“If a team is to reach its potential, each player must be willing to subordinate his personal goals to the good of the team.”
Head Football Coach
University of Oklahoma
(1916-1994)
Is it an Orchestra, a Football Team, or a Sales Organization?
Yes!
A sales organization is in many ways similar to an orchestra, a football team or an acting troupe.
Certainly the playbook and a script have lot in common. Special teams, often carping at one another. Coaches, some zealous, some lost in the stats and distracted. Players, each wanting to do it their own way; competing for attention and glory. Stars and utility players. A strategy pulls it all together, while compliance makes sure we stay within the rules.
So this could be a ball club, but the comparisons break down when we look closely. The executives and managers are often too distant and distracted to really follow and direct the day-to-day practices of the sales force in their far-flung territories. A football coaching staff is focused on the careful, timely and perfect execution of plays minute by minute both on the practice field and on game day. The sales force – not so much.
An ugly reality in the sales business is that when a new idea or a market change comes along, the executives give marketing and sales management the word to “take it to the street” and then the silos take over. Marketing makes up a story, sends the literature and fact sheets to the field, and the guys are expected to pick up the story and run with it… But do they? Are they being followed and coached by management? Is there a standard for critique? Is the Manager able to demonstrate the story and sales process? Are executives demonstrating a knowledge and skill level that commands the respect of the troops? Unfortunately, once the key command is given, the system of careful coaching and focused attention to detail tends to break down – leaving the field and the phone people to make it up as they go along. Although the organization is “graded” daily on sales results, the cohesion that makes an orchestra or football team really successful is usually not present in sales organizations.
The truth is they look similar from the outside. But on the inside, the sports and arts have it all over sales in terms of rehearsing and practicing – because they have breathing time between appearances; and because they harbor the expectation of flawless teamwork.
We propose these alterations to the sales model:
1. Start with the executive team to make sure they acquire the high articulation skills and a shared approach to building sales organizations. (We respect seniors who still make us feel a little nervous about our own technique…) Get the leaders together – whatever it takes -- so they can and will model the skills being required of the field. Lead by example.
2. Tell them what you’re doing. Let the organization know that you’re building a new “Fusion Approach” to corporate sales. Tell them what the executives are up to. Tell them the managers are learning to coach. Tell them there’s training coming up and that they’re expected to show up and swallow it whole – with their last full measure of devotion. Tell them to take it back with them to the field and demonstrate the story there. Tell them that teamwork is hard in a large geographically diverse organization; but that you know they can do it – and that you expect them to play the part they’ve been taught – rather than backsliding into their “envelope.”
3. Develop the story as a “Senate” of contributors from around the organization to eliminate second guessing and back-channeling the story. Make sure everyone involved has already been trained in the same team story building and storytelling approach.
4. Get Managers learning, demonstrating and coaching both the story and the sales techniques from the beginning. It’s one thing to send people to training. It’s another to train them, put a story in their hands tailored to their training and then follow up with coaching and compensation based on sticking to what was taught.
5. Launch the story through a group meeting. Don’t dribble it out individually. If they contribute to the development through their representatives in the Senate, then witness the launch in a “Roll Out to the Team,” they will have the chance to explore and acquire the same “take” on the story as everyone on the team. After group practice and demonstrations, a competition for bragging rights sets the entire sales organization up to launch the story in the same way, with the same style and at the same time – all across the country. "One Story, Many Voices!®"
6. With the Story launched, it’s all about the coaching! Doing it again and again, with the same perfection and individual tailoring to specific clients requires careful adjustment and reminders to stick to the script while at the same time “listening your way to the sale.” If the story gets changed every time it’s told; in mere weeks the power of a large-scale sales organization will dwindle down to “a lot of guys showing up and smiling.” Yet with laser focused coaching, the story (and the organization) can retain its coherence and its integrity while the practitioners can “individually manage the relationship around the story.” The way we tell the story doesn’t change, but every sales call is a unique undertaking. Coaching is what makes this kind of professionalism a reality. If we train the managers as coaches, we can get this done.
7. Compensation. Must be connected – not just to numerical sales performance – but to the sales process. If we pay people for the sales numbers, then they will attempt to force the numbers. If we pay them at least partially for sticking with the process and the story, we are more likely to get the kind of steady, stable sales process that will set us apart in the long run.
“Don’t look at the scoreboard.” – John Wooden.
8. Now do it again! And don’t change it next year. It takes a career – it is a career.
So, is it an Orchestra, a Football Team, or a Sales Organization?
Yes!
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