It's all about doing, not telling

In the past week both Fred and I have had similar experiences, but with different clients, we have come across the gap between management telling the sales teams what they would like them to do, and sales actually doing it.

Now before you invest time in reading our experiences, let me explain what we are trying to say. It's not the methodology that generates results, it's activities (hopefully using the methodology) that deliver success.

So what has caused us to remind everyone of this?

Coaching is not about methodology, it is about creating a successful sales team
Accredit have been working with sales management in a number of large IT companies, the objective is to get sales managers to effectively coach their people to spend more time understanding their customers' needs as opposed to fulfilling orders.

The challenge Accredit has identified, and is addressing, is the gap between senior management focusing on "coaching methodologies" (e.g. GROW, CLEAR, OSKAR, etc.) and sales managers applying coaching techniques when they work with their teams. It has quickly become apparent that whilst most of the sales managers could describe the methodology, few of them have translated this into effective coaching behaviours.

Let me give you an example, one of the sales managers, who has been identified as a high flyer, intellectually understood how to coach, but their behaviours with their team did not reflect the methodology. They spent too much time telling, not enough time listening and getting their people to identify their own solutions to issues. Because they were so bright they went straight to telling their sales reps what they were doing wrong and what they should be doing instead. Their team were intimidated by their manager and created a behaviour of telling the manager what they wanted to hear, which was not necessarily the truth.

To address this, we asked the manager to do two things:

1. Watch the sales reps in a customer meeting (without interfering), score the meeting using Accredit's assessment tool and then discuss how the meeting went. The objective is to get the sales manager to understand how the sales rep behaves in a meeting, as opposed to how they say they behave.
2. Run a 1-2-1 coaching session using the results of the assessment. The sales rep is asked to explain why they took the approach they did and to identify what they would do differently. The sales manager's role in this session is to facilitate the sales rep to help them identify what they did well and what they could improve on, they must then define their own objective, focusing on making it measurable and having a timeframe for when it must be done. The sales rep has to own the problem, and then own the solution.
   
   During this coaching session, Accredit's assessor, along with the sales manager's manager assesses the 1-2-1 and scores it on Accredit's tool. At the end of the session, the Accredit assessors and the manager coach the sales manager.

What has been the impact? The best way to explain is to let two sales managers tell you:

"It seems obvious, but it can be easy to speed up the process by telling the team what to do, I now recognise this is not necessarily the way to get the best results. Going through the coaching process allows the individual to buy into the activity and and deliver against action plans."

"I will ensure that I allow the team to make their own suggestions by asking one question and then waiting from answers I will also ensure that I encourage active listening" 

In both of these cases the managers understood the methodology, but had not translated this into their behaviours.

Good methodology without activity achieves zero success.
The second example is a piece of work we are doing for a marketing team within a hardware vendor. We have worked with them to create some specific sales messages which can be used by their own sales people as well as their channel. The objective of these messages is to identify opportunities for a specific product set, qualify the opportunities in/out quickly and focus sales resources where they will have the greatest success.

At the start of the project identified that key to success was getting the sales teams to buy into focussing their most limited resource, time, on the campaigns. To do this we had to ensure that all the messages were in-line with the rest of their sales activities, simple to execute and most importantly helped the teams to achieve their sales objectives.

Now we have a very effective approach to creating sales friendly messages which, when aligned to effective sales behaviours, help our clients grow their pipelines and generate revenue. However success is dependent on activity from the sales team, the messages do not generate the revenue, it is the sales team who achieve it. To achieve this success what do we have to ensure.

1. There is an expression, "the fish rots from the head" which is a useful analogy when it comes to successful sales campaigns. If management does not actively drive sales execution, then the campaign will fail. It does not matter how good the message, or methodology, if it is not followed through it will fail.
   
   Success is therefore reliant on senior sales managers owning a number associated with the campaign and passing this number down to the sales team. They have to have skin in the game, if not management will focus sales resources on other areas and your campaign will fail, regardless of how good the campaign is.
   
   
2. The campaign must be simple to execute, from a sales perspective. A key sales behaviour is the desire to take the path of least resistance, i.e. the easiest way of achieving the number. Sales people are not academics; they are practical people who just want to know what they have to do. Any campaign must therefore focus on simple steps which will achieve results, be clear what you want people to do, how it will help them earn £££ and measure the outcomes. Remember the acronym KISS (Keep it simple, stupid)
   
   
3. Align everything to the strategic plan. A campaign will fail if it does not support the overall focus. When everyone is focussed on selling notebooks, a campaign to sell servers will fail, regardless of how good the message is.
   
   
4. Measure progress, specifically activity (number of calls, number of meetings, number of quotes) and the pipeline. These will tell you what is actually happening. If the activity is not there you will have to go back to the managers to drive the activity, if they will not then they have not bought into the campaign!

Do we always achieve success? Well as we are so proud of our approach, I would like to say yes, but unfortunately the answer is occasionally no. Whilst marketing will always praise our work, we have been involved in projects that when we review them were never going to succeed, why, because the activity was never going to be undertaken to deliver the results. Focus was on the telling a good story, not delivering the story to as many people as possible. 

So what is our message to you?

If you want to achieve anything, it will only succeed if people actually do it. Yes, you need to tell them what to do, but that is only the start. The real work is ensuring they do it and this is where you need to put the majority of your focus. Stop thinking about the how and start to focus on the doing.

Be prepared to ask for help

If you are not happy with your approach to coaching or how you create your sales messages feel free to contact Accredit. We can give you quick feedback just by placing a comment on this blog, or we can work with you to ensure you are best placed to start drive the activities that will help you be successful.

Do you want to know more?

Either read our "Helping business drive sales" document or contact mark.savinson@sales-accredit.com and Mark can take you through more detail.