No Excuse Sales Leadership

Feedback on the June Minnesota Business Journal Power Player article (No Excuses, p. 40) suggests that my rural roots are showing – and that sales leaders connect with the down-to-earth business insights they generate. If you haven’t guessed yet, the article focuses on my vision of what accountability means for business today.

So, I’ve been reflecting on the relationship between ranch life and the life of the business leaders I work with every day.

I’ve seen my fair share of tractors. When I was a kid growing up in North Dakota, especially in springtime, our landscape was dotted with these red or green mechanical horses. But unlike horses, tractors had a habit of getting stuck in the mud. And staying stuck until resourceful human beings unstuck them.

Assessing the situation accurately, rolling up your sleeves, and unsticking your tractor was one option. A second was to let the fact of the mud overwhelm you, cause you to curse and throw things, and make you wonder why you kept doing this year after year. A third option was to sit and stare calmly at the tractor, willing it to unstick itself, and when that didn’t work, give up for the day and hope the tractor would be easier to unstick tomorrow, when the mud might be drier.

Options two and three had emotional benefits, sure, but the result was a tractor just as mired in mud as before.

Today’s businesspeople are farmers & ranchers as surely as those I grew up with. Their harvests are a bit different on the surface, but it’s all the same in the end.

Their mud is the sludgy, sticky economy.

Their tractors are their people, their processes, their visions.

Sales Leadership Behavior: Know your People

In addition to knowing your business, the authors of Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done  also suggest that the CEO, President and VP of Sales need to know their people. What are some practical ways that you can begin to really learn about your people?  

In my most recent tips booklet, Yes You Can: 67 Tips to Raise Sales Results in a Recession, I’ve included a couple of ideas to get leaders started: 

Tip 29: Identify Dreams.  Salespeople work primarily for themselves.  I know it’s disheartening for us to realize, but the company’s profits are not the prime motivator in their lives.  Their own dreams, goals, and aspirations are what inspire them to do the extra effort needed to exceed quotas.  So, what can you do?  Help them develop a game plan to achieve their goals and aspirations.  Link their personal goals to their professional goals.  Create alignment.  

Tip 41: Help your people overcome the high Need for Approval. In fact, help them identify their selling mindsets that support their sales effort.  Then, take the next step and help them identify those mindsets that are sabotaging their selling effectiveness.  Then, with both of you grounded with objective data, you can create an action plan to start Making It Happen!  In my 18 years of sales management leadership, I’ve found the data provided by Objective Management Group to be the most helpful in really knowing my people and knowing how I can help them. 

Tip 37: Understand your salespeople’s Workplace Motivators. Workplace Motivators help explain why your salespeople behave as they do. When you understand their Motivators, you can more easily come alongside them and help them execute at a higher, more intentional level.

I invite you download the entire complimentary tips booklet.  And, I’d love to hear your feedback on what other Know-Your-People tips that you’d recommend adding to future additions.  

So, what steps are you taking to really know your people? 

Sales Leadership Behavior: Know your business

Sales Leadership Behavior 1A: Know your Business

As you know,  I’m reading Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. The first leadership behavior that the authors feel is critical for building a culture of execution is “Know your people and your business” (pg 57). 

As leaders, it’s important that we’re where the action is, that we’re directly engaged with the business.  I often find the presidents, CEOs and VPs of Sales are making decisions based on filtered or incomplete information. I don’t want to offend anyone; often I find that business leaders have surrounded themselves with “yes people.”  It makes sense — people don’t want to risk losing their jobs so they don’t bring bad news to the table. Or, they have a high need for approval and are uncomfortable talking about what’s really happening in the business.

Whatever the reason, it’s disastrous for the leader.  An owner of a telecommunication company has made a deal with his salespeople that he will visit any client or prospect whenever they want him to. He’s not there to sell; he’s there to do a Senior Executive Overview. Interestingly,  he reports that in every situation he’s come back with new business opportunities that his salespeople hadn’t seen.  Joe is committed to getting un-filtered information from their clients. 

Other times, the information is incomplete. People are doing the best that they can; however, sometimes they lack your depth in the industry and market. Other times, they don’t have a strategic mindset where they can connect the dots as quickly as you can.  For example, when I was involved in the ownership team at Micro-Tech Hearing Instruments, my leadership team was great at surfacing current client and product information. However, when we needed industry trends, the ownership had to connect with other strategic players in the industry.  To get complete information, you may need to connect directly.  

What steps are you taking to know your business?   

And, what steps are taking to know your people? We’ll talk more about this in the next post. Stay tuned. 

Pursuing Sales Execution

I’m slowly working my way through Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. I usually speed-read books, especially if it’s the second time I’ve read them. However, one of the largest gaps that I see in sales organizations is lack of execution.  They “talk the talk” but don’t “walk the walk.”  Where should leaders focus their behaviors in order to build a culture of execution?

Larry and Ram have a great list of leadership behaviors that lay the foundation for a high-performance sales team (pg. 57):

• Know your people and your business,
• Insist on realism, 
• Set clear goals and priorities,
• Follow through,
• Reward the doers,
• Expand people’s capabilities, 
• Know yourself. 

How would you rate yourself on a scale of 0-10 with 0 being “This is an area where I’m weak” and 10 being “This is an area where I’m a hero!”?

Over the next couple of posts, I’d like us to talk about each of these. Where are you strong? What can you leverage to create a recession-busting sales team? Where does your leadership need “enriching”?  What will it take to “Make it Happen”?  

Leaders Improve Sales Execution

I had a great conversation today with Kurt Theriault from Business Efficacy about  the relationship between excuses-making/blame-gaming and execution. It was insightful because  both of our companies specialize in helping companies execute.  I lamented to Kurt that my advisors tell me that I should be more PC. However, we concurred, “Excuses kill execution.”  

Kurt talked about his work with companies that have great strategies, great training &  great insights….however, they aren’t executing.  That reminded me of a quote from Execution, “Organizations don’t execute unless the right people, individually or collectively, focus on the right details at the right time.” (pg 33).

So, do you have the right people in your sales organization? 

And, are the focusing on the right sales issues?  

Finally, are the focusing on them at the right time with the client? 

Where do you need to improve execution in your sales organization?

Lack of Personal Accountability Kills Sales Execution

Excuses kill execution, even with the best sales teams with the brightest sales management leaders. 

Everyone who knows me concurs, I disdain excuses.  Everyone—husband, kids, friends, colleagues, clients.

And, advisors coach me to be less harsh, to use more PC words, i.e. externally or internally focused, etc.

I work at it.

However, when I net it out, I hate excuses.

Why?

Because excuses kill execution.

According to Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, “Execution is a systematic way of exposing reality and acting on it.” (Pg 22) Excuses do the opposite. They distort reality. People start emotionally blaming anything external to them (economy, competitors, manager, company policy, etc) rather than objectively examining what’s really going on and taking appropriate action.

That’s theoretical. Here’s practical. In the last 10 years of consulting, I’ve send the correlation between the percentage of people on the sales team who lack personal accountability and the lack of the team’s ability to exceed goals….even when there’s a great strategy.

In studying DICE+1 through my work with Dr. Mark McCloskey at Bethel University, I see why excuses are so cancerous. Here are some of my insights:

D (Dynamic Determination):  Playing the Blame-Game erodes one’s willpower to accomplish the task. Excuse making kills determination.

I (Intellectual Flexibility):  Justifying the pasts stunts creativity. If you’re content to stop your thought process at the economy, competition, etc., then you’re selling yourself out to mediocrity. Excuse making kills intellectual creativity.

C (Character Soundness):  A key virtue in virtue-based leadership is courage.  It’s more courageous to face reality saying, “In light of the new situation, I/we need to change or improve in order to get the results we want,” than the oh-poor-me alternative. Excuse making sabotages one’s character.

E (Emotional Maturity): Only a leader with clear thinking can wisely execute in light of the gray zone. (Larry Jullian talks about the gray zone in his new book, God is My Coach) Excuses clouds thinking.

+1 (Partner Up Ability): Synergy only happens when there is hope, when people see possibility. Excuses kill hope.

As leaders, there are four steps that we can take to nurture a culture of Personal Accountability…and execution. Which steps do you need work on? 

Is this leadership? Or, not?

“Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
Ralph Emerson

A picture on my desk instantly and instinctively captures my attention every time I glimpse it. I haven’t been able to find the exact picture on the internet, but, it looks somewhat similar to this one. The vast, snow-banked, flat-as-far-as-you-can-see land, reminds me of my North Dakota childhood as well as the flatlands of Finland, where my relatives immigrated from when coming to the US.

The picture is footnoted with the above quote.

At times I ask, “What does this picture have to to with leadership? There’s one lone trail breaker; and no followers. Everyone knows that you have to have followers to be a leader!”

Then, this evening, I attended the Grand Opening of the Hilton Garden Inn and spoke with Stephen Schwartz, CEO of First Hospitality Group about his path to incredible success. He paused…then talked of his reputation for doing the unconventional. He’d take the risk to do something new and innovative. Eventually, others would follow his lead.

I wondered if that is akin to my solo dog-sledder? Someone who dares to the risk and initiative to “cut the course” through the snow (or to “blaze the trail” as my coach, Jim Early), says.

I’m interested in your insights? What does this quote have to do with leadership? How does this picture speak to leadership? Or, doesn’t it?

I’m looking forward to hearing from you!