunity management system allows us to identify the right experts with the right skills. What is unique about this approach is that the team is driven by the customer’s opportunity and not by some internal organizational need. Our sales team is compensated based on how quickly and how efficiently they achieve customer satisfaction.

How do you manage multiple teams?

RICHARD HARRISON: Our people realize that they are going to be on different teams all the time, reporting to team leaders at different locations. Technology helps us link all these processes. We use Lotus Notes and opportunity management systems where we are all connected in one place. That’s new for us, because we went from multiple divisions, multiple sales forces and multiple information gathering tools to one unified system.

How does Lucent Technologies create a world-class sales team?

FRANK COLEMAN: Our objective is to be recognized by our clients as the ultimate business problem-solving sales team. We use technology aggressively to achieve that goal. We make sure our sales teams have the best product knowledge. They know what problems they can solve best. Our salespeople need to understand what technological evolutions will be available three to five years from now so they can help the customer with today’s problems while keeping an eye on more advanced solutions that will be available in the future.

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Excerpted from Selling Power magazine,
January 1998

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