Share the Vision

As an executive you know how important it is to communicate the company’s mission to your employees, and we all know that that’s easier said than done. Talking about “the vision” at company meetings and having a Mission Statement on the website are not the same thing as having people understand it and believe it. The number one reason sales people don’t “Share the Vision” is that what they hear in speeches and read in letters from management often doesn’t align with what they see in action every day. Reps may not see, or may not think about, how their day-to-day activities fit with the company’s strategy, how their territories and their quotas align with the overall corporate goals. The major function of sharing the vision is to get the sales team to think about something other than their individual quotas. Reps can be very myopic when it comes to their little place in the corporate universe and occasionally need to be reminded of the “greater good” and how they can (and are expected to) serve it.
I cannot stress enough the value of senior management spending time with sales reps and giving them the insight to apply the company’s overall vision to their little slice of the world. Clarify and explain how sales objectives and territories are built and how what you have reps doing is an integral part of fulfilling specific milestones and meeting specific corporate targets, rather than just hitting sales goals.
Sales reps will be much more productive and happy if they understand your shared goals and can connect their activities with the activities of all the firm’s other employees. In the field they will be much more effective if they can trust that the corporate mission is more than words on paper; that it really is something you are all committed to.

Lose the Attitude or Lose the Client

I want to share something that happens to Sales Reps waaaaay too often.

I have a client with a billing problem and she's been trying to work it out with the Home Office for 2 1/2 weeks. This is not a little billing problem, this is a really big billing problem and it's an important client. Here's my first concern - guess how I found out about this? That's right - the client emailed me. I should not be finding out about these things from my clients. Too much trouble for the HO to shoot me a note or call me to say "We've got a problem on XYZ Co., this what it is and we're working on it and will let you know if you need to do anything"? Now, I don't want to hear about every little problem but please use a little common sense to say "Rich needs a heads-up on this" for the big things. This lack of communication makes us both look like idiots.

But wait - there's more. We had a conference call, me, the client and four (count 'em) Home Office staff. Good thing I was there to referee, because the HO people were very defensive about how they'd done things. Apparently, it was the client's fault for not understanding how we were charging them. Notwithstanding the fact that a lot of the charges made no logical sense or that nowhere did we attempt to explain how we arrived at these odd numbers. Clearly, the client was wrong and they should just take our word for it that the charges were correct. Guess what didn't happen.

OK, let me make this perfectly clear: the client is not lucky that we let them do business with us, we are lucky that they have chosen to do business with us. I have seen this attitude for years, at many different companies, that somehow our clients should be thrilled that we allow them to buy our products. Where does that come from and how does it possibly make sense?

We shouldn't put people in a position that they need to change their procedures to match our internal processes. We should know what the clients need and expect. We should be accommodating to them, not the other way around.

There are very few companies in the world who make or do something so unique that a client can't go elsewhere, and get something just (or almost) as good without the condescending attitude. Everyone does it all the time - Bank of America treats you badly? Well, Washington Mutual is right down the street. Is Cingular constantly overcharging you? Switch to T-Mobile. The point is that if your employees are doing that to your clients, your clients will leave. And my reputation gets tarnished in the meantime and, really, that's all I have.

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I know I'm not saying anything new here. Everyone knows you're supposed to treat your clients well, right? Well, apparently everyone doesn't know this because this little scenario happened just this week and I'll bet it happened a thousand other times this week to other reps.

Think this doesn't happen in your company? It does. Call any one of your sales reps right now and ask. That's OK, I'll wait. Do do do doooo do. See, what did I tell you? Maybe it doesn't happen a lot, but it shouldn't happen at all. Make it stop!

What are we waiting for?

One of the most frustrating things, both for you in the Home Office and for us in the field, is waiting for stuff to happen. But it's frustrating in different ways: for the field rep, once a problem has been identified or a procedure needs to be changed, well, just fix it and lets move on. Naturally, you know, I know, anyone who's ever had to actually fix a corporate problem or change a procedure and probably the rep herself, knows that it's usually just not that easy. Most of the time the issue is around either money or how to fix this one issue without breaking everything else.

To the rep, where everything has to be done right now (calls, sales, closes) waiting sucks and since reps for the most part run their own little shows, when something needs to be tweaked we can just do it on the fly. We just don't understand what takes so long, especially when the solution is obvious.

Two ways to combat this are to : 1) as often as possible, fix the little problems as soon as possible, immediately if you can, so that it doesn't appear as if the organization is paralyzed and 2) take a little time to explain what's involved in solving the problem. If the rep's proposed fix would break something else that's near and dear to her (the comp system?), that should definitely be pointed out.

The really frustrating part from the Home Offices perspective is the fact that, God Forbid, you rush the fix and get it wrong. The complaining will be unbearable.

So the trick is to make everyone understand that you, as a company, would rather do it right than fast but also disabuse us of the notion that Home Office folks spend all their time in meetings, accomplishing little.

The Rep is Your Company

To the outside world we not only work for you, we are you.

It’s extremely important that you and everyone else in your organization remember that, to customers, your salesperson is your company. Yes, this is a cliché and everyone knows it, but on a day-to-day basis this fact is overlooked all the time. In the real world of professional sales where your representatives (note the word) are calling on and selling to other professionals, we are Sony, we are Blue Cross, we are Conde Nast, we are Stanley Tools and how the client’s experience goes with us, the sale and it’s implementation, goes their experience with Sony, Blue Cross, Conde Nast, etc.

Now that you’ve got that message, what does this mean on a practical level? What it means is that you may have thousands of employees, a well-known brand and spend millions on advertising but, on an individual customer basis, none of that matters if we can’t deliver what we promise.

So there are two lessons here: 1. your company should be organized around delivering what your sales reps promise and 2. you’d better have sales reps you trust enough that delivering on our promises doesn’t become a problem. If you can’t trust us to make realistic, reasonable and, ultimately, profitable promises, you shouldn’t have us.

The inability to follow through on a promise, ugly or confusing marketing pieces, bad customer service, mistakes and delays in the delivered order – all these things reflect badly on your person in the field and, therefore, the company. It’s the sales rep’s inability to control, manage and foresee these glitches that is the most frustrating aspect of a rep’s life. Yes, we’ll bitch and moan when something goes sideways, but you’ve got to let us know as soon as humanly possible that something we’ve promised is delayed or sidetracked.

It’s fairly common practice for Home Office folks to assume that the sales rep can, and should, just go back and change something previously promised. This is not easy and can damage the long-term credibility of the rep and, really, that’s all we’ve got.

Your brand, your products and your service can go a long way to having your client be committed to your organization, but in the end it’s the rep whose relationships can make or break the client’s bond with you.