(925) 977-3400Wouldn’t you love to know exactly what your sales people do all day? Recently I was reading an article about sales performance tools and I came across a controversial tool sales leaders are beginning to utilize to increase productivity. The tool? GPS tracking for sales people. According to the article, a number of companies in the cable industry have deployed something called the Open Door System, which company literature states is the “leading door–to-door system from RealTime Results” and serves to track location and performance data for field sales reps. You can only imagine what the typically sales chat room is saying about this stuff: hint, sales reps don’t exactly love it. And certainly, monitoring sales people to this extent is raising a multitude of legal and ethical questions. But as much as it pains me, I will guiltily admit to harboring a brief moment of whimsy thinking about the ability to confirm my suspicions about midday workouts, knocking off early to knock some back, and isolating the amount of time certain reps spend on the driving range during the work day.
GPS data and tracking may have its place in sales performance, but if it does, it is much less important than the holy grail of sales performance management: ride time. Ride time consists of focused, dedicated time spent observing each of your sales people in real time selling environments. In one day of ride time, a sales leader can answer most of the following questions:
How prepared is the rep for the average sales call?
How well do they know their territory?
How do they present themselves (appearance, approach etc.)?
How are they received and perceived by their top prospects and wallet share growth clients?
How well do they conduct a sales call?
How well do they listen?
Do they ask high quality questions?
Do they ask for business? Are they specific and explicit enough?
Do they set up clear next steps with the client?
Do they create a quality follow up plan?
How do they spend their time when their day breaks down?
How can I best help their sales process improve?
Oddly, most sales managers only spend time in the field with their newest reps. Clearly these newbies need the most attention and benefit from clear direction, guidance and support. Ride time can be a small part of this process as the newer rep gains a little field time, but since it is typically utilized to assess a sales person’s skills, strengths, and challenges, it is actually more helpful for experienced sales people. Newbies need guidance and instruction – experienced sales people need observation and coaching. Ride time is a tool for the part of the sales team that has picked up sales habits, both good and bad – not those who are least experienced.
Unfortunately, your experienced sales people are not necessarily always ecstatic about toting you along. They have their routine, their pride, their work out schedule, their children’s events and other reasons you will be perceived as a barnacle. Inexperienced or weaker sales managers will buckle under this resistance and will let the sales people determine whether they need you to ever grace their presence. Don’t be that manager. A strong ride time process will serve to help eliminate these misgivings as they start to see the benefits for themselves. In the meanwhile you will gain a much stronger relationship with your sales people given the time you spend together. Your ride time sessions will help demonstrate your level of interest and support in them as a person and a professional.
A perfect structure for ride time doesn’t exist. Instead, here’s a real world way to approach the process which can be molded to suit your specific needs. Be careful to set up a reasonable and specific set of date/time expectations in advance. Failure to box these portions in advance will likely result in you (or some of your reps) scheduling over the times you’re going to want to utilize for ride time.
Date/Time Expectations
Ideally, sales leaders spend ride time with each direct report one full day per month. If your territory is too large (international or Western US) or you have more than 10 direct reports, quarterly is more realistic. Either way, ride time should consist of one FULL day per sales person and should be no less than quarterly. Riding together with the sales person to each meeting is key since most of the important time is spent in transit preparing for and summarizing the calls while they’re are fresh and recent.
Structure of the Day
In advance of each ride time day, a sales person will set up a total of four appointments. Two of these appointments should be with top 25 prospective targets and two with top 10 wallet share growth opportunities. Some sales people will forget to confirm the day before the appointments – a reminder on the first go around will help to keep the appointment schedule intact. Depending upon the skills and performance level of the sales person, it can be a good idea to walk them through the exact targets that are most worthwhile and give some guidance as to who you’re hoping to meet. Generally, the more productive reps should be allowed to handle these decisions themselves.
Ride Time Structure
For each call, you’ll employ a four part process. If at all of these steps should occur the day the calls take place. These stages include preparation, outcome expectations, debrief and action planning.
Preparation
In the preparatory portion of the process, you want a history of the account/prospect, important contextual information, an understanding of the decision makers and the decision making process, competitor info, etc. Just like a point of interest map, it should be clear, concise and include all the major places.
Outcome Expectations
This is critical – what exactly do you want to get out of this meeting? Should be specific to quantity and timeframes. One example might be: “we want an order for no less than $250,000 worth of product to be shipped by the end of September of this year.” Another could be: “a meeting with their executive committee in charge of the purchasing decision before March 4th.” The key element is how specific the outcome is and the date it will occur. Lots of times, you will get responses from sales people like “increase our business” or “get a contract.” These are problematic because they don’t allow the sales person to plan for the outcome – can you imagine a customer signing a contract without a date., price or quantity? Precise thoughts lead to precise outcomes.
Debrief
Sometimes, this is a back slapping session. Others, it’s a healthy dose of self-flagellation. While pretty natural responses, neither are very productive. The debrief helps to examine the quality of the call (what went well? What went poorly?), what could have been done differently, and what the next steps need to be. For a debrief to be powerful, the sales leader needs to play the role of “interviewer” asking the sales person for their opinion about the best/worst parts of the call, suggested improvements to the call or call preparation, and for a perception of next steps. Once the salesperson shares their observations, the sales manager weighs in with their opinions. A good debrief can go a long way towards creating best practices and training a salesperson about reviewing their own sales efforts. It helps a salesperson learn to ask themselves the same kind of questions after solo sales calls and build good preparatory skills by focusing on typical scenarios they encounter during the course of a call. Clarity around next steps is one of the most important elements of the process – gaining a clear understanding of what the client is expecting and keeping track of the most valuable next steps isn’t always intuitive for sales people, especially those who have a bit too much lip flapping and not enough listening going on.
Action Planning
Maybe the most critical phase of the ride time process is the post call action plan. During this planning process, the sales leader will review the required follow up and timing of the needed steps to the next stages of the sales cycle. Some of these items may be clear as a bell since the prospects made specific requests or requirements during the course of the meeting. Others require some discussion…what are the parts of the prospects decision making process and how can we speed through those steps? Who else will be involved with the decision and how do we impact those people? What parts of our organization should we involve in follow up? Lots of questions go into a properly designed action plan. If the call went well and you both asked plenty of valuable questions, there should be plenty of material to use. Each step of the follow up process should be outlined incrementally and assigned to the proper person with due dates. It’s important to get really granular – “set up next meeting” isn’t really a follow up step. “Set up the next meeting to review the delivery schedule and potential implementation strategies – CTOs required “ is more in line with a granular follow up step.
Ride time follow up
One of the best outcomes of a day of ride time is the ability to have some specific reasons to follow up with your salespeople. Conversations with sales people tend to be more general – or focused around monthly/quarterly objectives rather than individual opportunities and prospects. Ride time elevates the conversation since it gives a sales leader the permission, ammunition, and opportunity to reach out about the status of a prospect/sale in a meaningful way. It probably isn’t an overstatement to suggest that sales people, even good ones, can use a “deal monitor” at times to help them move the pieces on the board to the next logical step. The action plans developed after each ride time sales call provide a great way to collaborate on the sales pipeline which doesn’t feel swarmy, invasive or driven by a sales leader’s existential angst about making a quarterly number. Instead, discussions are focused, specific, and collegial. Given the level of attention, it’s also highly likely that the sale will move through the pipeline more quickly than it would if were a typical self-generated opportunity.
The Ride Time Spotlight
During the ride time process, it becomes apparent when a sales person is struggling or excelling in certain areas. Just a few of the many things a sales leader will observe during a ride time day will include:
Personal Presentation
Organization
Call Preparation
Territory Knowledge
Prospect Intelligence
Competitor Intelligence
Sales Process
Sales Style
Quality of Questions/Ability to Listen
Closing Skills
Action Planning
Follow Up Process
It can be helpful to grade each sales person in these categories every time you have a formal ride day. Use a 10 point scale for each area in which 10 is perfect and 1 is a complete train wreck. Any area where a sales person rates 8-10 gives you an opportunity to praise them specifically – “your call preparation was terrific, I felt totally up to speed going in to see that prospect.” It also can provide an opportunity for you to elevate their visibility for the rest of the team…I’ve often asked sales people who are outstanding in a particular category to ride with one of their peers who is struggling or could use some polish – especially as it relates to the areas of sales process, style, listening and closing skills. In the areas where the sales person receives a 5-7, look for opportunities to assign specific development tasks. Flip to the section on “moving mountains” for a thorough set of suggestions about this.
What if your sales person has spots where you rate them under a 5? First, these should be addressed immediately. To be more clear, before you leave for the day, you need to sit down and talk about those issues without pulling any punches. Remember the old adage “any behavior ignored is condoned.” Give immediate feedback with specific follow up steps and begin the counseling process outlined in the “moving mountains” chapter, working with your HR specialists to be sure you are following company protocol. It’s natural to want to put your head in the sand when sales people are in failure mode…it’s a pain in about twenty ways to go through the counseling and termination process, both for you and the employee. But make no mistake – you will end up doing it later anyway, so why not start now?
A Few Ride Time Challenges
“Didn’t get the memo”. Some reps don’t follow the script. No matter how much communication you’ve had with them in advance, they can’t quite seem to give you all you had asked for when you set up the ride time. Hopefully this doesn’t happen very often – but if it does, you have a few options. Unfortunately, you need to plan for this in advance and have an agenda you’ll follow if and when it occurs. The agenda could be: make one hour of phone calls to set appointments with top prospects, ask the rep to plan one hour of the day however they wish, choose (your choice) a list of existing clients/prospects/wallet share clients who you want the rep to call and “pop by” on, etc. Whatever. Just be sure the agenda is your own and helps to advance the causes of 1) increasing the likelihood the sales person will achieve goal and 2) exposing you to their sales activities for training purposes. Hint: a phone call (not an email) with the rep approximately three weeks beforehand can minimize the “didn’t get the memo” phenomenon since you can walk through the day, who they have on the schedule, and how they see the time flow. Be sure to ask about drive time between appointments etc. since this can often be overlooked.
Cancelled appointments. Basically your response will be the same as in the “didn’t get the memo” scenario. Choose a few activities to replace the time which would have been spent seeing prospects. Important comment: DON’T use this time to discuss other issues – problems in the office, operational challenges, etc. Ride time is money time. We want to model the behavior and expectations we have…not allow distractions to get in the way of high value selling time. You can always discuss the other issues on the way to/from each appointment after the debrief, or on your way home over the phone.
Yak-o-rama. Some people talk more than others. Sales people talk even more than that. It’s always good to recognize in advance that a successful sales related meeting happens when the client talks more than we do – and to remind our friendly sales person of this fact. More importantly, come up with a cue (it can be a word, sentence, or a hand gesture, whatever you want) that you mutually agree to use in the event that either the sales person (or you) get a little too frisky in the word department. Don’t rely on the age old “kick each other under the table” trick since you might not be seated next to each other. Whatever, just plan an escape hatch in advance
Crummy questions. You will, at times, find yourself cringing terribly by something your sales person says. More often, you’ll react strongly to a question a sales person asks, and want to throw yourself out the nearest window. Usually these are questions which a) restate the obvious, b) ignore major statements already made by the customer, c) are about benefits of your company/product/service that aren’t really questions but question wrapped statements, or d) are personal questions masquerading as “repore builders”. Keep in mind, any question is usually better than a statement. Your best defense against the bad question disease is to go over some key questions you want answered in your preparatory discussion. Just be aware that you never want to create a script of questions…this ignores the whole purpose which is to listen and learn. If you’re following a script, you’re just thinking about the next question, rather than learning. You can cover some of the other items mentioned in the debrief – plan a few key questions and introduce questions exercise/role play into your sales meetings and ride time prep.
Next? Be sure the meeting ends with a specific, time bound, mutually agreed upon next step. Walking away from a sales call without one means you had a social visit – not a sales event. Be sure the call objective is clear going in and help to polish out the specificity or timeframe of any unclear next step – even if you have to jump in to assist.
Ride time is the most underutilized sales training and sales leadership tool on the planet. Take advantage of the ability to get to know your sales people and how they perform in a real time environment while helping them advance their sales cycle and it will pay huge dividends. It will also get you out from behind your desk which is another huge vote in its favor. Whatever you do, start today…