I was reminded yesterday by a client of the dangers of managing your sales teams by EXCEL.
Those of us from a sales background understand that sales really is a fantastic career for anyone, but also one that is greatly undervalued and often misunderstood. One of the key motivational factors behind great salespeople is the level of empowerment the job offers. The responsibility of effectively owning, managing and running your own business within a business (and the best salespeople do see themselves as self-employed) is a great stimulus. The best performers as those who are self starters.
For managers however the balance between over managing and empowering is a difficult proposition, and hence my motivation to write this piece.
There has been a tendency I believe in recent times due to the economic environment to manage by Excel, in other words to over manage by literally smothering salespeople with additional measures/reports and paperwork. This focus on the numbers exclusively has overlooked the other factors behind sales success and is taking sales people away from what they should do most which is meeting potential clients.
In the particular case of this former client. The role of sales management was handed over to the new Managing Director, who superceded a Sales Director. The new Managing Director was an accountant by trade, which is indeed an honorable profession, however the different disciplines require totally different approaches.
The management of the sales team very quickly moved from a strategy very much focused on the client, to one of a strategy of focus on the individual performances. Management by Excel took hold.
Every measurement was introduced. Number of phonecalls made, number of contacts made, numbers of appointments made, ratios of calls to contacts, of calls to appointment, of calls to clients etc.
This you might say is necessary in order to manage the performance of your team and I would say yes it is. However this was just the start of the process. Daily reports were generated with details of each call, who was spoken to, what was the outcome, what was the next step. Follow up calls were assessed and graded. A separate report was written on these “warm leads”. This report was distributed daily. A weekly meeting was held where literally the Managing Director reviewed every single phone call and interrogated the comments and assessed next steps.
In other words the sales team quickly became administrators to such an extent that literally hours were spent daily on the filling out and discussion around reports and activities.
However the purpose of the reports was not to give direction, to motivate, but really turned out as a means to control, and manage.
The inevitable outcome of this is massive levels of demotivation and confusion as the end goals were never really clearly understood by any of the team.
Within a year the complete sales team left. Sales had dramatically fallen, and retention rates for new team members plummeted. People just weren’t prepared to administrate instead of sell.
And what about the clients? Slowly but surely they too lost faith in the company as they didn’t have enough genuine face to face contact, which was the building block behind the company’s initial success.
I am a complete advocate of clear measurable reporting systems for all businesses. Results can only be improved if they are measured. However as with all things balance needs to be achieved.
The average salesperson spends only 90 minutes a day actually selling. Is the management system contributing to this, or geared toward freeing salesteams to sell?
Move from Excel to Excellence by clarifying what your ultimate sales goals are and remember, people buy from motivated, enthusiastic salespeople. Does this sound like your sales team.
Best of luck
