Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast

By Walter Rogers
President and CEO
Baker Communication

We are trying to wrap our arms around the challenge of how to help sales managers become more successful and effective at helping their sales team become more successful and effective. If that sounds like double-talk, now you know how it feels to be a sales manager.

Many sales managers started out as sales reps themselves. However, now they sit on the other side of the desk. Suddenly, their measure of success is not based on how many deals they close yourself, but on how motivated, focused, skilled and successful at closing the entire team is. This challenge introduces a wild card into the sales equation that many sales managers have never had to deal with before: the people factor. Somehow, they have to quickly become adept at handling a diverse group of people with differing needs, skills, opinions, and experience levels, and they must inspire and equip them to go out and do for that sales manager what he used to do on his own.

It is precisely here that many sales managers begin to struggle. In their effort to get the team to perform better, they forget what it is like to be the sales rep. We mentioned last time that sales managers think too much about managing, which leads to continually coming up with new processes, new goals, new sales contests and other gimmicks, even new threats, all in attempt to squeeze more production out of the team. Some sales managers come up with new ways to measure and document so they can have more data to try to figure out ways to eliminate bottlenecks and make things work better. Yet, often all of these efforts meet with little or no success. Why?

Because sometimes sales managers forget what it is like to be a sales rep. For sales managers who came to their position from some other department and have never actually been a sales rep, the problem is even worse. The fact is selling is immersed in a very powerful and pervasive culture, and this culture will shred right through all the new plans and processes and strategies a sales manager can come up with. Most likely, the culture will just cause most new initiatives to be ignored. Let me explain.

Being a serious sales professional – not an order taker – is a challenging, exhilarating, overwhelming, heart-breaking, grinding, discouraging, frustrating, electrifying, energizing, brain frying, ego crushing, ego boosting thrill ride that makes the Tower of Terror at Disney World look like a kiddy carousel. Some people compare the life of a sales rep to waking up unemployed every day. The most effective sales professionals – the ones who work on full commission – are like daredevils taking to the high wire without a net. They thrive on the challenge. The only thing that matters is the next sale.

So don’t come to them with new processes or new goals or new accounting methods or new little sales games. Most top sales reps look at that stuff like it is just more deck chairs on the Titanic. When sales managers approach sales reps with new theories and new strategies, sales reps only have one question

Is this going to help me make more money?

If the answer is maybe, hopefully, not sure, or – this is the worst – probably not but it is important because management needs you to do it so they can achieve some other goal – then sales reps will take those strategies and stuff them in a drawer or use them as liners for their birdcages at home. Sales managers, whatever you decide to do that you think will help your team increase production and drive revenue, always remember this: If it isn’t clearly and immediately obvious to your team that your next new thing is going to help them make money, you are wasting your breath. Sales reps will always stick with what works for them unless or until you can prove to them that your way works better.

What is your cultural vision for your organization?

This instinctual sales rep culture will always eat sales manager strategies for breakfast. It isn’t even a fair fight. So, one of the challenges a sales manager must come to grips with is how to begin to mold and grow this baseline sales rep culture into something that is a little broader in vision and scope.

According to Alex Shootman, Executive Vice President of Eloqua, a leading global marketing automation firm, anyone can sell, but not everyone can sell right.

“While we need and will have a sales strategy, we cannot staple that strategy to a culture that will not support it,” explained Shootman. “If our culture is at odds with our strategy, culture will win.”

At Eloqua, the sales culture has been reformed around the vision of Getting it Done and Doing it Right, where:”

Getting it Done reflects the person's ability to do the job assigned and has three fundamentals:
- Skills - Does the person have the requisite knowledge and abilities?
- Action - Do they perform the tasks or processes necessary in the job?
- Results - What is their measurable performance against the key metrics for the job?
Doing it Right reflects how the person does their job and has three elements:
Teamwork - Do they place the team's needs above their own? Do they share expertise with others? Do they respect, seek and embrace input from others?
Integrity and Accountability - Do they accept blame as well as glory? Are they ethical, trusted by customers, partners and their team? Do their actions match their words?
Optimism and Enthusiasm - Are they a source of energy vs. a use of energy within the team? Do they see the truth, but not for worse than it is?

In addition to Getting it Done and Doing it Right, Shootman outlines three additional cultural imperatives that will help elevate the vision and scope of sales reps.

“There will be three personal characteristics we pursue, welcome and reward,” he says:

“Merit vs. Entitlement – An Eloqua business card does not earn us anything. We first owe results to our customers, our company and our teammates; then we can expect reward in return.
Straight talk vs. Passive Aggressive – If you have input for someone, take it to them directly. If you tell me something, I will have two questions; did you already tell them and can I quote you?
Accountable vs. Paternal – If there is an issue, we take ownership of resolving it. We should not wait for someone else to fix it for us.”

Action Items:

Assess sales rep workflow and eliminate or redesign activities/processes that don’t help to directly drive revenue.
Ask team to provide feedback regarding current activities/processes and identify anything that is hindering their ability to concentrate on driving revenue.
Ask team to identify steps you could take that would help them to more effectively drive revenue.
Identify areas where the sales rep vision and scope are not aligned with the culture you would like to undergird your sales organization.
Create messaging around your vision and scope and begin to push it out to the team, always being careful to help them see how this vision will feed into their ability to drive revenue by retaining the current install base as well as adding new customers and uncovering bigger opportunities.

Walter Rogers is the President and CEO of Baker Communications. Baker Communications is a sales training and development company specializing in helping client companies increase their sales and management effectiveness. He can be reached at 713-627-7700.

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