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.

I’ll be sharing principles used to create the Hardball sales process for Flint Group, formerly xSYS Print Solutions. They were the largest international supplier of narrow-web tag and label-printing inks struggling to reverse a three-year trend of declining revenues. We help the VP of Sales develop a system of sales management processes that change a culture of excuse making into one of personal accountability to generates predictable, sustainable results.  Listen to Hank tell the story of how we accomplish the following: 

• Market share grows despite an industry recession
• Predictable revenue with more accurate business planning, more efficient operation and higher margins
• Faster, organized sales process generates revenue more quickly
• New hires reach higher performance levels 30% faster

I recently conducted a webinar with EcSELL Institute on the same subject.  Bill Eckstrom, Founder of EcSELL Institute says that it was one of the most practical webinars they had–strong take-aways that sales leaders can implement immediately.  

Hope to see you there!

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? 

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. 

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”?  

On Friday, I attended a Winsights Executive Roundtable to learn from James Sipe, author of Seven Pillars of Servant Leadership. “Simply put,” Sipe says, “it is the leader’s commitment to serving others that matters most of all.”

I’m enthusiastic about this new book because it’s practical, walking step-by-step through the execution required for each pillar: 

• Person of Character
• Puts People First
• Skilled Communicator
• Has Foresight
• Is a Systems Thinker
• Leads with Moral Authority

As James articulates so well, leadership goes astray without the first pillar, being a Person of Character. The last pillar, Leads with Moral Authority, is earned once pillars 1 though 6 are consistently practiced.  

Often people ask, “Does servant-leadership work?”  James shared some great statistics comparing Jim Collin’s good-to-great companies against comparable servant-lead companies. The results were astounding. Over the same 10-year period, the good-to-great companies had a 17.5% pre-tax portfolio return while the servant-lead companies experienced a 24.2% return.  James calls the servant-lead companies better-than-great companies! 

What are your thoughts on servant-leadership?  Have you heard of the concept before? If not, you might enjoy these excerpts. 

I have tremendous respect for Rich Breau, president of Breau Bros Garage, a business consulting firm specializing in people, operations and strategy. In a conversation today, he mentioned that healthy cultures have two things in common. First, they know that culture starts at the top. Second, they have strong accountability. He defined strong accountability as having these characteristics: 

·      Well-defined performance standards

·      Rigor to achieve those performance standards 

·      A response for when the performance standards aren’t met 

Whether you’re a CEO, a president or a VP of Sales, these accountability characteristics apply, don’t they?  

This list reminds me of questions that another colleague, Dr. Mark McCloskey, uses in his business consulting practice when he’s getting to know the culture of a company: 

·      What really matters around here?

·      How are you doing on what really matters to you?

·      How do you know?

·      What are you going to do about how you are doing?

Great questions to ask yourself as you think through your company culture. How are you doing in creating the a high performance culture that keeping Making It Happen?

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?

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?