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Pulling together
You’re wondering how to motivate your salespeople as their prospects experience cost reduction, redundancies, reduced sales and slow markets. Their morale is lower than it has been for some time and some of them feel they are banging their heads against a brick wall.
Your proposition is still strong, your bonus scheme generous, your pricing aggressive and you still have some support from marketing although their budget has been reduced. And your budget is tight too. You are asking your salespeople to qualify harder before travelling to visit prospects.
If any of this rings true, one way forward is to improve the teamworking in your sales team. But how should you go about it, what will it cost, and will it make any difference?
Health warning
Team building with people who do not need to work as a team can do more harm than good. My definition of a team is a number of people with a shared goal who depend on each other for the achievement of their individual tasks and the achievement of the shared team goal. Often this doesn’t get applied to sales ‘teams’.
My definition of a group is a number of people who all report to the same manager but can achieve their own goals without any reference to, or help from, the other members of the group. The group achievement is determined by adding up the individual group member achievements. No group member depends on any of the other group members. Often this applies to sales ‘teams’.
Even before you think about team building and making your sales teams more effective it may be wise to look at your incentive schemes. Many sales incentive schemes, while being designed to encourage individual sales performance, actually discourage effective teamworking. Salespeople quickly work out how to maximise their personal benefit from any new incentive scheme and find themselves thinking:
Ø If I help another salesperson I will spend less time selling myself and, therefore, end up with a smaller bonus
Ø If I can keep myself at, or near, the top of the sales ranking there’ll be: less hassle, a better chance of promotion, less chance of redundancy, a better chance of a good appraisal and pay rise, a chance to get into the master sales club (or whatever you call it in your organisation), a chance of getting a better car – so why on earth should I put myself at a possible disadvantage by helping, or working with, another salesperson?
If your sales incentive scheme rewards individual success rather than team success it may not be a good idea to invest in team development. The drivers you are using to promote sales may work against effective teamworking. But if your sales incentive scheme rewards team success as well then investing in team building will have a payback – eg as well as individual sales a salesperson’s bonus could depend on:
Ø Total team sales
Ø Total regional sales
Ø Total national or international sales
Ø Customer feedback
Ø Company market share
Ø Company share price.
There are several benefits of salespeople working as a team. Assuming they have a shared goal and are rewarded if the shared goal is achieved salespeople will be more willing to:
Ø Share good ideas
Ø Ask for help from each other and not just their sales managers
Ø Make joint sales calls on each other’s patches to tackle a difficult prospect
Ø Coach each other
Ø Work with marketing on how customers perceive the advertising, the sales materials and the proposition
Ø Deliver training.
A team, of course, could consist of salespeople, marketing people, installation people, maintenance people etc. Configure your teams to best suit your sales model.
Assuming you have ‘teams’ of people rather than ‘groups’ of people you can try some of the following suggestions to develop teamworking.
Suggestion 1
Use the four Hs at your team meeting. Each team member comes to the team meeting prepared to share their four Hs, which stand for:
Hurrah – a success that the team member has achieved since the last team meeting. Sharing successes can help to both energise the team and help other team members learn what works and use it for themselves
Howler – a mistake that the team member has made since the last meeting. Sharing mistakes can help team members to learn what doesn’t work and avoid repeating their colleague’s mistake
Hint – something that the team member wants to pass on to the other team members that may help them to save time, be more successful etc
Help – something that the team member wants help with. For example, the other team members may be able to offer ways of closing the sale more quickly, using reference sites more effectively tec.
Suggestion 2
Use a team effectiveness tool to access your own view of your team. The Pansophix Team Effectiveness Tool uses 16 key indicators to determine how effective your team is. You should focus on:
Ø Success
Ø Performance
Ø Quality
Ø Customer focus
Ø Leadership
Ø Team goals and objectives
Ø Personal goals and objectives
Ø Roles and responsibilities
Ø Utilisation of resource
Ø Trust and conflict
Ø Support
Ø Interpersonal communication
Ø Problem-solving and decision-making
Ø Experimentation and creativity
Ø Controls and procedures
Ø Evaluation.
Get these indicators right and your team will be effective. The team effectiveness tool will, if you are honest with yourself, give you a clue where you need to invest time to help make your team more effective.
Suggestion 3
It helps if all team members have the same view of success. While this sounds obvious it’s surprisingly rare to find a team in which all members have the same view of team success. I’ve been helping teams to develop since 1992. Only twice have I come access a team where all the members gave me similar answers to the question “How do you know if the team is being successful?”
Try this – at your next team meeting, ask each team member to write down, on a piece of flipchart paper, the answer to the question “How do we know if we are being successful or not?” They must do this on their own and without conferring with each other. Write your own answer too. Now, put the answers up on the wall and compare them. They should be similar for the team to be effective. If they are not, team members may be pulling in different directions. It’s like two or more people fighting over the tiller on a sailing boat because they disagree about where they are going. The boat won’t be sailing effectively. Invest time in clarifying what the team needs to achieve to be successful.
Suggestion 4
Learn from geese! ‘Lessons from Geese’ has been around for a long time. They are reputed to be by a Robert McNeish, who wrote them for a lay sermon he delivered in a Presbyterian Church in Baltimore in 1972.
Ø Observation 1: As each goose flaps its wings it crates uplift for the birds that follow. Flying in a “V” formation increases their flying range by approximately 70%.
Lesson: Team members who share a sense of community and direction can help each other get where they are going more easily because they are travelling on the trust on one another.
Ø Observation 2: When a goose falls out of formation it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of flying alone. It quickly moves back to take advantage of the lifting power of the birds in front.
Lesson: If we have as much sense as geese we stay in formation with those headed where we want to go. We are willing to accept their help and give our help to them.
Ø Observation 3: When the lead goose tires it drops back into the formation and another goose flies to the point position.
Lesson: It pays to take turns doing the hard tasks. We should respect and protect each other’s unique skills, capabilities and resources.
Ø Observation 4: The geese, flying in formation, honk to encourage those up front to keep up their speed.
Lesson: We need to make sure that our honking is encouraging. In groups where there is encouragement, production is much greater. Individual empowerment results from quality honking. Be a team leader who focuses on catching people doing things right rather than doing things wrong. Are you the kind of leader who lights up a room when you walk in or when you walk out?
Ø Observation 5: When a goose gets sick, two geese drop out of formation and follow it down to help it.
Lesson: If we have as much sense as geese we will stand by each other in difficult times as well as when we are strong.
Contributor: Ian Clark is author of A Useful Guide to Managing Teams. He is the co-founder of consultancy Pansophix, which delivers face-to-face training and publishes e-learning resources. The full portfolio of Useful Guides is available on the Pansophix website, including A Useful Guide to Sales 1, which is about building relationships and gaining commitment. You can also get free access to the Pansophix Learning Support Centre, where you can access the team effectiveness tool. www.pansophix.com; 0845 2602820
Source: Winning Edge September/October 2009