The VP of Sales is the most fired position in corporate America today. The reason is simple. Their forecast number is tattooed on their foreheads for everyone to see. Make it and the Sales VP is a hero for a day. Miss it and well….

But consider this. Before any sale goes up on the big board, there are at least 10 critical functions that your sales leader has to perform. As CEO’s, and business leaders, we would do well to inspect these critical functions and to help our sales management succeed. Otherwise, you’re going to start over, which can be even more costly.

You can help sales management by looking at what’s not working. Here are a few questions to ask when your sales management is not delivering the number you both agreed to.

1. Do we have the right sales and go-to-market strategy?
2. What kind of sales structure do we have in place to support them?
3. What kind of motivation and comp system will accelerate results?
4. Is the team sufficiently trained on our product or services?
5. Are they trained on industry and competition?
6. Do we follow an effective and predictable sales process?
7. Is marketing providing qualified leads?
8. Are we supporting sales with the right tools?
9. Are we mentoring and coaching our sales team?
10. Are we hiring the right high-performance sales people?

If your first reaction is to fire the VP when the number on his or her forehead doesn’t match yours, then ask these questions. If you’ve asked, and coached to these questions, and not gotten answers, only then must you answer question number 10 with respect to your VP of Sales. But the final question to ask is, “What makes a great sales leader?”

(Take our 90 Second Sales Performance Benchmark)

Do Great Things!

L. Hobart Stocking
Founder
PrairieSkyGroup.com
651-357-0110 (C)

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The first thing to die on the battlefield is the battle plan. The same thing applies to strategic plans.

A big problem with strategic plans is that they often assume a static view of the world or the competitive landscape. For example, assuming that if you reduce your price, competition will just let you take more market share. The real world rarely works like that.

Yet many CEO’s are insistent that the “Plan” be followed. After all, you’ve spent a lot of time and resources working on it.

Two keys to success here are making sure your team understands the plan objectives, and then giving them the freedom to work out problems when they hit new obstacles. Only 20% of managers say their companies do a good job of moving resources, budgets, people, and focus to respond to new contingencies in implementation of a strategic plan.

One reason for this statistic is that resources and budgets are tied up in non-strategic initiatives. For example, many companies are slow to exit or sell lagging businesses. There are lots of reasons for this.

Like a bad bluff in a poker game, it’s hard to walk away from the chips you’ve already put in, but it hurts like hell when the guy across the table (or the market) keeps raising your bluff. Prairie Sky Group sees this reluctance in many companies looking to raise money for blue ocean strategic opportunities. The first question we ask is, “How is your current business.” Often we find CEOs and Managers reluctant to abandon bad bets. And most often, we find personal reasons such as loyalty to a manager running the business.

A smart response to changes on the battlefield is to allow your team flexibility to respond. This means moving attention, resources and budgets quickly. The ability to do this is called Agility, “the ability to think and draw conclusions quickly; intellectual acuity… the power of moving quickly and easily; nimbleness.”

Agility should not be confused with pursuing everyone’s new idea. Otherwise you’ll be chasing your strategic soccer ball like a group of five-year olds.

The freedom to overcome obstacles is real Agility. Companies that allow for flexibility of resources and budgets wind up being more profitable and successful.

Do Great Things!

Lee Hobart Stocking
Founder
Prairie Sky Group
651-357-0110 (C)

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Challenging your team requires that you do things smarter and not just harder.  There are some goals where working smarter is difficult.  So for example, if you are working on an assembly line, it might be difficult to increase your output, especially if you are not given any latitude to change things.

One common case of the “false challenge” can occur in sales forecasting.  It stems from the belief that sales people are lazy and will sandbag their numbers.  So management might add 20% to their numbers regardless of history or latitude.  The root problem is not sales achievement, but trust.   As a result, the organization winds up with multiple forecasts.  The one management thinks they might achieve, the one that sales thinks they might achieve, and the one operations scales to.  With three forecasts, no one knows where they are.  Since they are all based on mistrust, they are unlikely to be dealt with rationally.

The worst case of this phenomenon I’ve seen was in a company where the CEO either didn’t trust the sales team or was simply stingy.  He continually set sales goals so high that he didn’t have to pay bonuses.  He felt he was challenging his team.  But he wound up with a yearly turnover in his organization of 50%.

A challenge must have an element of achievability and support in order to work.  This doesn’t mean that sales teams can’t be challenged.  But that Management needs to stand behind one forecast, not three, and support the sales team.  If everyone is on the same page, then it’s much easier to deal with mid-coarse corrections, and it’s much more likely you will actually achieve a stretch goal. Make this year’s new years resolution to have one forecast.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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Doing great things doesn’t come naturally.  It requires an internal drive and often it also requires some external demand.

Several years ago I had the privilege of watching a senior executive challenge a small team intent on developing a new business.  They were entering a new market, one that didn’t exist.  It was expected that many competitors would enter the market at the same time.  Their plan was a little tentative since there was no history in the new market.  They predicted that their market share would be ten percent after a year.  He then asked a very critical question, “What would it take to get to twenty five percent market share?”

The team had limited themselves and their thinking.  So they went away, regrouped and came back with a plan they thought would achieve that goal.  A year later they had twenty three percent of the market and were becoming the dominant player.  It took a lot of hard work, but it also took thinking differently about how they would approach the market.

During strategic planning sessions, it is easy to set your goals too low because you know too much about constraints.  You know about a lack of resources, potential competition, and other limitations.  So you tend to average down.  There is nothing worse than a group that begins to re-enforce itself on what can’t be done.  The lesson is that you don’t have too.  Separate opportunity from limitations then figure out how to overcome the limitations. Challenge yourselves.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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In case you missed it, Microsoft recently changed their corporate logo.  I thought I would wait until the excitement died down before commenting.  You can almost always tell a company is in trouble when they change their logo.

Of course it’s easy to jump on the Microsoft bashing bandwagon, and they have been in trouble for quite a while.  I’m simply using them as an example.  From the other end of the size spectrum, I could use either of my son-in-law’s two businesses.  Both are under $1M in sales.  Both have recently redone their logos.

Redoing your logo or identity for even a small company will cost you both time and money.   In my son-in-law’s businesses, over $5K when you add up signage, website, literature, business cards, ad infinitum.   It rarely improves the top line or brings in new business.  I have to ask why?

I imagine it’s because one’s ego and business identity get confused.  In small entrepreneurial companies, the owner is often “the company.”  As a result, his or her ego is also “the company.”  Therefore the identity is connected to the owner’s ego.  The other reason is that it’s often easier to address something visible like identity than working on tougher problems.

If the focus was on your brand, or your brand promise or brand loyalty it would make more sense.  But because it has become easy to create a new identity, because it’s visible, because we believe it reflects on us, we wind up tinkering with the identity.  Don’t.  It’s a waste of time for 98% of small and medium businesses.  We’ll remember you for the brand you develop by working on the hard stuff.  When you get to the size of Microsoft then you can tinker.

Success is about relentlessly implementing a great plan, not about the binder the plan is kept in.  So when your VP of Sales and Marketing comes to you and says he thinks you need to change the logo… you need to make another decision.

Do Great Things!
Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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I once owned a partnership in the Sheila Yeates; a gaff-rigged topsail ketch.  She was a beautiful ship, 48 feet on the water line and 65 feet overall, built in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, and launched in 1976.  The Sheila Yeats sank in the north Atlantic in 1989.

For a long time the Sheila Yeates was fitted with a 1932 Fairbanks Morse six cylinder diesel engine.  A concession to a lack of funds and some romantic notion that fit the image of a traditional sailing vessel, it cost $1500.  It also blew so much diesel smoke that it virtually guaranteed anyone who went below in a sea would heave lunch.  The one consolation was that the 2000-pound engine kept its heat overnight in cold anchorages.

The engine was problematic.  On one crossing under motor-sail, I noticed the oil pressure had dropped to three pounds.  On questioning the captain, he indicated that the manual said it was good down to three pounds.  When I asked if he used detergent oil, he indicated that the manual didn’t mention detergent oil.  The manual had been printed in 1932.  Shortly after that the engine threw a rod.  It kept running however, not having the good sense to quit immediately.

The captain elected to replace the engine with a more modern Perkins Elmer.  He had gotten a deal from the Duluth Votech on a rebuilt engine, never mind that the engine was not a marine engine and had been used for logging.  After spending a good deal of money removing the chart house and installing the newly “rebuilt” engine, the engine ran for two minutes and then seized up.  They swore it had been dynamometer tested.  Another rebuilt engine was eventually installed.  Installing the two engines cost more than a brand new Perkins Elmer marine engine.

So here’s the deal.  There is a difference between cost, quality and value that confuses many people.  Price is what you pay.  Cost includes the price and associated costs of training, maintenance, and so on.  Quality is defined as meeting your specifications.  You can have a high quality Yugo or a low quality BMW.  It depends on your requirements.  If you are vague on your requirements, you might get anything.  Cost doesn’t always equate to quality.

Value = Quality/Cost

Value is the quality divided by the cost.  If it meets your specs and costs very little then maybe you are getting a value.  Both engines for the Sheila Yeates were low price, and had high costs.  They barely met the requirements.  As a result, the perceived value of a low price did not yield real value.

I see too many marketing executives and even CEOs go right to price when buying new tools.  It might be a sign of the tough economic times.  But the next time you buy a new marketing tool, take time to make sure it’s what you need, or it will wind up costing you more, and you will get very little value.  You’ll wind up heaving your lunch in rough seas.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
651-357-0110 (Cell24x7)

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The business environment is changing, there is price pressure in your market, a new competitor has emerged overnight, or more likely, a competitive threat has arisen from an entirely unforeseen industry and is now putting pressure on your organization.

Have you ever wondered why the typical response to a fast changing business environment is often to implement more planning, processes, and measurements, as well as re-organize the structure of the company?  (The last step is often referred to as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.) It’s the illusion of control.

We live in a period of rapid change brought on, in part, by digital connectivity and social media in a 24×7 world.  This also adds pressure and demands on the rate at which organizations, including marketing, need to respond.

At the same time, many corporate responses to the stresses of change seem to be to implement even more rigid plans and processes in hopes of maintaining control over the changing environment.  The effect is often less adaptability and less productivity, rather than responsiveness and more productivity.

In the new social world, productivity often comes from interaction and collaboration rather than structured systems.  In the new world, it’s often the outputs of our work rather than meetings and processes that need to guide our direction.  The problem with systems and plans is that they let us feel like we are in control.  But since we often don’t know what the outcome should or could be, they limit us and slow us down.   They promise more assurance, but the most valuable commodity is knowledge gained by trying something quickly.  To use the military analogy, the first thing to die on the battlefield is the battle plan.

By following the conventional approach of working harder on more complete plans and implementing processes to avoid risk, the next step is inevitable.  That is cost cutting measures that eliminate jobs in order to make the productivity of an organization look better on paper.   These changes rarely have anything to do with changing the actual productivity, and often have exactly the opposite effect.  Your employees and team members know this.

What would happen, if instead of increasing control and process in response to change, you chucked these out the window?   What would happen if you increased the rate at which you tried things without a focus on a guaranteed result?  What if you learned quickly and adapted?  Or you could continue fiddling.  Welcome to the new world.

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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I was talking with the COO of a small professional services firm the other day that had experienced 100% growth over the last year.  When I asked him how he managed that spectacular growth, he said he’d hired thirty-one people during the year.  He might have interviewed three or four times that many.

How did he do it?  His answer was succinct and direct.  He couldn’t always interview for specific skills or experience.  Others in his company could help him with that.  Instead, he said, he interviewed for the right values.  If he could find people with the right values, then he could worry about putting the right butts in the right seats.

The interesting thing was that the values for his company were written on a large sign in the lobby where his employees and guests could see them.  The list of five began with, “Always Add Value,” and ended with “Do the Right Thing.”

Values are different than business goals.  A goal is what you want to achieve.  Values are guidelines that we use for how we will behave and make decisions, especially when there is a conflict.

It seems to me that corporations don’t have values in themselves, but rather the people in them do.  When you put them on the wall, you are saying… this is how we expect you to make your decisions and conduct yourselves.  It helps hold others to the same code.

The test comes of course when really tough decisions have to be made or there’s some conflict between values.  In that case, you’d better have tested your own values beforehand.  Many companies simply put them up as they would office decoration.  Or they put up their business goals.  The real difference is can you live your values?

This is a time when positive impressions of business in America are at an all time low.  It’s easy to be cynical about corporate values when the company doesn’t live them or live up to them.  When this happens, it’s a huge demotivator and saps productivity and trust, both with employees and with customers.  However, this COO understood the value of values in creating a company that could grow at 100%.  Good values lead to good growth.  Values precede business goals.

Marketing and sales also own a big piece of the values for their organizations because they have the principle responsibility for communicating with clients, customers and prospects.   So what are you values?  Do you interview for them?  And how do you do that?

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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So, if you don’t make New Year’s resolutions, here is a list of items from my posts during the year that might make good subjects for reflection.

1.     How can I support my sales team more?

2.     What is my real customer experience?

3.     What can I learn about my clients and customers?

4.     What core messages do I want to deliver internally and externally?

5.     What things about my business make me uncomfortable, why and what can I do about them?

6.     What three things will I spend less time doing?

7.     How can I keep my commitments?

8.     How can my team have more fun?

9.     Who will I mentor?

10.  What am I thankful for?

Thank you for your encouragement and comments throughout the year. Have a healthy and bountiful new year.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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Group dynamics in meetings and decisions are influenced by the social pressures of the group.   You’ve heard the cynical old expression that the best decision of a committee is worse than the best decision of any one individual in the meeting.

Here are some signs that you may have a problem.
• Your business project or goal is deteriorating. You have missed deadlines, costs are rising, and there is a lack of participation, or even defection of members.
• Blaming and excuse making.  You hear, “It’s not my fault… I’m dependent on someone else, and they didn’t do their job.”
• Private discussions.  Individuals looking for support for their unheard position while tacitly agreeing with the group decision.
• Ad hominem attacks.  Attacking the person rather than challenging the assumption, the stated fact, or reason .  “He can’t possibly deliver on time because… he’s too tall, never here, not old enough etc.”
• Failure to celebrate successes, and being lavish with praise.  Though marketing and sales people aren’t kid soccer players that get trophies for fifth place, we all like to hear we’ve done a good job.

The first key step in avoiding the Road to Abilene is to prepare for the meeting, discussion or decision.
• Invite the right people.  People who have knowledge and expertise as opposed to just influence.
• Make sure that data and information are available prior to the meeting.  Many meetings spin off because there is no data.  As a result, the person with the strongest opinion or power often dominates.
• Make sure that everyone knows the objective of the meeting and the results expected.
• Have a process for evaluating options and impacts.
• Allow enough time for making the decision.

The second step is to understand the difference between real agreement and mismanaged agreement.   Both have the same visible end result and may be hard to distinguish.  Understanding the signs and circumstances of false agreement can help tip you off.
• Is the “boss” or one person of power dominating the meeting?
• Do people feel free to really express their opinions?
• Are they allowed to express their ideas?
• What is their body language?
• Is the discussion respectful?
• Is the discussion ever allowed to boil over?
• Are the participants comfortable with disagreement?
• Is the leader comfortable with disagreement?
• How comfortable are the participants and the leader with risk?
• Does the group understand how the final decision will be made?  By consensus or by the leader?
It is helpful to establish a set of guidelines for discussion that allows everyone to gate keep when others are being ignored or disengaged.

My belief is that 80% of misalignment in meetings and decisions is by two factors;  1) individuals feeling like they didn’t get heard, and 2) the fear individuals have of making a mistake or sounding stupid.  It takes some guts to challenge the social power of a group.  Individuals also often mimic the quietness of a leader mistakenly believing that speaking last, or not talking, is a sign of power.

It also takes some guts for a leader to expose themselves by checking and probing individual positions and gate keeping.  Patience is a virtue here.  It may seem like the process is taking longer than it needs to, but consider the costs of mismanaged agreement; lack of buy-in, low morale, low productivity and even counter support and sabotage.

Another step is to ask if all possibilities have been investigated and whether the group is confident with the data and information.  Each individual’s perspective and knowledge is unique and they each have something to contribute.

Just because you’re on the road to Abilene doesn’t mean you can’t turn around. Unless you need to go on to get your tattoo.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry with Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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