A couple of weeks ago I posted on a friend’s review experience and now it’s time for a follow up. She relayed to me another experience she had with her manager. Once again, this is an example of what not to do as a sales manger.

My friend set the personal goals she wanted to attain so that her territory had a good chance at winning the contest. In fact, she started talking with the rest of the team and they each set their own goals to win (unbeknownst to the manager). On the manager’s weekly conference call, the team found out they had already moved up a place in the standings.

After the call, the manager held a quick impromptu meeting with the team and told them they had 2 specific add-on services they needed to start selling. He told them that he would give them a spiff for every time they sold one of these services. Then he told them if they sold 10 he would give them a half day off work or the spiff, whichever they preferred.

Looks great, right? Unfortunately the service is a commodity and is more work to sell than any of the other services. If someone were to catch on fire and actually sell 10 of them in this time period, they should be running the company. As a sales manager it is important to understand the reality of the obstacles your team faces before promoting incredible contests or spiffs.

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We have written much about the flattened org chart that the younger generations subscribe. The extremely veridical, military-like chain-of-command days are waning in the modern work world. The decision-making distribution of authority is having a tremendous impact on slow-to-react companies.

I encountered this shift years ago working for a company that was headed up by older managers. My group made a presentation to management to streamline the complex business model we were running. Instead of a near-impossible vertical structure, we recommended distributing the decision process to the different business groups. The approach, which we thought made the most sense in terms of efficiency, was to have managers individually guide each unit. There would be one over-arching manager to maintain consistency throughout the distributed units.

The plan was summarily dismissed.

The older managers simply refused to permit low level command-and-control decisions to be made without their micro-management. Their plan, which was followed, was to try to retain control through a single hierarchy that made even the most insignificant decisions laborious. This small company should have been nimble and aggressive in the market place. Instead they moved like an ocean liner and eventually went out of business.

This long setup leads to a CareerJournal.com article titled How Understanding the ‘Why’ Behind Bosses’ Decisions Matters. From the article:

In a study last year, Mr. Clampitt found that employees are more likely to support decisions when they are told about the rationale. The study surveyed roughly 300 managers and employees at more than 100 U.S. employers, asking what they knew of decisions and how supportive they were of them. Mr. Clampitt says employees of companies that explained decisions more fully were more than twice as likely to support those decisions as workers who got less information.

I can personally relate to those findings. There is nothing worse than mushroom management.

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CareerJournal.com offers When Managers Neglect To Coach Their Talent which covers a principle we incorporate into our process.

“The role of people-managers — who develop talent and create sustained profits for companies — isn’t as valued as it should be,” says Mr. Harter, co-author with Rodd Wagner, also of Gallup, of “12: The Elements of Great Managing.” If it were, he adds, companies wouldn’t promote to management those who succeeded at a prior job but don’t have the foggiest idea about how to motivate people.

Blame the top executives who simply grade their managers on their financial results rather than on how well they groom and retain good employees.

The promotion based on financial results runs rampant through most sales departments.  The top salesperson is often promoted out of his or her revenue-generating position and into a manager role where they are asked to coach and motivate others.  As many of you know, this approach is replete with pitfalls.  Yet it continues.

Sales is historically a high-turnover department, but it doesn’t have to be.  The fix is to look for management talent to fill these roles, not necessarily the top revenue-generating salesperson.  The two-fold pitfall of promoting a top producer is that often they do not have the best skill set for effective management and you simultaneously remove your top revenue-generator from their territory.  And let’s not get started on the selling sales manager.

If you wondered why this topic is so important, I close with this:

Companies are filled with alienated employees who feel underutilized and ignored, and are either coasting or searching for new jobs elsewhere. A whopping 70% of U.S. employees say they feel either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” at work, according to a recent survey by the Gallup Organization.

Business units with such a large number of dissatisfied employees “have more absenteeism and lower productivity — as well as 51% higher turnover rates than those with engaged employees,” says James Harter, chief scientist for Gallup’s international management practice.

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We’re big fans of Hidden Business Treasures and the great insights they provide. Their latest post provides a tool for searching corporate websites that I was unaware of. Now, I’m no expert when it comes to researching the web, but perhaps you were unaware of this technique:

Here€™s the secret. DON€™T wander around the web site €“ instead, search the web site. Atlantic Trust does not have a search tool on their site €“ but Google (and Yahoo and Live.com) do €“ for every web site in the world.

For this exercise, go to Google and type in the following:

€œhuman resources€ site:www.atlantictrust.com

Read the entire post to understand how this tool can shorten your sales team’s prospect research work. It will be well worth your time and you will learn an effective search technique.

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