Jonathan Farrington

CEO, Editor, Author, Keynote Speaker, Customer Experience Evangelist, Sales Futurist

The Sales Futurists

The Greatest Leader That Ever Came On God’s Earth Bar None

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I have read extensively on the lives, characteristics and leadership styles of all the great leaders, including Alexander the Great, Montgomery, Elizabeth 1st, Churchill, Ghandi, Mandella, Luther-King et al (the list is pretty extensive).

However, the one that earns my greatest respect and the one with whom I feel the greatest affinity is Shackleton, because I have learned so much from his style of leadership – characteristics that I have endeavoured to incorporate within my own management style.

Sir Ernest Shackleton has been called “the greatest leader that ever came on God’s earth bar none” for saving the lives of twenty-seven men stranded with him on an Antarctic ice floe for almost two years.

From 1914 to 1916, Shackleton and his men survived the wreck of their ship Endurance in the crushing Antarctic ice, stranded twelve hundred miles from civilization, with no means of communication and no hope of rescue. The temperatures were so low the men could hear the ice freeze. They subsisted on a diet of penguins, seals and ultimately… dogs.

When the ice began to break up, Shackleton set out to save them all on a heroic eight-hundred mile trip across the frigid South Atlantic – in little more than a rowboat.

Unlike most of the polar expeditions, every man survived – not only in good health, but also in good spirits – all due to the leadership skills of Shackleton.

So What Are The Leadership Lessons We Can Learn?

Here are just a few that I have worked hard to adopt:

  • Cultivate a sense of compassion and responsibility for others. As a leader, you have a bigger impact on the lives of those under you than you can imagine.
  • Once a career decision has been made, commit to stick it out through the tough learning period.
  • Play your part in creating an upbeat environment – a positive and vibrant workplace is important to productivity.
  • Broaden your cultural and social horizon beyond your normal experiences. Learning to see life from different perspectives will give you greater flexibility when it comes to problem solving at work.
  • We live in a rapidly changing world, so be willing to venture in new directions to seize new opportunities and learn new skills.
  • Find ways in which to turn setbacks and failures to your advantage. This represents a good time to step forward on your own.
  • Be bold in vision and careful in planning. Dare to try something new but be meticulous with your proposal so that your ideas have a good chance of succeeding.
  • Learn from your mistakes – yours and those made by others. Sometimes the best teachers are the worst bosses.
  • Never insist on achieving a goal or objective at any cost. It must be achieved at a reasonable expense, without undue hardship on your staff.
  • Don’t be drawn into public disputes with rivals – better to engage in respectful competition. Remember, you may need their co-operation someday (Due to my crusading spirit and refusal to lower my standards of what is fair and right, this is the one that I have had the most difficulty with!).

If you are a leader, you will have identified closely with all of these principles.

If you are a follower, you will be considering how your leader would stand up to such a test?

Why Selling is Both an Art & a Science

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The dichotomy facing sales leaders today, is how they reconcile the fact that most corporations provide less upfront training for their sales staff than in years past, yet attach increasing importance to staff development.

This should not come as a surprise, because current stock market thinking provides a powerful disincentive for firms to invest in their people on an on-going basis. You see, an organization’s investment in their human capital, in the form of training and other forms of education, is not separable from general expenditure: It therefore appears as a cost on the corporate balance sheet.

Unfortunately, as a consequence, most sales leaders have concluded that their only realistic option is to cut back on training and instead look to recruit sales professionals who, in theory anyway, already possess the necessary skills needed to do the job. They then send them out to win business armed with what they know. However, most of those same sales leaders are discovering just how difficult it is to find skilled salespeople who have all of the essential skills and personal traits. And anyway, it is not possible to equate experience or seniority with success. As I have said on numerous occasions: “Some front-line sales professionals do have ten year’s experience but most have one year’s experience ten times.”

In skills development there are many similarities to sport i.e. does an athletic champion stop training as soon as they win their first medal? In music, does a concert pianist stop rehearsing as soon as they have given their first recital? In art, does the artist stop improving after they have enjoyed the first exhibition of their work? The answer in all cases is obvious and we should apply the same common sense principals to the on-going development of our sales teams.

The reality is that selling in today’s climate is both an art and a science. Selling is a profession that demands a far wider range of skills than ever before, skills that require continual fine-tuning and constant practice.

On-going reinforcement and development is essential: Even if salespeople have undergone progressive sales training, there’s no guarantee that they will be successful. It is common knowledge that skills grow rusty over time and salespeople are prone to pick-up bad habits along the way or to simply skip steps and take shortcuts that can lead to long-term trouble.

Perhaps even more important these days, is the fact that markets, competition, technologies, and customer preferences are all in a constant and accelerating state of change. This fact requires that sales people are able and willing to rethink their sales strategy and approach frequently and receive a regular top-up of skills and motivational coaching.

Our people are the most expensive asset we have so doesn’t it make sense to invest in that asset and increase its value?

Why So Many Salespeople Are Failing So Badly …

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Unlike most other professions, there are no qualifications required to become a professional salesman or woman: I find that very disappointing, and I am also deeply concerned that even the super-rich corporations who used to put their latest intakes on a solid two year program before letting them loose on an unsuspecting audience, now believe that around two weeks of product training is quite sufficient.

Why the change? In a word, “cost” Since the recent financial meltdown, investors have been crawling all over balance sheets, and any investment in staff development always appears as cost for which there is never any tangible evidence of a return.

Whereas replacing non-performing heads is always seen as an unavoidable investment. This in turn has led to a new “hire and fire” mentality, which actually, is incredibly short-sighted, and usually proves far more costly. It is a total cop-out, and simply highlights the fact that so many poor hiring decisions have been made in the first place.

Make no mistake, as a sales leader, when one of our team fails, we fail.

The real answer, as I alluded to yesterday, is the decline in the quality of sales leadership. This is a role, which is now pivotal in every organization, whatever the size: I liken their importance to that of the QB on a football team – yes, that important. Which is why it is alarming to note that the average tenure of a sales manager today is just eighteen months.

So are there any companies out there still willing to invest to accumulate?

Very much so. Those companies who have implemented their own “academies” – including most of my clients – are reaping rich rewards. Turnover has been reduced to virtually nil; teams are happy, and feel valued; staff typically work longer hours, but are also working smarter, and they are totally committed.

None of that should come as a surprise to any of us. When a company demonstrates its commitment to its employees by investing back into them, those employees are anxious to repay that faith – it is a no-brainer and definitely win-win.

How about you, are you really valued by your company? Or are you one of the at least 80% of sales professionals who remain unqualified to do your job properly?

Successful Leaders Are Not Afraid to Leave Their Comfort Zone

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“Prince Rabadash’s army lay close behind them, Anvard ahead. If they did not reach Anvard before Rabadash and his horde, their journey, their entire lives, would have been wasted. The horses, Bree and Hwin (both of whom could, of course, talk) galloped. Certainly both horses were doing, if not all they could, all they thought they could do; which is not quite the same thing. But a lion appeared out of nowhere and with the spur of terror; Bree now discovered that he had not really been going as fast, not quite as fast, as he could.”

This extract is of course taken from The Chronicles of Narnia, that fount of a million, simple and usually overlooked truths. It illustrates perfectly what it takes for some of us to be steered out of our comfort zone.

Perhaps of all the temptations we meet in life, money, power, sex, alcohol, drugs and fame, the subtlest of all is the comfort zone, that invitation to settle for less, to go for content when the stresses of over achievement beckon. The way that takes you out of the comfort zone is the route less travelled. Most of us when we come to that place where the two paths divide prefer the one that leads to safety, to warmth and to comfort.

Both in sport and in business, I have witnessed countless companies, friends, colleagues, and team-mates who underachieved, despite having far superior skills and talents when compared to others who have made it to the top.

The reasons have always been the same, fear of leaving the comfort zone and entering into the unknown, the land potentially of failure and rejection. But I believe there is another way to motivate individuals and coax them out and it relies on one simple fact, most people do not know what they want from life.

Certainly, the majority working in a commercial field will say they crave success but without understanding what success means for them. Of course, describing success is difficult, because it will be different for all of us. The definition I prefer is “The achievement of a worthwhile goal.”

Success should be something you do not just ‘Kinda Sorta’ want to achieve but something you MUST achieve.

Generally, successful people expect to be successful and as a consequence, they usually are. They are driven by a have to attitude not a want to attitude.

If you are going to climb out of your comfort zone, you must deep down feel that you have to.

My experience is that you cannot have everything you want, but you can have anything you really want, you just have to decide what it is and then be prepared to move out of your comfort zone to achieve it.

Managing Is All About Motivating

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It is a fact that we as managers should accept – our people perform better when they feel positive about their job.

In my view, we absolutely must:

  • Recognize that active motivation is necessary
  • Resolve to spend regular time on it
  • Not chase after magic formulae that will make it easy (there are none)
  • Give attention to the detail
  • Remember that we succeed by creating an impact that is cumulative in effect and tailored to our people

Our intention should be to make people feel individually, and as a group, that they are special. Doing so is the first step to making sure that what they do is special.

Understanding Motivation

Every manager needs to know something of how motivation works. The key is to influence the motivational climates by taking action to:

Reduce negative influences. Potentially, the good feelings people have about their jobs can be diluted by negative views on matters such as: company policy and administrative processes, supervision (that’s us, unless we are careful!) working conditions, salary, relationships with peers (and others), impact on personal life, status and security.

Action is necessary in all these areas to counteract any negative elements.

Increase positive influences. Potentially feelings can be strengthened by specific inputs in the areas of: achievement, recognition, the work itself, responsibility, advancement and growth.

Many factors contribute to the motivational climate – from ensuring that a system is as sensible and convenient to people as possible (reducing negative policy/working conditions), to just saying ‘well done!’ sufficiently often (recognizing achievement).

The state of motivation of a group or individual can be likened to a balance. There are pluses on one side and minuses on the other. All vary in size. The net effect of all the influences at a particular time, decides the state of the balance and whether – overall – things are seen as positive, or not.

Changing the balance is thus a matter of detail with, for example, several small positive factors being able to outweigh what is seen as a major dis-satisfier.

A Little Thought Goes A Long Way

We need to make it clear from the outset that we are concerned that people get job satisfaction. Major schemes can wait. Early on:

  • Take the motivational temperature – investigate how people feel now (this is what we have to work on).
  • Consider the motivational implications of everything we do – when implementing a new system, making a change, setting up a new regular meeting or whatever, consider what people will think about it? Will they see it as positive?
  • Use the small things – regularly – for example, if asked if we have said ‘well done!’ often enough lately, we must always be able to answer yes – honestly.
  • Never be censorious – we must not judge other people’s motivation by our own feelings. Maybe they worry about things that strike us as silly or unnecessary. So be it. The job is to deal with it, not to rule it out as insignificant.

Creating the habit of making motivation a key part of our management style will undoubtedly stand us in good stead.

Finally, my last piece of advice: Resolve now – right now – that you will give motivation priority. Don’t be mistaken, motivation makes a difference – a big difference.

If you care about your people (really care) it will always show.

Managers and Teams – United We Stand, Divided We Fail?

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I am consistently on record as saying that standards of professional selling have never been so bad: This is borne out by the startling statistic that around 50% of frontline salespeople, globally, are expected to be behind quota at the end of Q2.

I have also been quoted as saying “Show me an underperforming sales team and I‘ll show you an unqualified and ill-equipped sales manager”

If you are a manager, here are some words of advice you may want to digest as a matter of urgency –after all, the average tenure for someone in your position is now just 18 months!

The principle of working together with your team should underpin how you operate. Managing people doesn’t just mean acting as overseer, to see that they get their work done satisfactorily. It means involving people throughout the team in a creative role, to ensure that together you are all able to succeed: You need them as much as they need you, because whether you like it or not, your success depends entirely on their success.

Involving people on broad issues is motivational. Never underestimate people. Their views can enhance everything: methods, standards, processes and overall effectiveness.

Remember, managers are not paid to have all the ideas that are necessary to keep their section working well in a changing world, but they are paid to make sure that there are enough ideas to make things work and go on working.

Use your people and make it clear to them that you want and value their contributions.

Underpinning Success:

Some matters are of particular importance to the way a manager and staff work together. This is not the place to review the whole management process, but the following four areas are critical and must be addressed correctly early on if results are to follow.

They are:

  • Setting goals
  • Project management
  • Ongoing development
  • Job performance appraisal

A quick look at each of these in turn…

Setting Goals:

“If you don’t know where you are going any road will do”

For all its familiarity and common sense this maxim is worth reiterating. No one and no organization works well without clear objectives. The responsibility for setting many of them may well be yours.

The objectives you set must condition and direct what your people do. Make sure everyone has clear goals and they are committed to achieving them.

Project Management:

Many of the tasks to be done involve the complex process of people working together in a co-ordinate way over time. When this is headed up by you or involves you, make sure that the project is:

  • Carefully and systematically planned and organized.
  • Effectively executed.
  • Precisely monitored.
  • Fine-tuned so that contingencies and changes are accommodated.
  • Brought in on time, on spec and if appropriate, on budget

Your management of others will be jeopardized if the way you organize the work of the section in any way falters.

Ongoing Development:

Nothing is more important to people than their success. Time and again you hear people say something like “Above all, I want to work with a manager from whom I can learn“. The development of your people is not something to ignore or leave to training departments. The responsibility is yours. Make sure people have the right knowledge, skills and attitudes to do the jobs you want and to do them well. Development is not only about correcting weaknesses, it is about upgrading and taking people forward, not least to keep up with change.

Tell your people that you:

  • Recognize that their development is important
  • Will help them gain experience and extend skills And…
  • Create a visible system so to do

As the old saying goes you can either “have five years’ experience or one year’s experience multiplied by five”. People want the former. Show them you are the means to achieve it.

Use the development cycle:

  • Analyze the job (what is needed to do it)
  • Analyze the person (their competencies)
  • Look ahead, anticipate what new skills, etc. the job might necessitate in the future
  • Define the gap – what must be done to create a good fit between the person and the job
  • Specify development activity, methods, budget and priorities
  • Implement action and monitor results

This is a rolling cycle. Keep clear records, make sure everyone is reviewed in this way and create a culture in which people value development and what it brings. Part of your job is helping people to learn.

The culture of an organization in terms of its attitude to training and development is important to people. Their view of it is, in part, dependent on you. Send the right signals.

Performance Appraisals:

In many organisations appraisals are poorly conducted and rated unhelpful by those who are appraised

Appraisals should:

  • Be constructive, helpful and motivational
  • Focus on the future
  • Be a genuine opportunity for both parties to ensure that the period ahead (year, quarter, etc.) goes well, perhaps better than the last
  • Link to action plans for the future

Study your organization’s appraisal system and learn how to conduct an effective appraisal meeting. This is good use of management time. Apart from helping you achieve results in a practical sense; it will also position you as a competent manager and differentiate you from others.

Management Processes:

Whatever processes you set up, will be seen as a sign of your style. If they meet with approval, trust is built. If not, they distance you from your staff.

You must ensure system and processes are:

  • Fair
  • Understandable
  • Effective
  • Relevant
  • Time (& cost) effective

And are not:

  • Bureaucratic
  • Out of touch with realities
  • Over complex
  • Restrictive/contradictory
  • Incompatible with other systems/common sense

Everything you set up (or maintain if someone else instigated it) must aid the effectiveness and efficiency of the section. Those who do the work will quickly see inappropriate systems as you making their jobs more difficult; not a way you want to be seen.

As the advertising slogan of the Abbey National banks in the UK said, “Life’s complicated enough”

How To Develop A First Class Sales Team

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Pick up a typical report and what words do you find? Verbs like analyze, forecast, plan, assess and schedule, are used in pursuit of organisations that are efficient, productive and predictable. What set of people are required? Obviously, people who are efficient, effective, proficient, competent, productive and co-operative. But I believe we need to go beyond – we need to be inspired, motivated, creators, who are enthusiastic and able to consistently deliver against our key objectives. We should be developing individuals who are not afraid to challenge paradigms, who are prepared to go that extra yard in search of excellence and who understand that success is 80% attitude and only 20% aptitude.

For a group of people to remain consciously competent at optimum performance levels, they require frequent injections of stimulation, motivational guidance, coaching, prompting and directing, otherwise they can easily lapse into becoming unconsciously competent or worse, unconsciously incompetent.

In 2015, around 50% of frontline sales professionals failed to achieve quota – did they fail? No, their manager failed. All roads lead back to the leader – he/she has total responsibility for the success of the team, and that responsibility cannot be abdicated. After all …

The primary objective of a professional Sales Manager has to be:

“To achieve consistently superior results through the performance of every key individual.”

The Acid Test: When thinking about your own sales force ….

  • Do you understand their motivators – what is driving them?
  • Do you have visibility of their numbers – year to date, forecast vs. required performance?
  • Activity levels – are they working hard and smart enough?
  • Engagement – are they talking to the right level in their prospects/accounts?
  • Messaging – are they capable of delivering an appropriate message at the right level?
  • Qualification – are they only spending time on deals where they can compete and ultimately that they can win?
  • Closing – are they constructing successful campaigns and closing business?

How did you do?

Whatever got you where you are today will not be sufficient to keep you there in 2016

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A rapidly changing environment is the regular background against which organizations must develop.

Change is continuous and will become more rapid as we move forward over time. Senior management must be capable of reacting to those changes, be prepared to take advantage of them and yet stay within the overall framework and agreed strategy.

The role of strategy is fundamental if the people within an organisation are to be enabled to make the level of contribution of which they are capable. Strategy, based on a good grasp of the core competencies of a business, is an essential precursor to achieving optimal shareholder value.

Dependence on salespeople is key to delivering the latent capability of a business. Our salespeople are the greatest source of competitive advantage we have and that is precisely why we should continue to invest in them and fully develop them.

This is particularly true now that in most market sectors competitive advantage is continually being eroded – i.e. International barriers are coming down, selling time is becoming limited, competitors are getting smarter, fewer and fewer names are appearing on companies’ databases and product uniqueness is rare. Conversely, undeveloped personnel can bring down a company through inadequate performance, leaving the competition to harvest the marketplace.

This extract from ‘All Together Now’ by Sir John Harvey-Jones articulates the last point perfectly. “There is practically no area of business where the difference between rhetoric and actuality is greater than in the handling of people. Every businessman will always claim that it is the people in his organisation who are the key to its success. Indeed it is difficult to argue anything else. A company consists of money (which can ebb and flow almost with the speed of light), of fixed investments (which by definition are obsolescent from the very moment that they have been made), and a range of products – and hopefully a market position – which are under continual attack from competitors who are trying to produce better and more desirable products for less costs. What a company does have, and handled rightly can maintain, is the commitment, skills and abilities of its people. This is constantly attested to by the statements in company annual reports – I cannot remember the last time I failed to see the chairman’s last sentence paying tribute to his people. Yet despite all these facts our skills at enabling our people to give their best, and continuously beat the best that come against them, are remarkably tenuous. Moreover, this area of activity is seldom subject to the sort of analysis, debate and experimentation so readily devoted to fields such as production or marketing. Even though we are all welded to the concept of continuous improvement, when did you last see an improvement plan for the management of your people? If you have seen one, I would bet long money that the plan referred to reduction of administration costs or overheads, rather than being a plan consciously adopted to enable more of our people to contribute more”.

One of the most over-used definitions you are ever likely to read is from Albert Einstein, “The definition of insanity is to continue to do the same things in the hope that those things will miraculously achieve a different result.”

This means that sales directors and sales managers who are not happy with the results they are achieving must make changes.

Keep doing what you are doing and you’ll keep getting what you have been getting

Organizations that want to permanently increase their sales results, need to approach sales differently, to create “the difference that makes the difference” in order to positively impact bottom line performance.

Sales captains and salespeople who have 100% commitment to doing whatever it takes to elevate their sales to a whole new level, are the ones most likely to succeed.

The Importance of Building a Shared Mental Model

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One of the most important responsibilities of a sales leader is to translate the organization’s vision, mission and values into a meaningful context that sales teams can relate to and feel excited by. If this is achieved then the leader will have created a sales team with a shared mental model. This transforms an ordinary sales team into a high performing one.

For clarity, here is a brief description of the following terms:

An organization’s vision is a guiding image of success formed in terms of a huge goal. It is a description in words that conjures up a picture of that organization’s destination. A compelling vision will stretch expectations, aspirations, and performance. Without that powerful, attractive, valuable vision, why bother?

A mission statement communicates the essence of an organization to its stakeholders and customers, and failure to clearly state and communicate an organization’s mission can have harmful consequences around its purpose. As Lewis Caroll, through the words of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland says, “If you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter which way you go.”

Guiding principles are the consequence of a mission statement that are intended to inform or shape all subsequent decision-making, which also provides normative criteria allowing policy-makers to accept, reject or modify policy interventions and activities. They are a guiding set of ideas that are articulated, understood and supported by the organisation’s workforce.

Values are beliefs which the organization’s workforce hold in common and endeavor to put into practice. The values guide their performance and the decisions that are taken. Ideally, an individual’s personal values will align with the spoken and unspoken values of the organization. By developing a written statement of the values of the organization, individuals have a chance to contribute to the articulation of these values, as well as to evaluate how well their personal values and motivation match those of the organization.

The Human Capital Development Model, created by Krauthammer International, is a logical process that can take top management concepts, and translate them into a context that has real meaning for staff at all levels.

The key to bringing this model to life is to answer the following questions:

  • Do my team understand the organization’s vision and how their role moves the organization closer to achieving it?
  • How can my sales team translate the organization’s mission into one that is relevant to them?
  • How does the organization’s guiding principles impact on the day-to-day responsibilities of sales people?
  • Which of the organization’s values does my sales team relate to?
  • How can we interpret these values so they become compelling for each sales person?

An effective sales team understands the big picture and the context of their team’s work to the greatest degree possible. That includes understanding the relevance of their job and how it impacts the effectiveness of others and the overall team effort.

Too often, sales people are asked to work on an activity without being told how their role contributes to organization’s vision, much less how their efforts are impacting the ability of others to do their work. Understanding the organization’s vision promotes collaboration, increases commitment and improves quality.

An effective team works collaboratively and with a keen awareness of interdependency.

Collaboration and a solid sense of interdependency in a team will defuse blaming behaviour and stimulate opportunities for learning and improvement. Without this sense of interdependency in responsibility and reward, blaming behaviours can occur which will quickly erode team effectiveness and morale.

The Importance of Stakeholder Management

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The more successful you are as a Sales Leader means that your sales strategies will affect more and more people. The more people you affect, the more likely it is that your actions will impact people who have power and influence over changes that you are seeking to implement. These people could be strong supporters of those changes or they could block them.

Stakeholder Management is an important discipline that successful Sales Leaders use to win support from others. It helps them ensure that their changes succeed where others fail. By engaging the right people in the right way in your proposed changes will make a big difference to the outcome you desire to attain from the changes.

Stakeholder Analysis is the technique used to identify the key people or departments who have to be won over in order to successfully implement the changes you want to make. You then use Stakeholder Planning to build the support that helps you succeed.

The benefits of using a stakeholder-based approach are that:

  • You can use the opinions of the most powerful stakeholders to shape your change plans at an early stage. This makes it more likely that they will support you and their input can also improve the quality of your change plans.
  • Gaining support from powerful stakeholders who have high levels of influence regarding your changes can help you to win more resources – this makes it more likely that your change plans will be successful.
  • By communicating with stakeholders early and frequently, you can ensure that they fully understand what you are doing and understand the benefits of your proposed changes so they can support you actively when necessary.
  • You can anticipate what people’s reaction to your proposed changes may be, and build into your plan the actions that will win people’s support.

Stakeholder Management really is that important!