Jonathan Farrington

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

Sandler Research Center - Survey results

When The Leaders Are Leading, The Pack Will Follow

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Unfortunately, most salesmen and women believe that a successful career in sales culminates in sales management, and yet there are of course far less management positions up for grabs than sales positions.

As a consequence, salespeople with this attitude concentrate on making sales rather than investing in themselves in order to become Top 5 % players and eventually most become disillusioned, resulting in a significant dip in achievements levels.

The knock-on effect of this is that many salespeople who move into management, take with them an underdeveloped view of selling – a “traditional” orientation and as consequence they help to create or maintain an unrealistic and short-sighted vision of what will be needed to develop their teams.

Because they lack Top 5% experience themselves, and an insight into the skills needed to make it at the highest level, the environment that they help to create fails to recognise the need for outstanding performers, and this is particularly noticeable in the compensation structures they build, which neither supports nor encourages their teams to break through that final glass ceiling.

As I have said often enough, both here, and on numerous other occasions, the single most common mistake that organizations make is promoting their number one salesperson into the role of sales manager, thereby depriving themselves in a single stroke of their best producer and hamstringing their sales force with an ineffective manager.

The skills required for managing, mentoring and developing a sales team are totally different from those required for selling. As a result, it’s not uncommon to find newly promoted sales managers who regret having taken a management position and may even leave to get back into sales – that is if they are not pushed first!

The majority of sales managers – new and experienced alike – say they do not have sufficient time to train and develop their sales teams. They are so focused on sales results – and so accustomed to achieving success through their personal pursuit of those results – that they overlook their greatest potential source of power, the power to increase sales performance by developing their people.

The sales manager’s role is transforming from evaluator to developer, from expert to resource, from teller to questioner. This change is no mere tweaking adjustment, it is a 180° shift from how most sales managers manage and how they are managed. Most organizations profess to want coaching, but they don’t really do anything about it. Just as students are lucky to have one or two special teachers in a lifetime, most sales professionals are lucky if they get one real coach. Organizations don’t have role models for coaching, they don’t train for it, and they don’t hold people accountable for it

You see, today, the role of sales manager is pivotal. It is the vital link, and ineffective sales leadership is the main reason why so many sales teams are failing.

All the current excitement surrounds lead generation – it seems that everything I read everywhere, is totally focused on finding, qualifying, and weighting leads. But what is the point of continually creating new opportunities and passing them to sales managers who are unable to cope?

At the end of the day, the sales leader needs to be a “model of excellence” – only then will the pack faithfully follow.

If you would like to read an abbreviated version of the Sandler Research Center report, “THE ESSENTIAL COMPONENTS FOR SUSTAINING OVERACHIEVING SALES PERFORMANCE” in which we further highlight the paucity of genuinely qualified sales managers please download your copy here 

Current Stock Market Thinking About Sales Training

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The dichotomy facing sales leaders is how they reconcile the fact that most corporations today 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 ongoing basis. An organisation’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.

Tough Choices

Unfortunately, as a consequence, those same 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 directors 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.

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 ongoing 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.

In Summary – Ongoing Reinforcement and Development Is Essential

The operative word here is ‘ongoing’. 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.

What Makes The Perfect Leader? – Do You Report To One?

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Let me begin today’s post by saying that in my opinion, the perfect leader has yet to be born – and I have studied most of the significant leaders in history.

I also took on my first “leadership” role at the tender age of eight, so you can assume that “leading from the front” has been a major feature of my commercial life.

The reality is that we all have room for self-improvement, but if at least we can agree upon what it takes to be a good leader – what are the traits of leadership; what are the skills – we will at least have made a good start. We should analyse every genuine leader we know and try to learn which qualities influenced us to consider them a good leader. We can probably agree upon at least six – these are mine – and you may well have a leader in mind as we consider these?

Enthusiasm:

Everyone should agree that enthusiasm for what one is doing is a critical leadership trait. No man or woman can install much enthusiasm in anyone else for something about which they themselves are not enthusiastic. Genuine enthusiasm does not mean a glib, backslapping, plastic smile type attitude. More often, the genuine leader’s enthusiasm is likely to be of a more quiet nature – but it is there! It is shown by the manner in which they go about their work. Their manner of handling their job seems to say to everyone. “This is important! It must be done right. It must be fairly and squarely done! And -you can do it!”

Unless a person feels right down in their bones that the work they are doing is worthwhile, they can never consistently (day in and day out) act as though they do. So, if they have any feelings or doubt about the importance of their work and cannot become enthusiastic about it, the trouble is in the person himself or herself. Whether they realise it or not, those around them sense their feelings, their attitude is showing!

Courage:

Leadership takes “guts.” The true leader has the ability to “take it” when the going gets rough. Often the leader has to “take it” for the whole organisation to keep morale high. The leader has to face up to new challenges all the time. Indeed, many successful leaders invite difficulties just for the sheer joy of coping with them. The genuine leader approaches each day with a sort of “joy of battle”.

Courage in leadership sometimes takes unexpected forms; it may mean standing up for a principle. (Has anyone ever known a real leader who was a “yes person”?) It means having the character to stand up for what you believe in without comprising or cutting corners.

It may mean taking a bold approach to a new idea – sticking your neck out in support of something which you think is worth trying. It means loyalty to your convictions.

Self Confidence:

Another important requirement for the leader of today is self-confidence. However, in making decisions about people, their motivation and the way they act or react, the leader can never feel completely sure they are right. The best they can do is to make a sort of “educated guess” based on the facts they can assemble and then rely upon their past experience and knowledge to interpret them.
A great help is to know and work within their personal assets and limitations. They know what they can personally do and what they are unable to do. They are willing to listen to other opinions, assess them and be big enough to adopt the meritorious ones even if they do not square with their original thinking. They can take small reverses in stride.

A self-confident leader is never satisfied with their present accomplishments; does not spend their time in useless longing for things they cannot have. Rather, they set about realising their immediate and realistic goals.

Integrity:

A leader keeps promises: They keep their promises to their associates as meticulously as those made to their superiors. They keep promises made to themselves, which are the hardest to keep and failure in this is the easiest to rationalise. They can keep all these promises because they never commit themselves rashly; but always within the limits of reality and their present capabilities in terms of personal ability.

Part of this matter of integrity is certainly, unquestioned loyalty to their organisation – to its reputation as well as their own. Also they must have loyalty to their products and to their associates and loyalty to their industry. Loyalty to one’s associates is extremely important in any leader. They should never allow themselves or others in their group to ridicule, or down grade other leaders or people in the industry, as it is a sign of jealousy and this is one trait that cannot exist in a true leader. Part of this loyalty is a sense of stewardship – a feeling of responsibility for the welfare, progress and security of the industry as a whole, and that includes everybody who ethically runs a business, everyone in their organisation, their customers and their family.

Interest:

Even the Oxford Dictionary has difficulty in defining the meaning of the word “friendliness”. Of “friendliness” it says, “it signifies befitting or worthy of a friend.”

A leader has a genuine and sympathetic interest in and a respect for people as individuals. A very high percentage of any leader’s day is spent working directly with individuals.

Be careful – do not go overboard. Here there could be a danger signal. Friendliness can, of course, be overdone. Although interested and sympathetic, the true leader stays firm – never getting so involved in the personal lives of people that he forgets the implications of their role as a leader. They never play favourites – and should never play one personality against another. They know where to draw the line.

Humour:

Whilst not advocating that a leader be the ‘life and soul of the party’, it is essential that they have a keen sense of humour. There will be times when an appropriate joke or light hearted remark, will do more to relax and motivate than all the arranging in the world.

These then are the six basic characteristics which help a person to become a successful leader. Think of others. Upon reflection, you will probably agree that your ideas are closely allied to or even a part of the six detailed here.

They are not by any means a guaranteed panacea that will assure success as a leader. Though all leaders possess them to a varying degree, all of us have known people who have had them all, but were still unsuccessful as leaders. Characteristics or traits by themselves do not make leaders, certain “core skills” are equally necessary.

Do We Really Need Sales Managers?

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Short answer? Of course, and here is why ….

In my view, the role of a sales manager 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 manager 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 the 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 Carroll, 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 organization’s workforce.

Values are beliefs, which the organization’s workforce hold in common and endeavour 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.

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. Understanding the organization’s vision promotes collaboration, increases commitment and improves quality.

What we really need are sales leaders, but right now we have far too many sales managers.

How to Achieve Sustained Sales Growth

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In his book Fundamentals of Selling, Charles Futrell identifies careful use of selling time as perhaps the distinguishing characteristic of the successful salesperson.

Frequently, there are two main pitfalls that even experienced salespeople can fall into in terms of activities. First, they simply are not doing enough. What is enough? Enough telephone calls to make appointments, enough face-to-face calls, enough calls that involve or influence the decision-makers. In general, the more focused sales activity salespeople generate, the greater the number of sales opportunities they can create.

Poor-Quality Activity

Second, but equally important, salespeople often are not clear about how to identify the prospects most likely to have a genuine need for their product or service. Without an objective way to prioritize which prospects to contact first — and/or an efficient strategy for contacting them — salespeople are doomed to waste a large percentage of their time.

Another huge dilemma for many salespeople is how to divide their time between servicing existing clients and generating new business from new prospects. Existing clients frequently make requests for service that could be dealt with by support staff. But salespeople who lack a disciplined, future-oriented plan for generating new contacts and sales often find themselves spending more time attending to “urgent” tasks for existing accounts instead.

A common approach among salespeople can be summarized in the saying, “If you throw enough mud against the wall, some of it is bound to stick.” This approach is exhausting, demoralizing, extremely unproductive, and very expensive in the long term.

Speed of Relaying Customer Information

The Sales Leader provides another interesting dimension to activity management. Apart from product or service knowledge, salespeople require knowledge about prospects, clients and market trends. Therefore, if the information those salespeople require is not relayed in an efficient manner, their “face-to-face” selling activities are dramatically reduced.

Harder Rather Than Smarter

In the book Emerson’s Essays, there is a section on “Law of Compensation,” which can be summarized simply as “give more, get more.” This is what most salespeople try to do, so they end up working harder when they could be working smarter. This begs the question, Are your sales activities deciding your strategy, or is your strategy deciding your sales activities?

Developing a Strategic Sales Process

From the Sales Leader’s perspective, developing a strategic sales process means developing a comprehensive, formal, realistic and step-by-step outline of what salespeople are expected to do. This is just as appropriate for internal and totally reactive sales teams as it is for external, proactive ones.

This outline includes the activity and calls salespeople must make, the relationships they should establish with prospects, the documentation they should use in sales calls, the issues they must discuss and resolve with prospects, and the tangible goals they must achieve in sequence along the path to each sale, in order to achieve maximum effectiveness.

The Essential Components for Sustaining Overachieving Sales Performance

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To provide critical insight and direction to organizations worldwide, Sandler Training, the largest sales, management and leadership training company in the world, has created the new Sandler Research Center. Our primary objective is to explore the dynamics of selling today, tomorrow, and into the future. We believe that this truly international initiative will deliver impactful research to the global sales community via the most relevant data available.

Our inaugural survey, “The Essential Components for Sustaining Overachieving Sales Performance” focuses on what we believe are the 5 critical elements that drive success within a typical sales environment:  

Strengths of Sales Leadership

In most organizations, the role of the sales manager has become pivotal.  They are, after all, driving the sales team, which is the company’s engine room. The primary objective of a professional sales manager needs to be: “To achieve consistently superior results through the performance of every key individual.”

Current Levels of Sales Achievement

It has been widely reported and discussed that for the past 5 years, sales achievement levels have been decreasing year by year. In fact, the number of frontline sales professionals who met their number in 2018 was less than 50%. We are seeking to identify and understand what needs to be done to arrest this alarming decline.

 Successful Utilization of Sales Technology

Over the past few years, we have witnessed huge investment in new sales technology solutions and sales process tools. However, that investment does not guarantee an appropriate return in terms of increased and improved sales performance.

Commitment to Client Retention

When it comes to looking after our clients, quite often there’s a gap – a huge gap – between theory and practice. In discussing client relations, we are not just discussing the work of a Customer Service Department. We need to look at the whole company-wide approach to clients – that’s all of us, not one of us or a few of us

Effective Collaboration of Sales and Marketing Functions

The most successful companies we know have managed to persuade their Marketing and Sales functions to legitimize their relationships. This harmony has created a commitment to collaborate and cooperate for the good of the organization and has inevitably resulted in consistently superior results.

Please accept my personal invitation to participate in this substantial initiative, which will only require 10-15 minutes of your time. In return, we will provide exclusive access to a summary of our findings, affording you with the unique opportunity to benchmark your organization’s current performance levels versus the best of the best – and allow you to get ahead of your competitors!

 Please take the survey here 

Thank you for your support

PS: We also created a short podcast in which Brian Sullivan, VP of Sandler Enterprise Selling and I discuss this first piece of research. Please listen here

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.