Is Sales Six Sigma-proof?

The great myth in business today is that sales organizations are Six Sigma-proof. That is, sales organizations are by definition immune from standardization because salespeople will not conform to a prescribed set of streamlined processes. The argument goes that in fact they should not even be asked to, or you will scare away the superstars who are comfortable with a maverick approach to their work. In other words, salespeople need to be coddled, not have their worlds interfered with, or they will flee to what they perceive as greener pastures. But it is a myth.

No Barriers

Last week I attended the sales kick-off meeting in Orlando of a customer of ours where I had the great pleasure of listening to keynote speaker, round the world solo yachtsman, Neal Petersen. While there are several hundred people who have also achieved this feat what sets Neal apart is that he grew up a person of color in Apartheid South Africa, in abject poverty and suffered from severe hip disabilities in his early childhood.

Rad eCommerce Experience

I always like to use this blog to highlight a positive experience that demonstrates particular sales and service excellence, so today I would like to talk about Blackhole Boards. But first some context: recently my 6 yr old son took up skateboarding and shows some real aptitude for it. His first board has been put through the wringer and it is time (already!) for a new one.

Eating Our Own Dog Food and Loving It!

Working in Silicon Valley in the 90s meant being subjected constantly to a barrage of hip, dot-com buzzwords and phrases of which “eating our own dog food” was prominent. There were many others of course which gave rise to a game that was played at meetings called “buzzword bingo” where you could tick-off buzzwords used during that meeting for your own entertainment. Of course conference calls lent themselves perfectly to this activity (apparently, not that I’d know – although I will admit in our office there was once a pool on how many times the word “conceptually” would be used by Marketing during a call and the final score exceed the highest bet by some margin! – of course I am sure they had their own pool on the buzzwords we used too.)

Impacting the Recovery

It has been a very busy time of late due to my being given a unique opportunity to run not one but two companies simultaneously. In addition to my role at Huthwaite, I am now also running Omega Performance, a sister company in the Informa family of Performance Improvement businesses.

Let's Be Honest: Excellence Takes Hard Work

Following on from my post on the Short Cut Culture some of you have emailed me to ask about whether I believe there is a broader context to this and indeed I do. We have begun to celebrate and tolerate mediocrity in all its forms as a way of avoiding standards that take hard work to attain and to hide behind it as some kind of great equalizer. Either way it has made the quest for excellence the path of increasing resistance.

The Shortcut Culture

I have just returned from a short vacation in Los Angeles and while I was there it struck me how what I call the "Shortcut Culture" has pervaded the home of the entertainment industry. Once upon a time young hopefuls would get off the Greyhound in LA, find a job busing tables, save their tips to pay for acting lessons and endlessly trudge from one audition to another driven by the belief that their hard work and commitment just might make them a star.

E.I. is O.K.

If there is one thing that most frequent business travelers fear is that dreaded delay on the tarmac especially when the actual flight is a short commuter one. Well this evening it happened at Dulles Airport in DC, we boarded the CJR 700 commuter plane, seating for about 60 people, on time only to be informed that thunder storms in Charlotte had shut the airport there. And so we began that open-ended wait for us to get the go-ahead or head back to the gate. In the end we spent 2.5 hours sitting on the hot tarmac (it was still in the 80s outside) in the small confined space of the full CJR 700 an experience that had the potential to be an extremely uncomfortable and frustrating one.

Insight & Foresight

I recently launched a series of conversations with business leaders from across multiple verticals called "The Business Insights Series" and as I reviewed the first five interviews I tried to see if there are some consistent themes emerging. What I found is that although there is great diversity in terms of business focus, there is great consistency when it comes to outlooks and observations.

Some of the key insights provided by these business leades include:

Are you ready to cross the Delaware?

As we head into the Independence Day celebrations it is worth noting how in the winter of 1776 it seemed highly unlikely there would ever be any independence to celebrate. George Washington and his continental army had suffered defeat after defeat and had been forced to retreat through New Jersey into Pennsylvania. Morale was low, desertion high and the prospects for reenlistment remote. But rather than succumb to what seemed the inevitable, Washington decided that winning a victory, any victory and soon was critical to turning things around. To this end he carefully re-examined his options and found a target in the wintering Hessians at Trenton. If he could rally the continental army and get them to Trenton he was confident that surprise and superior numbers would carry the day. So he set off on that famous crossing of the Delaware and the rest as they say is history.

Who Dares Wins...

I arrived for a meeting in Toronto which is gearing up for the G20 Summit later this week and when I got to my hotel I was surprised to find the lobby thronging with people and a noise level that would rival most sporting events. No I hadn't come upon the Anti-Globalization crowd getting ready for whatever it is they will be protesting against this time, rather to my surprise it was the "G20 Young Entrepreneurs" who have a side meeting at the summit. If their enthusiasm and high spirits are any indication of their entrepreneurial talents then it is likely I maneuvered my way through some future innovators who will join the likes of Google and Facebook in the pantheon of the truly disruptive.

Whether it is the World Cup or your Sales Organization - Coaches Matter Hugely!

The world's greatest sporting event (certainly in terms of numbers watching and participating before anyone starts emailing me about the Olympics or even the Super Bowl - perhaps I should say biggest because obviously greatest is in the eye of the beholder) begins this Friday in South Africa. 32 nations have made it through a two-year+ qualifying process in order to compete for the ultimate prize in international football (or soccer depending on where you are reading this post from!).

 Naturally the bulk of the attention is focused on the array of playing talent that will grace this global stage in the coming weeks and the predictions are flying in households across the world about which player will be the ultimate star. Will it be Argentina’s Messi or England's Rooney or Brazil's Kaka or Spain's...well pick any of their midfield or forward line and fill in the blank such is their depth of talent. There is another major factor, however, in who will ultimately lift the 18 carat solid gold trophy and that is the coach!

Finding the Pulse

It never ceases to amaze me how much time we spend on standard operating procedures, process mapping, documentation, flow charts and customer data entry only to find ourselves constantly supplementing it with human intervention to “fill-in the gaps” or to tell the “real story”. Now don’t get me wrong standardization and documentation is important (as long as it leads to greater efficiencies and greater quality control), rather it is the haphazard human intervention that I am pointing to as the problem.

I’m Not Into You Being That Into Me

Guest Blog from Bruce Wedderburn, Vice President, Global Channel Sales at Huthwaite.

Recently I had a call with a sales person, let’s call him Fred, who wanted to discuss how a partnership with his firm could be beneficial for Huthwaite. He was referred to me by a colleague and I was very open to speaking with him. In the first few minutes of our discussion he dropped into the conversation the names of two colleagues from my college drama class, the name of the high school that I attended in Australia and that he, like me, also admired the artwork from another friend of mine who happens to promote her exhibits through social media.

Demanding Customers! Aren't we all?

Henry Ford once said that "a business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large" and many books and case studies have been written on how exceptional service has been a competitive differentiator for a whole host of businesses over the years. The "Nordstrom Way", for example, is one that immediately springs to mind.

Given that nobody will argue with the power of customer service and follow-up in building customer satisfaction and loyalty, I recently asked a gathering of sales professionals what was the one major change they were seeing in buyer behavior and their unanimous answer (and this was a gathering of about 30 individuals) was that the demand for instantaneous support and service had increased dramatically.

There is no future in the past

Yesterday I was in Dublin, Ireland at a meeting of the Dealmaker Partner Network (DPN) along with the leadership of the TAS Group and Infomentis. This was my first visit to my native land since last year and gave me an opportunity to talk to people and assess the full impact of the recession on this former tiger economy. The prognosis is, unfortunately, not good for the short to medium term future as the country rebuilds (unfortunate choice of words I know) after the bursting of a property bubble that rivaled anything seen in the US or elsewhere.

The papers and the TV stations are full of backward looking introspective pieces on what happened to the economy and why and who is to blame, all valid questions and while I agree with Churchill's assertion that those who fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it there is a greater urgency and I would argue time better spent figuring out where to go from here. Thankfully some efforts are afoot, including a Government sponsored think tank of leading Irish business people and academics who are charged with identifying how to foster and support innovation in Ireland and what industries or market segments Ireland is best placed to service in the future. I am happy to add that my brother-in-law who is CEO of Merrion Pharma, an Irish bio-tech success story that continues to excel, is a member of this think tank.

 There are many parallels at the individual business level to what is happening at the national level in countries large and small as they grapple with an uncertain future after the certainties of the recent past turned out to not be certain at all. Businesses need to quickly move from the initial reactive mode that is essential to survival during the first wave of a recession to a more future focused mode that repositions the business for success as a recovery (however slow that recovery may be) begins to take root. There is always a temptation to stay in reactive mode for too long or to forlornly wait for the return of the norm which of course never comes because business is a dynamic organism than evolves and changes, eventually settling into a new norm that marks a new cycle.

Noise Annoys

I have not posted anything this week as I have been away and now as I break that silence I am somewhat conflicted by thought that at least for a few days I added to the silence and not the noise.

My conflict comes from the sheer deluge of information that is flowing through the LCDs of our devices, coming at us from all angles with commentary added at each stop on each digital journey - useful, valuable insights spinning into a vortex along with the midly interesting and the downright inane. The end result of course being noise and when a thousand voices chatter nobody is really heard. And naturally we need to hear that which is worthwhile and could potentially help and enrich us. All of the media and channels of communications now available to us are gifts that we should cherish and use discriminately because if we don't we risk diminishing the importance of the messages they may carry.

Is it time to raise your head above the parapet?

The National Bureau of Economic Research, the non-profit group of economists that decides on the official start and end date of recessions, still hasn’t reached agreement on whether it is ready to pronounce the current recession at an end. Naturally the significance of such a non-pronouncement is greater for those with a more academic interest in market cycles than to those with a more business focus who measure the end of a recession by whether their pipelines are showing signs of meaningful growth and deals are actually getting inked.

That is not to say that it wouldn’t be nice if recessions did have neat start and end dates so that you could plan accordingly. The reality is, of course, that those who are quickest to see signs of a downturn and then make the necessary business adjustments early (cost cutting being paramount among them) fare better during that downturn. Likewise those who are first to see signs of recovery and start to refocus on top-line growth early can gain real market advantage in an upturn.

The stronger than expected retail sales results that I talked about in an earlier post are obviously providing the NBER with some real recovery-supporting data, however, the more interesting story is how that sector itself is interpreting the trends.

Death of a Salesman 2.0

I came across some interesting questions that are contained in a Teacher’s Guide to the Penguin Edition of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman - that timeless portrayal of the common man as a tragic figure. The questions that the teachers are encouraged to ask of their students before they begin studying the play are:

• What is your definition of salesman?
• How is a salesman different from someone in another occupation?
• What attitudes do you think a salesman should have to be successful?
• What attitudes would hinder him?
  
  

Puttin' on the Ritz

When the monster in Young Frankenstein began tap dancing and singing "Puttin' on the Ritz" it was the absurd contrast that made the humor. The big hulking monster trying to be Fred Astaire was a riot. Now another former behemoth is trying to put on the ritz too in the effort to turn around its fortunes.

GM has just announced that it is sending some of it Cadillac dealers to sales and customer service training at the Ritz in order to learn from the luxury hotel chain how to capture and delight high end consumers. Don Butler, Cadillac’s newly appointed marketing manager, was quoted in WardsAuto.com as saying “Think about their (Ritz Carlton's) slogan, ‘Ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen,’” Butler says. “So we are working with them, having them help us talk to our dealer partners and emphasize the importance of how you treat your customer.”