D is for Ducks

The ABC of Sales Part II.

A while ago, I wrote an article on The ABC of Sales: Psychology Before Process, so it was inevitable that at some point I would follow this up by working my way through the rest of the alphabet. Which brings us to D.

D is for lots of things. D is for Data, in terms of being data-informed in how you approach planning and sales activity. It can’t all be based on instinct or doing what you have always done. There needs to be an objective rationale for why you (and your business) are doing what you do now and going forward. And how you objectively measure success (or understand why you fell short).

D is for Delegation. In short, trust the people you have hired to do the jobs you hired them to do. Organisations spend a lot of time, energy and money on finding and hiring the right people, and (hopefully) more still on developing them during their time with the business. Micromanaging, creating a sense of paranoia or using short-term KPIs to beat these people up are all sure-fire ways to lose your best hires and have high levels of staff churn – creating disruption and added expense.

D is also for Delivery. Or doing what you said you would do. If you agree to provide a customer with a proposal or an answer to a specific technical question, make sure you follow up. On time and in full. Don’t overpromise and underdeliver.

However, this article focuses on ducks.

More specifically, getting your ducks in a row. In my previous article, I wrote about aptitude, bravery and curiosity as three essential behaviours for successful salespeople aiming to sustain reasonably long and satisfying careers. But something which makes the best salespeople stand out from the rest is their ability to plan and organise, at both a macro (territory, annually and quarterly) and micro (individual accounts, weekly and daily) level. The hard yards undertaken before and after the sales call. This planning work is as much about behaviours and mindset as it is about process.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (pre-Brexit, pre-smartphone and pre-AI), I was hired to lead a small field sales team working in the educational publishing space in the UK. The team was responsible for selling a portfolio of textbooks for broad range of career education qualifications in areas such as construction, information technology, motor vehicle engineering and hairdressing. The business was steady but static.

My team comprised three people with a combined experience just from working in this team (not across their entire careers) of nearly fifty years. That’s a tough gig for an external sales leadership hire who is less than a decade into their entire career. Especially when two members of the team had also applied for the role and been rejected.

Full of enthusiasm, I sat down privately with each member of the team and asked (1) how things were going, (2) how they defined success in their roles, and (3) what they needed from me as their line manager to continue to be successful.

Each one said pretty much the same thing:

(1) Fine, thank you.

(2) Making sure they had visited and provided the latest product information to all of the college libraries in their assigned sales territory over the course of the academic year.

(3) Nothing, thank you.

The gig had just got even tougher. This team’s working lives were effectively a road trip from September to June each academic year to sample the tea and biscuits at each college in their sales patch. Nice work if you can get it! I am being a bit unfair of course. They were each very professional in their approach and each of them had built strong, trusted relationships with the librarians at virtually all the colleges in their sales territory – many of whom had equally long tenures.

But the business had been static for several years and was now starting to atrophy in the face of increased competition and dwindling library budgets. Colleges were purchasing fewer titles and doing so in lower quantities. This wasn’t so much a case of ducks in a row as being sitting ducks for our competitors.

My job as the new sales leader was to generate growth in terms of new adoptions[1] of frontlist titles and increased sales volumes across the wider portfolio of titles. And so, I introduced my team to the basic concept of territory planning based on targeting revenue growth opportunities (a) by the largest colleges with the largest enrolments and budgets, and (b) by focusing on key frontlist titles and bestselling backlist titles. We even had a cut-down version of a truly horrible old CRM system at our disposal, the full version of which had been implemented across the parent company, synchronised by each salesperson each evening via dial-up internet. Not that anyone in this part of the business had been using it prior to my arrival.

The transition was painful. My team felt mistrusted and undervalued. They found the CRM system cumbersome and time consuming. As for me, a relative rookie in their eyes, parachuted in as their sales leader, I struggled at first to sell the plan to my team.

They had got into a comfortable state in which they almost assumed that the new titles and bestsellers would just sell themselves, as long as they let their library contacts know what was coming down the line each year by sharing the new title marketing flyers and the glossy annual catalogue. The idea of talking directly to the people leading and teaching the courses, rather than just the librarians, was anathema to them. The team dutifully respected the perceived role of the librarians as gatekeepers. And how could they possibly talk to all these people, when they had to physically get around all their colleges before the academic year was over? Talking to the course tutors was the librarians’ job, armed with the information provided by the sales team.

Each team member said they understood the rationale behind the new approach and each grudgingly agreed it was the right thing to do. But there was undoubtedly a natural inertia and an emotional resistance to the new way of working. Their accepted definition of success was being challenged and changed. After all, nobody within the business had complained over the last 10-20 years, so why change things now?

However, the plan started to work. It helped that I was able to bring in an additional team member, from another part of the business, who embraced the plan and (rather too keenly perhaps) demonstrated their aptitude, bravery and curiosity for the role, which spurred the other team members to raise their game – but didn’t do anything to quell their resentment.

We won new adoptions for titles in subjects with the largest enrolments (hairdressing being the biggest, which often surprises people outside of the vocational education space). We started to connect directly with course leaders and tutors, being mindful to do this in collaboration with the college librarians rather than trying to go around them. We grew the business for the first time in years. Not by a huge amount, but enough to show a direction of travel. And for the first time in years, each team member didn’t visit every college in their territory for tea and biscuits.

D is for Deprived of Sleep

This process of change took its toll on everyone. This was the age of the Blackberry, the must-have status symbol for every aspiring middle manager in the early noughties. Constant connectivity as a perk of the job. I was suitably thrilled to be given my own Blackberry when I was hired to this role, whilst my team had to make do with their Nokia mobile phones. In the interest of keeping my disgruntled team happy, I made sure my Blackberry was always kept on, and as such I was always available to support them.

Whether through insecurity or mischief, I had one early-bird team member who consistently messaged or left a voicemail at around 5am each day, and another who typically did the same thing each evening around midnight. Given that these two were the ones who had also applied for my role, this probably wasn’t a coincidence. I quickly found myself tormented by the little red flashing Blackberry light on my bedside table and, within less than a year, I was physically and emotionally exhausted by the job. I paid the price for my naivety and inexperience as a sales leader.

Things have moved on during the intervening twenty years or so, both in terms of technology and expectations. Sales pipelines, KPIs and online CRM platforms are an intrinsic and accepted part of the salesperson’s role in most organisations. It’s now almost inconceivable that someone could perform a sales role without the use of technology and constant connectivity. Arguably, this is sometimes to the detriment of the art of selling – the behaviours and mindset, the value of experience and trusted relationships. Perhaps we focus too much instead on a short-term view of the process and numbers, and defer to what we believe to be definitive, objective metrics, rather than giving a fair hearing to the lived experience and commercial instincts of the salesperson. Maybe we are too quick to be data-driven rather than data-informed.

As a rookie sales leader joining that educational publishing sales team over 20 years ago, I know in hindsight that I undervalued the relationships and trust that those highly experienced field salespeople had built with their customers. They desperately needed a plan and a definition of success which aligned with the goals of the business, but they also needed a more empathetic and pragmatic leader. They didn’t need a 24/7 always available line manager; they needed a coach, advocate and facilitator. I focused on the data and the process. In my eyes and in those of the business, we felt that we delivered. I had done the job which had been asked of me.

But for much of my time with them, despite me trying to do the right thing by them as well as the business, those three experienced team members felt deflated. They resented not being able to visit each and every one of their college librarians in person – their longstanding customers and in many cases their friends. In retrospect, looking back now as a fifty-something sales professional myself, there was a better balance to be struck, and arguably a more patient timeframe needed on the part of the business for getting our ducks in a row.

D is for Direction

In summary, getting your ducks in a row as a salesperson or sales leader means knowing why you are doing what you are doing, and not just what, how and where.

How does your activity align with the goals of the business? Is the focus on revenue growth, profitability, pivoting to a new space or increasing market share? Or a combination of the above?

The business needs to have its ducks in a row as well, ensuring that the plans and incentives for its commercial teams (and across the wider organisation) are transparently aligned. Are you getting the most from your most valued resource, your people? Sell the plan and the goals to your team, and get their input and buy-in, before they go out and start selling for you. A commercial operation isn’t a democracy, but it does require you as its leader to make sure that the people you have within your team feel seen and heard.

And a plea to those experienced salespeople, the forty and fifty-somethings in the second half of their careers, who find themselves confronted by a sales leader who apparently has less professional or life experience. Don’t be afraid to politely push back a little on your management if they aren’t quite seeing the bigger picture. Manage upwards a little bit to help (but not hinder) your colleague!

But please, do try to have some evidence – some data – to back up your case and, ultimately, make sure you can demonstrate you did all that was required to deliver what was agreed. Volatile market conditions and bad luck stories won’t cut it, especially if you just went along for the tea and biscuits, in order to tick another customer (or conference) off the list for the year. D is for lots of things, but it’s not for Dunking.

The Duck takes a break from the photo shoot.

[1] ‘Adoption’ in this context refers to a college or university adopting a printed textbook as required reading for its students on a particular course, either for purchase at a local bookstore or bulk purchase by the institution. In recent years, this business model has tended to be replaced by online course materials.