Some companies believe selling systems are restrictive.  Other companies view them as methodical and clumsy.  I, for one, am not a fan of the sequential step approaches that require this question be asked first, followed by this question and so on.  Those approaches drip with insincerity.

But a selling system is important.  From ManageSmarter.com’s What’s Your Plan?

The survey of over 500 sales professionals proves what most executives should already know: Their reps need a plan of action.

TAS found that companies that give their sales staff a concrete plan to close deals experience 39 percent less turnover. Their salespeople are also more than 50 percent more likely to meet sales expectations.

I’ve often wondered how a sales manager can manage a team without a selling system.  How does the manager guide the team to similar objectives?  How does the sales manager know what stage each prospect is at?  How does the sales manager identify the stages at which salespeople are losing prospects?

Imagine if a football coach didn’t require his players to follow a gameplan.  Each player would be asked to just run around the field and make things happen.  I could go on, but you get the picture.

My guess is that retention improves among companies with a selling system because the salespeople know specifically what is expected of them.  It also stands to reason that the majority of sales managers who incorporate a selling system stay active in coaching their salespeople and holding them accountable.  In other words, they are engaged sales managers.

I believe the best selling systems are those that specify specific information that needs to be learned before classifying a potential customer as a prospect.  Salespeople each have their own style and approach to qualifying, but certain key criteria determine what are the real deals.  Having a selling system provides a guarantee that the salespeople are focusing on the specific qualifying tasks that lead to pursuing prospects instead of tire-kickers.

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Hammer’s recent post brought back the memory of a experience I had about 18 months ago. I was with a sales rep at a meeting hastily put together because a vendor’s VP of Sales was coming to town. Although we had several very good, qualified meetings on the schedule, our local rep wanted to make sure the VP was kept quite busy with appointments.

So we walked into this last minute meeting not really knowing much about why we were there (man, do I hate that!!!). I asked the attendees to tell us what their role was within the organization, why they were attending the meeting and what they hoped to gain by meeting with us. (By the way, I had to interrupt the VP that wanted to start his presentation without asking any questions….)

One of the attendees responded by saying “I’m the vendor guy.” I was a bit confused so I asked him to explain. He went on to tell us that his role was to talk with vendors about their offerings. Period. Still confused, I asked him to explain his process and methodology.

This company had decided to have several resources within PURCHASING dedicated to talking with vendors. This plan was put in place to avoid having vendors talk directly to individuals within the company who were too busy to spend time with individual vendors. I was shocked. I simply asked, “How does that work?”

His reply was even more shocking. The gentleman went on to explain that his department knew what the company needed in virtually every area of the business. If they heard something that would pertain to a need, they would investigate further, then perhaps allow direct dialog with the actual users of products and services.

Needless to say, I was stunned. He went on to “assure” me that the individuals in his group specialized in certain areas. He said he was the right internal person for our product and would review it with potential users within the organization.

Wow. Those are some extreme measures to keep truly professional sales people from doing their job. Wrong way prospecting meets wrong way purchasing.

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We post ads in many locations as part of our sourcing activities. Those ads usually lead to solicitations for services as a set response to new listings. We received one email today that caught my eye. Here is an excerpt:

We can have qualified candidates available for you to interview, hire or work within 24 to 48 hours. Our extensive database of qualified candidates and team of experts enable us to provide you with candidates who exactly match what you are looking for.

An interesting proposition, don’t you think? Here is the rub for me – how do they know what I need? 1 to 2 days and they’ll have them available to hire or work, no less. This approach is what bothers me most about low-end, quick-turn recruiting.

My guess is that this company will send a bunch of resumes to me and make me sort out which ones to interview without truly knowing what I need. The fact that the candidates may be able to work within 24 hours sounds like summer staffing candidates.

The icing on the cake – our ad is for a VP of Sales.

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Selling Power.com published an article entitled Six Sins of Selling that discusses modern changes in selling and sales people’s need to change and adapt to them. Certainly that statement is true, but item #2 especially caught my attention.

Sales Sin #2: Selling personality rather than value
Customers will buy from people they like. There is no question about it. Today€™s buyer, however, is much more sophisticated and has much more information at his or her disposal. The information revolution gives customers a global arsenal of data and an almost limitless number of options. In the past personality may have been your core value. Today it will deliver only a slight edge, all things being equal. Today, value almost always trumps relationship. Learn your product, and practice ways to effectively articulate your value.

I was going through some old training materials that were gathering dust in my office. I read through the notes I had made about the course and notes to myself on some things to try. The Selling Power article is right on. I’m afraid some of the techniques of old would fall flat today. It truly is about value.

A good relationship brings value, but it is no longer a “primary” value to most buyers. It seems the ability to outline, explain and qualify the points of value to an individual prospect are far more important than how easy you are to get along with.

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There is a myth regarding strong salespeople that they have to be outgoing. I contributed a short piece to an article earlier this year in regards to this exact error. And then I read this quick blurb for Selling Power’s Identifying the Skills You Want in a Candidate:

Sure salespeople need to be outgoing and driven €“ those are a given, but what about qualities that people need to have to fit in your particular position?

No, that is not a given and not a truth. Writing in such generalities is not accurate because selling style is not as important as sales skills.

Style is simply a matter of how a salesperson will approach communication. Today’s complex, extended sales cycles often align more closely to a salesperson who is not necessarily an “outgoing” salesperson (a term that can be defined in more than one way).

Skills are the abilities that differentiate salespeople. A more thorough analysis also identifies the motivations, rewards and aptitudes of the salesperson. Understanding all of this information as a whole is tantamount to success in hiring salespeople.

This piece of advice from the article is valuable:

Kursmark also suggests reviewing the long-term objectives of your company. “You want to make a hire that’s going to be right for the current time period, but also for the future,” she says. “Are you looking to grow in a certain area? Are certain types of business becoming more important? If so, can you enhance that hire by bringing in people skills rather than fundamental skills? “You need to think long-term so when your company gets there, you’ll have the talent on board already,” says Kursmark. “You’ve laid the foundation.”

Absolutely correct. When we profile the sale for our customers, we look at specific information for today and, more importantly, tomorrow. Where do you want the sales position to lead? Many times managers are over-focused on specific aspects of a salesperson based in large part to a recent failure. Candidates are then compared to the previous salesperson who failed in the role. If any similarities appear, a strong candidate is downgraded.

It is important to focus on where you want the position to go and what ideal looks like in that role. Define those parameters and then hire salespeople with complementary skill sets for that position.

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We often speak of the costs of making a bad hire especially in sales. One bad sales hire can send prospects to your competition and sully your company’s reputation in the market all while you pay this salesperson. But what if it goes even further than that? In our litigious society, what if an employee decides to make a run at a discrimination lawsuit?

BusinessWeek online offers up some incredible examples in Fear of Firing:

-Many of the lawsuits may seem ridiculous. IBM is currently defending a case filed by James C. Pacenza, a plant worker it dismissed for visiting an adult Internet chat room while on the job. In his lawsuit, Pacenza claims that his propensity to such behavior stems from post-traumatic stress disorder, which he suffers as a result of military service in Vietnam, and that IBM violated the Americans with Disabilities Act.

-In October, 2002, Southview Hospital in Dayton fired Karen Stephens, a nurse who worked in a unit for premature babies and other at-risk newborns. Six other nurses had reported that Stephens was abusive to infants, according to court filings, spanking them when they were fussy, wagging their noses until they screamed in pain, pinching their noses shut to force-feed them, and calling them “son of a bitch.” Stephens, who was 60 at the time, sued Kettering Adventist Healthcare Network, which operates Southview, denying “inappropriate” conduct and alleging that the real reason she was let go was age discrimination.

-Even in the face of theft, Revolution Partners, a small investment banking advisory firm in Boston, balked before showing one of its employees the door. The woman had used her company credit card for a personal shopping spree and plane ticket, but Revolution retained an employment attorney, got the woman to sign a form waiving her right to sue for wrongful dismissal, and after she was fired took no legal action to recover the amounts improperly charged. “We’re a little firm, and the last thing I need is to spend a lot of time on a lawsuit, whether it’s warranted or not,” says Peter Falvey, one of Revolution’s co-founders.

Pathetic examples of malfeasance, don’t you think? It is difficult to predict which employees will choose this path if terminated. However, it is possible to do as much as possible to hire the best person for the job. Each hire leaves the company with some exposure for a potential lawsuit no matter how frivolous the accusation by the former employee. Invest in finding the best candidate and you provide some insurance to these headaches.

In our candidate assessing business, I have always believed that our prices should be double for identifying candidates that look good on paper to the hiring company but are not a match for the position based on the objective assessment. One parting thought about a bad hire who resides on your payroll for any extended period of time:

This set of divergent incentives puts line managers in a tough position. When they finally decide to get rid of the underperforming slob who plays PC solitaire all day in her cubicle, it can be surprisingly tough to do. And that, in turn, affects productive workers. “Few things demotivate an organization faster than tolerating and retaining low performers,” says Grant Freeland, a regional leader in Boston Consulting Group’s organization practice.

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From the opening line of a cover email:

I am out of work right now from some bad luck and am looking for a new job.

Outside of cursing, it is difficult to imagine a less impressive way to open a cover email. Almost anything would be better.

I read a different cover email in which the candidate referred to himself in the third person. “Jim has excellent communication skills. Jim has achieved success at….” I wouldn’t recommend that approach. Ever.

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Through our recent assessment work, we have noticed a number of candidates with traits that are not considered desirable in a sales role. In particular, those who have high Social and low Utilitarian motivations. Often, these people have a need to be liked, accepted and helpful even to their own detriment.

Those traits are desirable in many positions, but not sales. The main reason is this type of salesperson’s inability to qualify prospects by asking strong questions. A sales person that doesn’t qualify opportunities wastes valuable time, energy and company resources. They typically will take any meeting they can get, return with no particular purpose in mind and spend way too much time talking with people that will talk to them – not buy from them. They are loathe to call a perceived opportunity a dead end even when it clearly will never close.

In a previous life, I managed a sales rep with a similar motivational pattern. He brought a box of cookies to every meeting. In fact, he had an inventory of Perkins cookie boxes in the trunk of his car. He told every prospect that he was a “Cookieologist,” not a salesmen. Unfortunately, he was right.

The amount of time, energy, resources and stale cookies expended on unqualified accounts was ridiculous. His strategy was, “if they like me and know I’ll bring cookies to every meeting, eventually they’ll buy from me.” He would schedule an appointment and require resources (engineers) to join him in meeting with anyone who would talk to him.

Real prospects want to be qualified. They have no more time to waste than a truly effective sales person has to waste. A salesperson skilled in assisting prospects in being qualified will earn the respect and business of the buyer. This ability is far more important than the limited skill set of a cookieologist.

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Red Bird and myself are fighting over the chance to claim this CareerJournal.com article – The Art of Playing Dumb To Deter Unwanted Tasks.  Jared Sandberg is an entertaining writer and I highly recommend this article.  At first I thought it was tongue-in-cheek, but it is not.  This ability is a real artform.

Strategic incompetence isn’t about having a strategy that fails, but a failure that succeeds. It almost always works to deflect work one doesn’t want to do — without ever having to admit it. For junior staffers, it’s a way of attaining power through powerlessness. For managers, it can juice their status by pretending to be incapable of lowly tasks.

In all cases, it’s a ritualistic charade. The only thing the person claiming not to understand really doesn’t understand: That the victim ultimately stuck with the work sees through the false incompetence.

I used to work for a manager who consistently asked about the fax machine – should the papers be face up or face down?  We answered the question 5 different times in spite of the clear hieroglyphics on the fax machine.  The question continued so we added a label stating face down.

The question still continued so the office manager simply took over the task for him.

A great quote to end the article:

Strategic incompetence involves a lot of unnecessary posturing, notes Robert Sutton, a professor of management science at Stanford University. But it’s not all bad. “One way in which lower-status people feel more esteem in the presence of higher status people is to show they have a skill that’s valued and needed,” he says.

It can signify a mutual respect found in other hierarchies, he adds. “I think of apes grooming.”

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So which is more important to employees, pay or benefits (specifically health benefits)?

In last week’s Workforce Management’s newsletter, a nationwide survey was recently conducted by the National Business Group on Health that asked 1,619 employed people that specific question. They found that employees in the U.S. consider their health plan to be their most important benefit. Furthermore, in a world of rising health care costs, employees would rather give up wage increases and other benefits to preserve health care coverage.

More than 50% said they would accept fewer choices in order to keep their premiums low and roughly 75% would rather receive employer health benefits than get paid more and need to purchase their own health insurance. Additionally, more than 80% said they would rather see their salary or retirement benefit reduced rather than their health benefits if their employers need to reduce total compensation.

These findings don’t surprise me. These findings follow right in suit with what we often hear from talented candidates as our clients work through offers with them. Health benefits usually are the second item candidates look at in an offer letter. The benefits are viewed in almost in tandem with the compensation (salary/commission) package.

They always go hand-in-hand in today’s world. I remember back in the ’80′s when I would breeze past “rich” co-pay plans – that benefit was expected. Today, candidates view the benefits with more scrutiny than the salary/commission plan. I have seen more offers turned down because of the health plan not being acceptable than I have seen for the base salary and commission schedule.

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