Stop Meeting With Your People
‘Look at this!’ Graham exclaimed. He was staring at his computer screen, an expression of angry disbelief on his face. ‘When I left here Friday, I had five open hours in my Monday calendar. Now, all that time is filled up with meetings. When am I going to get my work done?’
Sales managers are united in the concern that they are overloaded with meetings that cover a huge number of subjects: planning, forecasting, lost deals, finance, product development, HR procedures, “leveling” exercises, deal approval, pipeline reviews, contact strategy, key account planning, legal and contract review – not to mention escalations and emergencies.
This is true for every business we consult. And these are only the meetings that happen during the normal course of business. They don’t include the truly unnecessary get-togethers such as:
The ‘I’m feeling nervous so I want you to stop what you’re doing and gather some information for me to make me feel better’ meeting often initiated by senior managers.
The ‘I’ve got a great idea and now you’re going to come talk about it with me and 20 other key people’ meeting,’ often initiated by other department heads who believe that sales should sit in and be impressed.
And there's all the preparation and follow-up for these meetings: the spreadsheets, the slide decks, the email chains, none of which actually bring you or your team closer to hitting your sales targets.
Sales managers tell us that up to 80% of their time at these meetings is totally wasted. And, if they have had to include their salespeople in any of the activity, the loss of selling time mounts geometrically.
We hear nearly the same thing from salespeople who complain that their sales managers either call useless meetings or require them to go to meetings that other people have called. You may think that your meetings are really helpful to your people. Perhaps they are. Just know that you would be the exception. Very few salespeople have ever told us that their manager holds great meetings.
What can you do about this?
Roberto called me one day, laughing about a breakthrough he had just experienced.
‘I looked at my schedule for the New York trip and saw that I had every hour booked with one meeting after another. I called up each person on the schedule and suggested that we try to get our work done in half the time we had scheduled. Everyone was delighted to try, and I wound up with an extra three and-one-half hours on my hands.
‘I went back home, called each person on my team and suggested they do the same thing – and to take half the time they saved and do something for their families.
‘It changed everything for us!’
First, be dead honest with yourself about the meetings you attend. How many of them are well-planned and well-led? How many of them really hold your interest? How many of them are really worth your time? Really?
Second, draw a line in the sand with yourself and commit to never hold a poorly planned meeting again. Just stop doing it and start trying things that can truly help your people while bringing you solid insight and greater agency as a leader.
Before you call a meeting:
Ask yourself and others, ‘Can this be accomplished without a meeting?’ You’ll be surprised how often this is the case.
Add up the total person-hours that your meeting will require for preparation, the meeting itself, and follow-up. Divide by eight, and then determine if the meeting is worth that number of days taken from selling time.
When you do call a meeting:
Only invite the people who must be there and invite each one only for the time they need to be there.
Don’t just schedule the meeting for a standard period of time if half that time will do.
Plan a careful, timed agenda, and, if you are not a skilled leader, find someone who will lead the meeting for you.
Start on time, and always end a little early with clear very next steps defined and committed to.
Don’t forget refreshments and nibbles. (This is a lighthearted suggestion, but it works!)
After the meeting:
Minimize the follow-up. Only do what's needed to bring the purpose of the meeting to a successful conclusion.
Avoid circulating reports until they’re actually needed.
Get out of meetings that waste your time. If at all possible, be creative in avoiding meetings:
Ask for the agenda in advance to see if a meeting is worth your time.
Try some or all of the following:
Bow out gracefully by contributing your thinking in advance if it is being requested.
Ask which part of the meeting is absolutely critical to attend and come for that time only.
Give good reasons why you’re not attending, such as being at a customer meeting.
Always attend meetings held by your boss!
You’re a sales manager, not a politician. You’re paid to build an effective sales team, not attend meetings. Your best meeting is probably one-to-one, with your sales reps helping them get better and better.
Stop Managing Your Team.
Gareth (his real name) was our first employee, serving as director of operations. We quickly got so busy over the first few months that many things floated in his direction that he had to handle.
I sat down with him once for two hours but instead of discussing what had to be done. we focused on what he liked doing and…I was taken aback when he said that he was sick of operations. What he really wanted to do was train and consult.
The more he talked about what he wanted to do, the more certain he became. By the time we completed the conversation, he had decided that within three months, he would resign as Director of Operations and prepare himself to coach and train.
I was so impressed that I committed to help him make the transition. We hired a new director of operations, Gareth started coaching and training in our organization, and he is now one of our delivery partners whose work is valued by many.
Sales managers often try to manage their people as one unit instead of managing each person as an individual. This is one of the most common mistakes we see sales managers make.
This behavior often proceeds from good intentions.
They try to be fair and treat everyone equally. They check in with people the same number of times each week and conduct an equal number of reviews and planning sessions with each person.
They try to manage their team in team meetings to save time because they have such a busy schedule.
They try to manage people as a team to create team spirit and cohesiveness.
There’s some safety for you in treating people as a team, especially if your company is unionized either in fact or in spirit. You don’t want to leave yourself open to accusations of playing favorites or neglecting your people. You don’t want HR or an over-zealous higher-up requiring yet another employee satisfaction metric.
Unfortunately, managing people as a team often results in them adopting certain roles to play within the group. People tend to find their place in a system and remain stuck in that way of behaving. For example:
There’s the head of the pack, closely followed by someone eager to knock that person off.
There are the people in the middle, playing it safe, and either just making or just missing their targets – but never having a spectacular year.
There’s the bottom third of people trying hard, including a few sad cases who somehow hang on.
We are assuming that you want to build a sales team that shoots out the lights. You want an atmosphere of friendly competition. Even more, you want a culture of peer learning and support, where everybody is hitting their targets, quarter after quarter, year after year.
To achieve this, you need to appreciate that the notion of managing teams as a group is fundamentally flawed.
Say you have eight people on your team. What you really have is eight individuals. The eight individuals have different ambitions, needs, ways of learning, and styles of behavior. People require different things from you in order to perform at their best:
Some need competence training (contact management, an understanding of the path to lead their customers along, and skills to do that).
Some need attitude training (development of confidence, quick recovery from disappointments, seeing possibilities in every situation).
Some need training in how to execute – how to stay on target and firmly refuse to be distracted from winning.
This commitment to individuality requires time and skilled attention. This means getting really good at getting out of things that steal your time so you have time to build your team. This generates the dividends of better performance, loyalty and professional satisfaction.
Try the following experiment. It just might change things forever for you.
Individually, ask each person what he needs to do to exceed his targets. Learn about any concerns the person has that stand in their way.
Ask him what he needs you to do for him to succeed. Don’t accept facile answers. Dig deep for exactly what they need from you:
Changes in your management style
Protection from other people in the company
Training they require
Determine your next step and follow through on whatever you promise to do for and with the individual.
Take your time in this conversation. Don’t settle for the surface answers. Keep asking what’s preventing him from doing what he needs to do to succeed. Hold him accountable for figuring out what to do.
Stop Hiring Experienced People
I remember hiring Peter, an insurance veteran who had over 20 years of experience. He had a great CV, a strong book of business and he interviewed well. The indicators were good and I hired him.
He said he was eager to learn our system and build his career with our company. We invested in him with proper training and placed him under a very capable manager.
He started off with a couple of good months selling our products to his book of clients, but once the leads were spent, his poor work ethic was exposed and his sales dried up. It wasn’t long until Peter was let go and he went on to his next sales job.
The truth is that Peter never really wanted to change his ways and learn our system. What he wanted was a job to make money and to ply his trade the same way he’d always done it because that’s what he was comfortable doing.
Hiring experienced salespeople can be a real crapshoot.
It starts during the recruiting process. You contact salespeople with whom you’ve worked in the past. If they’re really good, they’re happy where they are. Maybe someone’s ready to jump ship or – best case – really looking forward to working with you again. Then you start remembering: were the ‘old days’ really that good?
You comb your network for referrals. That usually doesn’t produce many leads because all your peers are looking for experienced people as well, and they’re not about to pass along the really strong candidates.
Maybe your manager has been authorized to spend a boatload of money on a recruiting agency. The recruiter produces a list of candidates because producing a list is what you’re paying them to do. Then the fun begins.
Everybody’s CV looks perfect. (After all, they’re supposed to look perfect.)
Every candidate presents well during the interviews. (After all, they are in sales.)
Everyone looks pretty much the same during the pitch demonstrations. (There aren’t that many ways to do it.)
Probing questions are met with a logical answer, leaving you wondering about the real story.
You call their previous employer for a referral, which rarely yields the truth because they fear being sued if they say something critical.
You lay out more money for psychometric testing to try and get behind the story. Unfortunately, many test providers claim their instruments to be predictors of sales success.
Then you make your choice. Sometimes it works out, often it doesn’t, and it costs a lot of time and money.
But here’s the kicker. Even if you do succeed in hiring a hired gun, you’ve bought a serious problem: you’ve sent the message, ‘You already know how to sell.’
You’ve hired them to sell the way they’ve sold before and given away your right to shape how they will sell for you. You’re highly likely to wind up with a rep intent on doing things in his own way.
By repeating this approach to build your team, the likely result is a sales team that has no common framework for selling. And if you’re selling in a complex environment, you’ve multiplied the complexity of your team’s ability to harmonize their selling approach. If you don’t think this is happening, go out in the field and watch your team work. Ask them to explain what they are doing and the process of selling they are following. Watch to see if they actually do these things.
Perhaps you will be pleasantly surprised. More likely, however, you may find:
Multiple styles of selling that make it difficult to assess, track, and train what your team is doing that works or doesn’t work.
People mostly doing what they are comfortable doing (this is understandable) and not attempting to stretch, grow, and try new things (this is stagnating).
Various approaches to working within company processes, procedures, and systems. This impedes the discipline required to minimize internal problems and maximize efficiency.
Multiple understandings of the steps a customer needs to take to buy well. You may well have salespeople who have never thought about this before.
This shouldn’t be surprising. After all, if you hired these people because they already knew how to sell, then they came to apply what they already knew, not to learn something different.
If you are suffering from this dynamic - either a little or a lot - try something like this:
Meet with each of your team individually, and enroll them into a process of defining your team’s way of selling.
Spend time learning how each person sells, especially your high-performers. Identify which practices succeed and which don’t. (Note: Don’t be surprised to find that some of your people don’t actually know what they do - you may have to watch them work and identify this for them.)
Spend team meeting time to present your findings, and, with your team:
Identify a selling process that develops your customers into intelligent buyers and develops your team into skilled sellers.
Identify a simple system to help everyone plan their selling activity according to this process and track the results.
Secure everyone’s commitment to master this system to sell more and make more money.
You’ll never have to invest the time and money again trying to hire the ‘proven’ ones. Instead, you’ll have a cohesive sales force who work together, sing off the same hymn sheet, and can – over time – become masters at selling for your business. Your selling methodology will change, improve, and your people will help you do that.
Stop Being Positive
We worked with Howard, a very good manager who was frustrated with his sales team. He wanted his reps to actively use an input and output sales dashboard, but the reps kept making excuses and wouldn’t update it.
Howard finally called one of the reps and asked him directly, “What is standing in the way of you guys using the dashboard?” The rep said the team was afraid of using it because it would require even more work and commitment from the staff, plus it might be somewhat exposing.
Once Howard helped the reps recognize that their resistance was an issue of attitude, not of competence, they were soon using the dashboard – and their closing percentage improved.
No matter what a person’s sales ability, length of service, or technical expertise, the determining factor in performance is attitude. If he believes he can do something, if he expects to succeed, if he believes closing a sale is possible, there’s a strong likelihood that he will do it. Most people call this having a positive mindset.
Conversely, if someone lacks confidence because…
He is unfamiliar with a new product that he has been tasked to sell.
He feels dejected because he can’t find prospects who will listen to him.
He is worried because sales aren’t happening and he just lost the sure deal he was counting on.
He is all bent out of shape because the service department has let him down.
He’s afraid he isn’t going to make the cut.
...the chances of making a sale are predictably low. A negative attitude just isn’t going to produce consistently solid sales results.
Every sales manager wants his staff to be in a positive frame of mind not only because better sales will follow, but also because it’s no fun dealing with negative people who whine, moan, and complain.
Most sales managers take it upon themselves to cheer up their team so they can get back to selling. After all, your reputation and job security depends upon getting your people to sell. Managers try a number of ways to get people to be positive:
They try humor.
They try being a therapist.
They try incentivizing.
They give them a couple of hot leads.
They buy them a drink.
They give them a pep talk.
They tell war stories.
They model being really positive.
Sometimes these approaches work, but only in the short term. Invariably, there will be some bad news and then the negativity returns.
As a sales manager, either you resign yourself to the belief that you have to keep propping people up, or you stop taking responsibility for something that isn’t yours to take. Then you can start doing something that empowers your employees to take full responsibility for their own attitude.
First, you need to understand that the subject of attitude is far more nuanced than the labels ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ convey. Both of these words are generalities, not specific descriptions of mental states that generate behaviors that either produce or inhibit sales success.
Let’s keep it simple for the moment. We find it helpful to think about one’s attitude either being ‘up’ or ‘down.’ When training and coaching sales managers, we often draw a horizontal line and refer to attitude being either above-the-line (ATL) or below-the-line (BTL).
ATL is a mental state in which people are constantly seeing new possibilities, new paths to take - no matter what is happening.
BTL is anything less, culminating in an attitude of impossibility, where people feel victimized and believe they have no options other than having to do what they’re already doing.
When most sales managers sense a team member is below-the-line, they feel this person’s state of impossibility and get hooked. They take it upon themselves to try to cheer them up.
Unfortunately, this is exactly the wrong thing to do!
Being happy-clappy will not solve a down attitude. At best it’s a temporary fix. At worst, your sales people know you’re faking it and simply can’t picture themselves acting like you.
At the same time, being angry, avoiding, or threatening won’t solve the problem either. It will just make things worse.
The real question is -- what can you do to teach your salespeople to take responsibility for their own attitude and to quickly shift back to a state of possibility when the wheels feel like they have come off?
The next time one of your team is below-the-line, try this:
Speak to them privately, and ask them directly what is bothering them.
Listen carefully – don’t interrupt, give advice, put a positive spin on what they are saying, or otherwise try to cheer them up. Let them express their negativity for a few minutes. Just take notes and repeat back to them what they’ve said.
When you sense they’ve said it all, then ask this critical question: what do you want instead?
Again, listen carefully, repeat what they say, and ask why that’s important to them. After they’ve spoken, add the words, “and you want that because…” and let them continue to speak.
Watch as they lighten up and relax. They’re attitude will continue to rise as they think about and express what they want.
Now help them find a solution to their problem and a specific very next step they can take.
Attitude is a significant component of sales performance, and you will reap the dividends if you can teach your team how to bounce back quickly when they’ve fallen below-the-line.
Stop Motivating Your People
Welcome back to the Stop > Start series. This week, we introduce you to the diagnostic tool we have used with great success both internally and with hundreds of our clients across the globe.
It was one of those conversations that spontaneously occurs when you’re receptive to unexpected opportunities. I was on a train, heading into London on a Monday morning, anticipating a day of training with a small, technology services firm that specializes in configuring Oracle and Microsoft applications for their clients.
I struck up a conversation with Robert, an engaging man in his mid-thirties, who a month earlier had been promoted to sales manager in his company. His was a typical story. He’d been successful, very successful actually, as a salesperson for his employer. He’d made a lot of money, had a wonderful time, and then he’d been promoted to management.
It had not been an easy ride for him. He now had direct line management responsibility for the six people who had consistently ranked below him in the company league table. He knew them, of course. He’d shared numerous pints of beer after work, and joined in the moaning and complaining.
That was fun, but now he was finding that these complaints had roots deeper than he’d realized. His team was demoralized and had been for quite a while. He didn’t really understand why people – especially those who had a job that depended so much on maintaining a positive mindset – would let themselves wallow in such petty things. That was preventing them from making money!
“And now,” he said to me, “it’s my job to get them motivated. What do I do?”
Sales is a challenging job – really challenging.
There are customers to deal with – customers who often don’t really know what they need, who ask for things that won’t solve their problems, and who often believe that you’re trying to con them. They block your team’s access to stakeholders, and they often follow procurement processes that prevent both buyer and seller from arriving at the best decision for their company.
There are also internal customers to deal with: teammates who are trying to move you in a different direction, delivery staff who may or may not fulfill the promises made to the customer in the sales process, and service team members who may or may not take care of problems that arise.
Then there’s all that noise and distraction from well-intended but sales-ignorant people from products, marketing, HR, supply chain - and, lest we forget, the finance people who keep setting unrealistic targets. - who think they know exactly how you and your team should be doing their jobs.
It’s easy to see why your salespeople’s motivation slips from time to time. And, when they are ‘down’ instead of ‘up,’ their ability to sell suffers. When salespeople are demotivated, complaining, and lacking confidence, you know their motivation needs to change, and fast.
The problem is - and, nobody ever tells you this when you become a sales manager - that you cannot motivate your people!
Let that sink in for a moment. It’s a bit depressing, but, if you think about it, you’ll know it’s true. You cannot motivate someone else. Only one person in the world can do this - and that’s the person himself.
If you can accept this initially frustrating truth, you are on the road to a remarkable transformation in your management style. You will start drawing some interesting conclusions:
You can’t change someone else’s attitude - only they can.
If they don’t know how, they can learn.
If they won’t learn, or they learn but won’t do it, it’s not your fault, but theirs.
This logic leads directly to a decision that will change your management approach forever: you can’t make someone have an effective attitude, but you can require them to maintain one for themselves!
You can require your team to spend their working time more ‘up’ than ‘down.’
You can require them to recover quickly from disappointment - in minutes rather than hours, days, or months.
It is critical to require this of your people. Your team’s sales success will absolutely depend on its ability to maintain a genuinely positive attitude, one in which they keep seeing possibilities, no matter what challenging things happen.
As team members improve their ability to manage their attitude, they think more clearly and act more boldly. We call this an “above-the-line” attitude, and it’s the most powerful force for performance in every job, but especially in sales.
What is your part in their learning to manage their attitude? You’ve got to get very skilled at creating the conditions in which they can do two things:
Notice when their attitude has fallen “below-the-line.”
Take the steps required to elevate it again so they can confidently move forward.
We think that is the most important skill a sales manager can learn. It’s how he can help his team want to do what the business needs them to do.
Try this, for starters. Make a list - mentally or on paper - of the ways, directly and indirectly, that you try to motivate your people, inspire them, lift their spirits, make them feel better - all that stuff.
Now, make a vow to yourself to stop doing these things - all of them – now.
Then, at your next team meeting:
Share your list. Tell them that you’ve been taking responsibility for motivating them and you’re going to stop trying to do what’s impossible.
Establish a new standard for your team: each person, including yourself, is required to (a) recognize when their attitude is ‘down’ and, second, (b) get it ‘up’ quickly.
Tell them that you will have an individual conversation with each of them to agree on how this requirement will be part of their specific development plan. Reward them as they succeed with this requirement.