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.

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.