It is hard being a sales leader


Off late, I have run into a lot of highly stressed out sales leaders – at work, at airport lounges and at assorted other places including at customer sites. It is real hard being a successful sales leader.

In most jobs, if you do well in current role – you are generally setting up yourself well for your next higher role. But I doubt that is true in sales . Many of the best sales people I know made mediocre sales leaders when they got promoted. And some of the top notch sales leaders I know today were just about average sales people in their prior life. While such things do happen in other job functions too – I have a strong feeling that sales kind of bucks the general trend.

To begin with – many organizations do not start grooming sales people into sales leaders early. They like sales people to be laser focused on quota and will not recognize the other skills they will need as they move up the chain. And compared to a developer or a finance person or something at the same level, the remuneration for a young sales person doing well in their job is pretty high. So the behavior patterns needed for narrow objectives of the organizations are rather strongly reinforced early in their life. I think this is also the reason why several successful sales people like to continue as individual contributors and not get promoted to leaders.

A developer who grows into an architect or development manager or a VP of development is not expected to code at that point. But  sales leaders have to occasionally take matters into their own hands and sell directly. That is not really the hard part – the real hard part is to resist the temptation of taking matters to their own hands too often in sales situation.

If you have an A team for sales, the chances are that they won’t sit patiently through a cadence call and take instructions and report status in a structured way. And many sales leaders are not very good at sales operations. It never ceases to amaze me on how long it takes for some of them to understand the need for good operations and hire a good COO . Good ops leaders are worth their weight in gold -once you find them, keep them close. However, you always need to watch out for where you draw the line on ops efficiency. End of the day – you need the sales to happen and reporting is an after effect. Don’t let controls screw up front line sales . It is a very hard balance to strike – especially for those sales leaders who totally hated controls when they were doing front line sales.

In  a big sale I did at IBM as an account partner – my deal strategy required a senior partner to come in as a “closer” to get the deal signed. I did not really need that given I had a great relation with the customer CIO and his staff, and we had done a good job in understanding each other. However, I was so tuned to having a closer in such big deals. Thankfully, when I pinged my boss to show up – he said ” this one is on you buddy, call me when you have it signed”. Words cannot express the sense of elation that balanced out my sense of panic. He was a senior guy and totally saw that the defined process is only a guideline – and I needed help in seeing that. Now, this is my guiding principle in any situation – sales or otherwise. Do not use “process” as a rigid mandate – use it only as a rough guiding principle. As long as you have the trust of the manager that you are ethical and responsible – you will have the support you need.

What is the most important asset for sales people? That would be the relations they have nurtured with customer contacts. This is also why a lot of Sales Force Automation systems get implemented by companies who want to keep that data. This is also the reason why most sales people do not care to put the information in these systems. It is hard to get the sales people to share those relationships. However, as a sales leader – your very success is dependent on your ability to share your relationships with your team so that they can go make the sale. This is the most counter intuitive thing for most sales leaders in their first leadership appointments.

As the size of the organization increases, there will be a number of over lay sales roles created to make sure there is sufficient attention on all important stuff. Too often – this results in lack of clarity and vast majority of leaders just become “checkers of the double checkers”. Eventually, everyone and no one is responsible for the actual sales or the lack there of. Over lay functions cannot be avoided when a company has a large number of products and vast geographic coverage for markets they serve. I have seen upwards of ten people “managing the spreadsheet” and “checking on status” for same sale in some situations in past life. It is a rough life to be at the receiving end of that mess. And this is only flavors of sales people. On top of that – there will be general managers of products, HR and assorted others who will need to be kept informed too. They cannot be blamed for asking “who is the customer here ? you folks or the company that actually is paying us?”.

Finally, there is the love-hate relationships with channels. Nothing demonstrates misaligned goals more than the goals set for direct sales and channel. Everyone loves channel up the chain – except the people held directly responsible for the quota for the same business. If you put direct sales and channel in conflict via goals and processes – you have no one else to blame for the resulting chaos. It is a hard lesson – with very few right answers. These are strategic goals to be set at the CEO level and lower level goals should be aligned perfectly to that strategy.

Despite all these things stressing them out day in and day out, all my buddies in sales leadership roles still keep their heads up and motivate (ok ok, occasionally even manipulate) their teams to achieve the big targets. I hope they have a less stressful 2014.

 

 

Acid test for leaders – a good night’s sleep!


How do we figure out if we are leading people as opposed to getting in their way ? Reason for the question is – if we can’t figure it out , we can’t change our course and do better .

Yet, being critical of oneself is the hardest thing to do – definitely the case for me,but also for many people I know .

I had a lot of discussion on the tactics of leadership with friends this week and I thought I will jot it down here , mostly for me to fix my own flaws as an aspiring leader .

My way of looking at this is rather tactical – And borderline selfish – I just try everything possible to stack the deck in my favor by doing a few things

1. Leadership thingy is mostly about people – not process . So the trick to being an effective leader is to carefully create the team you can lead well .

2. I need to be sure of one of two things at least – either I should get a clear direction of what is expected of my team AND/OR I should be empowered to figure out what needs to be done and get the minimum resources (people , time, money etc) to get things done . If these conditions are not met , I happily say NO to the assignment .

3. Try everything you can to get out of your team’s way once you set the goal . This is the hardest part for me – one way or other I always seem to get in the way – with good intentions, but with less than optimal results . If I am the smartest guy in the room over and over – it clearly shows I didn’t hire well , and hence I should worry -A LOT.

4. If/when my team has a hierarchy – then one of my big priorities is to make sure the managers get out of their people’s way too at the earliest . It is easy to delegate responsibility – the hard part is to delegate authority .

5. Encourage debate over elegance in meetings . It kills me to sit in meetings where everyone is asked to shut off phones etc and someone speaks with a set of slides and says this is a report out of past, and this is what we are going to do going forward . Such meetings absolutely kill me – and I prefer emails for such discussions . If people meet on phone or in person – they should be willing to challenge and be challenged . If not – don’t go to that meeting . I don’t go to many such meetings – and if I do, I get out the soonest I can.

6. Watch out for the team and build a culture where they watch out for you and each other .This perhaps I should have put higher on the list . If people won’t watch out for each other – it is hard to be a good team . This doesn’t happen in large teams – and hence my preference for small teams working together for short duration and then dispersing to form other teams . In almost all cases – small action is better than grand strategies .

But all things said , I have an acid test for leadership . The comfort I like the most in my life is to get a good night’s sleep . So if I don’t get that – I usually know something is not quite right .

Finally , celebrate success at every possible point . Negativity is easy – takes no effort and it takes a lot to get out of it . Celebrating small successes along the way keeps everyone closely knit – and it helps get a good night’s sleep .

What can corporate peeps learn from chimpanzees ?


Let me tell you a story

A scientist wanted to test how well Chimpanzees take care of each other and devised an experiment to test his hypothesis .

He put a little chimp and his mother into a huge tall glass jar . And then he started pouring water into it . As the water level rose to the little chimp’s nose , the mother picked it up and held it close to her chest . As water kept climbing up – she put the kid on her head . The scientist was fascinated , and decided to see what happens next . And throughout the process, the little chimp tries hard to escape from the top of the jar

As water level continued to rise – the mother stood on its tip toes . But as soon as it reached her nose – she dropped the chimp and stood on it to reach the top of the jar to escape .

End of story – and it is just a story , no actual animal was harmed in this fictional story .

In our professional life – at times we are the little chimp and at other times we are the mother chimp . The only thing that doesn’t change is the allegoric water level that keeps rising .

Will the mother chimp in us wait till the water is at nose level before we decide to put our life ahead of the little chimp under our care ? And when we are in the role of little chimp – are we always that helpless and do we need constant protection ? Clearly not a black and white problem

Sadly – there several managers will not wait till water reaches their nose level . At the first sign of trouble – some times even when there is no actual trouble – they will throw the people under them down and step on them . To those managers , all I can say is that they are not always playing the role of the chimp mother . There are times when they could end up as the little chimp and the tables will get turned against them too .

We can’t change how such managers work given the flow of decision making in most organizations . But we can choose whether to work for a manager who will give us as many opportunities as they possibly can till their own existence is endangered .

Not everyone has the option of finding a new manager when the existing one is clearly not the one you want to work for . This means we need to be patient and see if we can make it work over time . However , it will be pretty naive to not keep your skills up to date so that in worst case you can always find a manager in another team that you can trust . Skills alone will not find you the next job – you need to build a network too that you can tap into .

Hopefully you have that network already . The best time to start building that network was the day you got into kindergarten . The second best day is today . So please get started . Even if you never anticipate being in the little chimp situation – you will do the world a lot of good by being a good mother chimp to the unfortunate little chimps amongst us .

Always remember – even in the best case scenario, if water level reaches the nose level of the mother chimp – the little chimp has no chance from that point . So – wherever possible – work with the mother chimps to see if you can stop or slow down the water level from rising .