Worrisome Patterns of Behavior

On The Price of Business Kevin Price and Walter Rogers Discuss the Twelve Best Practices of Sales Management and Focusing on Worrisome Patterns of Behavior

[Kevin Price]: Welcome back to The Price of Business, it is the show that never ends, why; it continues twenty-four-seven at priceofbusiness.com where you get great information, great audio and great news that is unique only to that site. That is what I love about it, the internet is a phenomenal and an amazing regurgitation of information but, what I think is phenomenal is that all has to start somewhere; as some of the best content in business news and information as well as some of the stuff going on in the political and current events front, is found at the priceofbusiness.com where you find people like Walter Rogers with Baker Communications. He is my friend and is always a delight to have on the program, I enjoy our conversations, and I am always smarter after I spend time with you Sir.

[Walter Rogers]: Hey, I am always smarter after I spend time with you Kevin.

[KP]: Well, thank you Sir. What do you got for us today?

[WR]: Today we are going to talk a little bit about, continue to talk about, the best practices of sales management and the focus for today is; looking at worrisome patterns of behavior. So, how can you begin to spot things that are not all that good with one of your performers?

[KP]: Okay. Okay. Are these something that are typically quantifiable or observational? Go ahead and jump in. I am sorry, I‘m asking questions I should probably be asking after you relay your case. Go ahead.

[WR]: Yea

[KP]: You know me I get excited and want all the answers right now.

[WR]: I know Kevin, I get excited with you to, you excite me. So, basically a few weeks back, we spoke about the difference between managing a forecast and managing the forward pipeline. In that show we talked at detail around the difference about those two things; certainly a quantifiably indicator of a change is a decline in the pipeline. If you start to see that your pipeline metrics are starting to dip than obviously there is probably something going on with that sales rep that is worthy of investigation. We are not really going to double click on that today because we have already covered that. But there are other things that a sales manager ought to be constantly on the lookout for that really has everything to do with behavioral patterns. So let me give you an example; you often times worry about losing your better performers and if you’ve got great performers on yours team certainly you want to make sure they stick around and sometimes you can tell if they are looking for other jobs. If you know that they are out there looking for other jobs, than you have the ability to do something about it. Here are a few things that you can specifically look out for: changes in dress patterns; let’s say you have a pretty casual office and all the sudden someone comes in dressed up regularly, now you might think what’s the big deal with someone upgrading their dress code. But you know Kevin; one of the things that we have found is that often times it is a sign of what? What do you think?

[KP]: Interviewing.

[WR]: Interviewing going on, exactly, outside of the office, so, real easy to spot. Doesn’t mean that that is exactly what is happening, maybe they have a lunch date, they want to look nice for somebody or what have you but, certainly be on the lookout for that. Another tool that we have seen that is really affective in monitoring these changes in interviewing behavior are Linked In. Now Kevin do you use linked in by any chance?

[KP]: Yea, not as much as I should. But Yes.

[WR]: For the listeners who don’t know what Linked In is; it is basically a social network really targeted for business networking and on this network you can create a user profile and individuals will often use this profile to find prospects, connect to new customers and all of that. One of the things you can spot in a change of behavior is if somebody starts to make a lot of changes and updates for their user profile. That is another indicator that this is somebody who is probably looking around because the reason they are updating their profile is they want to make sure that if other people are out there looking for potential employees to hire that you are personally putting yourself out there with the best foot forward.

[KP]: Right. So, that is exactly true. They are busy doing things like social networking, particularly on the business side, if they are wearing interview type clothing than these are all indicators that something may be going on.

[WR]: Something may be going on. Another great recommendation is that once a quarter get a subscription to monster, now monster is probably the largest job board out there and a subscription will cost a few hundred dollars or whatever it is for about a week or so; search in monster for your company name and you will find who is putting resumes out there, of themselves, in the world, again looking for employment. So, it’s not something you should do constantly but, it is something worth doing once a quarter. Now the reason you want to do these thing is not so much because you want to prevent somebody for going out there and looking for work if they are not happy, right, then perhaps they need a different environment but, if they are not happy then maybe there is something else going on inside of the company that can be addressed. Maybe it is a misunderstanding between that person and you, and it is often times something that you spot early enough you can have dialog and conversation with that individual and actually prevent somebody who you don’t want to leave from leaving. Hiring somebody and replacing somebody is very expensive.

[KP]: Very expensive. No question about it. Opportunity costs dollars. I think we live in a society that we pretty much have dismissed the importance of opportunity cost, it seems.

[WR]: The opportunity cost is certainly when you lose somebody; it has something to do with more than having to hire somebody else, you have got transition costs, you have got customer transitioning costs and the customer is now going to have to deal with a new sales resource that maybe isn’t familiar, you’ve got knowledge leakage that walks out the door. So, really retaining your top talent is a particularly important thing to do. I think it is the most important thing that managers can do.

[KP]: Absolutely. Those are very important indicators. What are some of the contributing factors you typically see over and over again? What are the recurring themes for people leaving?

[WR]: You know there is a thing called the grass is always greener, yet it rarely is, right Kevin.

[KP]: Ah Men

[WR]: Sometimes it has to do with just somebody feels like they do not have any more headroom or as I say room to grow inside of a company and so they start looking for other opportunities outside of the organization. Now room to grow does not necessarily mean promotion; most sales people, in fact, don’t make particularly good sales managers, they are really good individual contributors but aren’t necessarily cut out for sales management. Yet, there is a belief that sales management is the next logical step. Having dialog with your high performers around, their particular career path, finding leadership opportunities for them inside of the company, giving them a chance to showcase themselves inside of the company outside of just compensation are ways you can use to retain some of your top talent and prevent them from leaving. There are some other patterns of behavior that a sales manager should be on the lookout for besides these behavioral patterns associated with interviewing and looking for other jobs and that is a declining amount of customer contact.

[KP]: Yes.

[WR]: So, most companies should have some sort of target in terms of number of phone calls or face to face meetings or customer meetings over the phone that sales reps are supposed to make and if you start to see a declining pattern against the targets, then again it is another sign of maybe something that is going awry. Maybe it’s a work obstacle that is getting in the way or maybe it is something personal in their lives that are getting in the way, either way, it is the manager’s job to try to understand and help that performer do a better job.

[KP]: Is that for preexisting clients and people they hope to have, prospects, or are you talking about, specifically, preexisting clients?

[WR]: Well it is really both. So there is a balance between getting new customers and retaining the ones that you have. Some companies are organized so that there are hunter teams and that is all they do is get new customers and then hand them over to the farmer teams that are going to retain them. The targets are going to vary between one group and the next depending on the industry you are in and how you are structured.

[KP]: Interesting. We are of course talking to my friend Walter Rogers, He is with Baker Communications; vital contributor every week here on The Price of Business bringing phenomenal information. You know, I would like you to take a minute. You do such a great job in the content oriented area and by the way you practically have a book written there, and let me tell you just how much I enjoy your literature that I noticed you don’t have your article up this week, I watch closely, I love the content you write. You are essentially writing a book, you are one of the most prolific writers of our contributors out there but, you do such a good job of going straight to the content. Kind of give us the scope of what Baker Communications does for a company?

[WR]: Yea Sure Kevin. So, we are a performance improvement organization and really what that means is that we work with about half of the fortune 500 and lots of companies in the middle market, about a thousand or so customers a year, and we help them to conceptualize what their strategy is and help them identify what the gaps are from a people perspective, from a process perspective and from a technology perspective towards achieving those objectives and then come in and fill in with some solutions that have to do integrating sales and marketing doing a better job of using their CRM upgrading their skill sets of their sales reps upgrading their skill sets of their sales managers. About half of what we do is in a classroom environment and about half of what we do is in the cloud, as we say, 100% virtually.

[KP]: Okay. And so it includes a multi approach; includes hands on, one on one, group settings, the whole nine yards and they can be specifically designed to meet the need of the client.

[WR]: They are always designed to meet the need of the client. We do have an open enrollment business where people can just register and show up and take a class in New York City, Miami, Atlanta or any one of the 14 cities in the United States where we do those. 90% of our work is client specific so everything is extremely tailored to that clients experience and to that clients objectives. You are right Kevin; it does combine a mix of one on one, coaching, team coaching, sales manager coaching, classroom coaching, virtual education, self study materials, integrated strategies and software tools.

[KP]: The whole nine yards.

[WR]: No one thing fixes it all; you really have to have a blend.

[KP]: Walter Rogers is his name Baker Communications is his game; the premier of experts when it comes to taking businesses to the next level. Again, I just go t a little smarter in the last segment thanks to Walter Rogers. Walter, people get in touch with you at bakercommunications.com and you did say last week that you have a new website, I got to play around with it and you know what it is very impressive, congratulations.

[WR]: Hey, thanks. I am glad you liked it. It is just part of our upgrade and how we are really working with our customers.

[KP]: You have to keep upgrading, that’s for sure. We have to be moving targets or we are going to get ran over. Bakercommunications.com. Phone number?

[WR]: (713)627-7700, (713)627-7700

[KP]: Very, very good Walter Rogers you are the man! Thanks for being here with us again.

[WR]: Thanks Kevin I appreciate it.

[KP]: What is your next article going to be about?

[WR]: Yea, so next week a topic I am extremely passionate about which is; how to protect your sales reps time because if they are not spending time with customers they are not making money for you. We are going to talk about exactly that.

[KP]: Thank you very much my friend.

[WR]: Thank you Kevin. Bye, Bye.

[KP]: You bet. Alright, good stuff of course that is what Walter Rogers does all the time there at Baker Communications. I am Kevin Price wrapping up another show after this segment with some great information for you and your business and your life. This is CNN650