Cadence and Consistency

Walter Rogers invites Mike Clayville to discuss the importance of cadence and consistency on The Price of Business

[Burt Martinez]:  And we’re back.  This is Burt Martinez filling in for Kevin Price and this is the show that never ends.  You can check us out at the Price of Business dot com.  Right now we’re going to be talking about one of my favorite subjects which is sales because sales is what really drives America.  My guest is Walter Rogers.  He is the president and CEO of Baker Communications.  Walter, welcome to the show.

[Walter Rogers]:  Hey, thanks Burt.  Nice to be back.  I’ve got a guest with me as well and his name is Mike Clayville.  He’s the VP of North America Sales for VMware.  He was a guest prior, on a previous show and he’s going to join us again today.

[BM]:  Great Michael, welcome to the show.

[Mike Clayville]:  Yeah, thanks for having me. 

[BM]:  Alright, so you know, I’m looking at your article and this is a great article.  I love the headline.  “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast”  It’s a great article for those individuals who like to get their arms wrapped around the challenge of helping sales people manage more successfully.  Walter what do you have today?  What are you and Mike up to today?

[WR]:  Yeah, so without a doubt culture eats strategy for breakfast.  We covered that topic a few weeks ago and today we’re actually going to be talking about cadence and consistency.  If you think about it, the sales managers, which we’re really focused on right now, sets the heartbeat, the pace of what his or her team is going to do.  That heartbeat, that pace is all around managing cadence and consistency in a variety of areas that sales management is responsible for.  Mike’s got years and years of experience doing the job of setting the right pace and cadence with his sales managers who then set with their own sales team.  That’s what we’re going to talk about today, the importance of setting the right cadence with your sales teams.

[BM]:  So cadence, consistency that’s kind of the rhythm, if you will, of successful selling?

[WR]:  It absolutely is.  Mike why don’t you comment on that?

[MC]:  Yeah, that’s exactly right.  There’s really two vectors for success in sales.  If you think about all of the years I’ve been in business, there’s really two things that made the biggest difference.  It’s all based on cadence.  It’s what you do and how fast you do it.  If you get really good at doing something.  Just like if you’re out practicing golf or basketball, you do it over and over again.  You get that muscle memory down.  You get really, really good at doing it.  So one of the things that I would teach my team is every month, every quarter, do the exact same thing.  Get better and better and better.  Refine that skill to the point that you’re exceptional at it.  Then it’s about the urgency of delivering right?  You marry those two and you have an unbelievably successful result. 

[BM]:  Absolutely.  You know one of the things that you’re talking about there Mike and Walter is something that I believe really makes us masters of our domain, so to speak, and that is the whole thing or repetition.  Like you said, it’s something so simple as doing what you did over and over again.  You’re getting better each time.  You’re mastering it each time.  That’s what makes you unbelievably successful, not being distracted in ten different ways and trying out the latest fashions, so to speak.

[MC]:  To a certain extent, we’re all creatures of habit right?

[BM]:  Right.

[MC]:  If we get into a rhythm that says we’re going to spend two hours a day prospecting, two hours a day on customer service, two hours a day building new proposals and we keep that rhythm day in and day out, we’ll get ourselves down the track much further than if we opportunistically or when we think about it decide to jump in and do some prospecting.  I look at it at a macro and at a micro level.  What am I going to do today to advance the ball?  Over the course of the month what am I going to do each week to advance the ball?  Then over the course of a quarter, what am I going to do each month to advance the ball?  Right?  And you set that cadence, not only a daily cadence but a weekly cadence, a monthly cadence, and a quarterly cadence and you have that consistent so you get to repeat those processes, those behaviors every day, every week, every month, every quarter refine your skills to the point that you’ll be more successful than anybody else.

[BM]:  Absolutely.  Walter, your take?

[WR]:  Yeah, and it’s even more important to do this when you’re wanting your team to do something they’re not all that comfortable in doing.  Mike’s mentioned prospecting a few times.  Our experience has been that most sales professionals are not big fans of prospecting.  They have a fear of rejection mostly because they don’t know how to properly execute a prospecting strategy.  You talk about something like prospecting and cadence is absolutely critical.  If you don’t expect and inspect the prospecting behavior that you want your team to work on, then you can be sure that they’re going to vary off of that path.  In fact, Mike any comments on the importance of cadence around prospecting?

[MC]:  Oh it’s fundamental.  It’s absolutely  fundamental.  The biggest mistake we make as sales managers is the belief that everyone is good at the, generic term, prospecting.  Prospecting isn’t just one behavior.  Prospecting is a series of about four behaviors.  First of all, it’s how do I target?  Second of all it’s how do I make contact and earn the right to have a follow up meeting.  Next is how do I have that meeting and understand the customer’s pain points so that the fourth thing is I can find a qualified sales opportunity.  The biggest mistake we all make is assuming that everybody is good at all four of those skills.  You know what?  We’re not.  Just like we have people on the front line that are three hundred pounds, we have people on the ends that can run 4.3.  We have very few people who are three hundred pounds and can run 4.3. 

[BM]:  Right.  And the other thing is…Sorry Mike to cut you off.  The other thing is, something that you hit on or Walter mentioned this, when you mention the word “prospecting” it’s assumed that we know what we’re talking about, but your interpretation, Walter’s interpretation, my interpretation, the sales person’s interpretation may be completely different or slightly different than what we expect like Walter said.

[MC]:  Oh, absolutely, absolutely.  With a solid cadence however, you take each of those skills and you continue to refine them and you won’t have the three hundred pound lineman running 4.3, but they’ll get a lot faster.  All you have to do is average up the entire population to make a significant difference to your sales force.

[WR]:  And breaking something like prospecting down into the four phases as Mike described is exactly how you’re able to stay on cadence, because if you can break it down to those four steps, the sales team understands what those four steps are, they’re then measured and inspected against their progress in each of those four steps both in a one-on-one basis and in a team setting that measurement and that discussion occurs on a weekly pattern then all of a sudden, you’re setting cadence and tempo.  Yeah, it’ll take a few weeks to get people going.  It’ll make people uncomfortable because it’s not something that they’re necessarily used to, but in the end once you set that pattern and that tempo then they’ll be able to stay on cadence and the prospecting cycle will become much easier, much more predictable.  The sales managers will have much more visibility which means they’ve got better visibility into their forward looking pipeline.

[BM]:  Absolutely.  You know, you mentioned a couple of times you have to inspect to make sure you get what you expect and I like the strategy of cadence and consistency because it all gives that sales person, from the bottom up, the sales person, the sales manager, the VP of sales, they’re all teaching the same thing and so they’re all on the same page, you’re going to get consistent results.

[WR]:  It also drives home the importance of it.  If a sales manager every single week or month whatever the pattern is consistently repeats the specific activity of inspection, discussion, coaching then that sales team will know it’s important to that manager.  If, on the other hand, you do it one week, you skip three weeks, then you do it again, then you skip a week and you do it again, the sales team can see through that.  It’s just like raising kids.  Mike and I were talking about the similarities between raising children and working with sales people, not that sales people are children, but there’s a lot of similarities in terms of parenting style. 

[BM]:  [Laughing]

[WR]:  Well, it’s true.

[BM]:  [Laughing]  There is.  It’s so true.

[WR]:  Right, because children are going to behave in a way that’s consistent with their parents behavior.  As soon as the parent varies from that behavior then the children will know they can just do whatever.  We see that happen over and over again.  Mike, what are your thoughts on that?

[MC]:  Absolutely.  In fact it’s the management and mentoring that’s the key to this.  In the long term what you want is every one of your sales reps to be filthy rich right?  And not have to work very hard.

[BM]:  Absolutely.

[MC]:  You get that simply through ensuring that consistency and cadence is managed and measured and the next “and,” which is the most important one, is “mentored.”  If each of those steps of the weekly, monthly, and quarterly cadence you’re managing and you’re mentoring them, improving them with every single week, with every single month, with every single quarter those reps are going to end up being unbelievable performers for you. 

[BM]:  Absolutely.  Guys, we only have a couple of minutes and I wanted to throw this out.  How important, you mentioned measuring a couple of times, how important is the success of the sales team based on measuring?

[WR]:  Mike I know you’ve got a strong opinion on that.  I’ll let you go first.

[MC]:  You never know if you’ve won unless you have a scoreboard.  Sales people are all about winning right?  A good salesperson wants to win every single time.  So you have to have a scoreboard up that shows how well they’re doing.  Not only can it motivate them, but again coming back to your job is to make sure that that sales rep really advances in their career.  As a sales manager you don’t know their strengths or, more importantly, their weaknesses unless you have a scoreboard that shows you that from that scoreboard you get the next important vector which is are they improving?  How well are they doing and are they improving?  That only come from measurement. 

[BM]:  Hey Mike, Walter hold on one second.  If you guys have a couple of minutes, I’d like to hold you for after the break and let’s wrap this up on the next segment.  Is that okay?

[WR]:  Sure.

[BM]:  Okay guys we’re going to take short break.  We’ll be right back with Walter Roger from Baker Communications here on the Price of Business.

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[BM]:  And we’re back.  My name is Burt Martinez.  I am filling in for Kevin Price here on the price of business and we are talking about money, specifically how to make money and measure sales success.  I’m talking Walter Rogers, president of Baker Communications and his guest Mike, if forgot you name, but guys welcome back. 

[WR]:  Thanks Burt.

[BM]:  Alright, Mike was talking about measuring, how absolutely vitally important this is.  We only have a couple of minutes left guys and I wanted to wrap this up.  Your take on it Walter?

[WR]:  It’s absolutely critical that success is measured and as Mike said, sales reps care about winning.  You’ve got to have the scoreboard and you’ve got to have leader boards and people want to know how they’re ranking on that scoreboard.  If you’ve got good sales people they’re not going to want to be at the bottom of that leader board or that scoreboard.  Also what’s important is to measure the activities that get you to that success.  You can’t show up at a football game look at the scoreboard and impact the score when the game is over, but you can impact the results of that game as that game is unfolding and that’s really that sales manager’s job.  It’s part of the mentoring that Mike was talking about.  How you mentor a sales person and look at the correct set of metrics that will ultimately influence whether they win or not.  For example, if a sales rep had a million dollar quota for a quarter and they only have a million dollars in their pipeline odds are they aren’t going to make their quota, because you need to have at least 3x in your pipeline in order to hit your target most times.  So the sales manager, if you’re able to quickly take a look at somebody’s pipeline and you know what the metric is in terms of the multiples that pipeline needs to be in order to hit their quota then they can properly mentor that sales rep without just focusing on the end result. 

[BM]:  Excellent.

[MC]:  The other thing I think about Walter, is I think about leading indicators and lagging indicators.  The scoreboard is a lagging indicator.  It’s too late to change the scoreboard when you’re out there in the game right?  The leading indicators, which is how hard you worked in practice, how well you have your timing routes down, what type of exercise you’ve been doing, strength training you’ve been doing, those are the—

 [BM]:  Hello?  Looks like we had a little technical difficulty.  Anyway we were talking to Walter Rogers.  He is the president and CEO of Baker Communications and he is a leader in sales training, his company is.  This is amazing.  They’ve trained over a million people and they’ve also won the training industry award for top sales training companies.  That’s awesome.  Again this is Burt Martinez here on the Price of Business.  I want you to check out the PriceofBusiness.com and get your business where you want it to get to.  Have a great day.  Again this is Burt Martinez on the Price of Business.