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Sales Leadership Wisdom - Episode One - The Quality versus Quantity debate

2011 at 15.24 pm posted by Gill Barstow

Effective execution on one call out-trumps five poorly executed calls

As a sales leader, with a high target to achieve, you have a choice to make – do you focus on cranking the machine and pushing your team to make more calls,  attend more appointments, get out more quotes?... or do you focus more on the quality of what they are doing, making sure their behaviour, messages, and approach are right?

When sales leaders all over the world had a discussion on Linked In about what not to do as a great sales manager, this theme got more mentions than anything else! They had very strong views..... ‘ ‘Don’t confuse activity (motion) with movement (progress)’... ‘Activity is like a dog chasing its tail’ .... ‘The numbers are fine but if you’re doing it wrong, the more you do it, the better you get at doing it wrong’ .... ‘Effective execution on one call out-trumps five poorly executed calls’

Clearly experienced sales leaders believe that focusing on quantity at the expense of quality doesn’t work.

• Lead generation activities are expensive and each appointment or enquiry is like gold-dust.  You need to work in way which gives you the best chance of converting each and every one.
• If you are operating in a limited market then you cannot afford to ‘waste’ any contacts. If you get it wrong once, then you have to put more effort into reversing that first impression.
• If sales people are out there positioning your company and services in the wrong way, they are systematically injuring your reputation. They may also be missing big opportunities on each and every call
• And as one leader said – with every call badly executed, your team reinforce bad habits and become more and more discouraged.

All of this may sound very obvious, so why were so many people worldwide observing this behaviour in managers?

• When you are concerned about results it is very easy to throw yourself into being busy. Being busy becomes a habitual way of working and of justifying your salary. On Orbit programmes we use a model developed by Stephen Covey to help managers understand the difference between what is urgent and what is truly important. Constant frenetic busy-ness simply helps to cover up that niggling feeling in the pit of the stomach that maybe things are not going well. All of the leadership actions that will make a lasting difference to performance (like proper briefing, training, coaching, sales accompaniments etc) are in the ‘important but not urgent’ box – i.e. they are absolutely vital but nobody else will push you to do them. Any sales leader needs to make a determined decision to set aside quality time for these activities
• Focusing on numbers is easy. Numbers are black and white and therefore easy to measure and understand. Things like behaviours, engagement and motivation are more complex and take quality thinking and planning. They can be harder to measure. On Orbit programmes we help leaders determine the specific behaviours they are looking for and use RAG charts (red, amber, green) to monitor if behaviour is moving in the right direction.
• Focusing on quality means coaching and developing your team. Many sales leaders gained their promotion from being a good sales person. Being good at sales does not necessarily lead to being good at developing your sales team. Coaching skills form a vital part of our programmes with sales leaders. At first they may find it tough to ask questions and listen rather than dictate... but once leaders get used to this new way of operating it opens up much more enjoyable and productive conversations and relationships with their teams. Managers are often delighted at how much hidden talent there is in their teams. The old adage of having two ears and one mouth and using them in that proportion definitely works here
• It often takes courage to hold onto your values and stand up for what you know is right.   There is often pressure to ‘get out there and start selling’ too quickly. Again on our programmes we encourage leaders to define the ethics and ground-rules they want to set for their teams. We help them put in place the tools, knowledge and skills that will ensure a quality approach on every opportunity.

Of course the quality versus quantity argument is not an ‘either-or’. In our years of experience of working with customer facing teams in companies we’ve seen both extremes – as well as the frantic numbers game already mentioned, we’ve also seen the opposite with managers spending far too long on developing exactly the right materials, or sales people locked in the office for too long each day producing ‘perfect’ proposals, or a lack of pacing and energy masked by the objective of having things 100% before people start to get down to business.

There is a balance to be achieved here. Our advice is to first focus on quality, ensuring your team have the right skills, process, tools.....Then determine the pace and volume of activity needed to achieve results......Then manage the team to achieve the pacing required, and meanwhile keep a constant check that quality habits are being established and maintained.

Many years ago I worked in the printing trade. The minders who looked after the large print machines would spend a long time getting the settings and the colour standards on the machine exactly right, with the machine ticking over at the slowest rate, running off periodic test sheets that they pored over with a magnifying glass to look at colour quality and registration. Only when they were fully satisfied would they turn the machine up to full speed. Then they would produce a huge number of consistent high quality prints. At that stage the process needed far less supervision. A periodic check was enough to assess that nothing had slipped. Hopefully it is clear how this analogy applies to developing sales behaviours.

So all of this begs some important questions...

• What is the correct behaviour in your sales team - for your services, your market, and your growth goals? What are the right messages to position your services? What are the questions your team should be asking?
• And are these behaviours the same for all of your accounts – or do some accounts merit a different approach?
• Do all of your sales people know what to do?... and, more importantly, are they motivated to do it consistently? Can they see the benefits? Have they practiced till they feel confident?
• How often do you accompany them on sales meetings? .... and when you do, do you allow them to do the talking so you can observe and coach?
• And what is the focus of your one-to-ones and team meetings? Do they focus simply on numbers or do you allow time for more developmental subjects such as building skills and coming up with good account strategies? At worst these meetings can feel boring, or like an interrogation with a headmaster... at best they can be creative, stimulating and motivational
• And if you are fully confident that the quality is right and the real problem is quantity.... what do you believe is getting in the way? Is it the skills or mindset of your team, or is there something fundamentally wrong with your sales process? How can you clear away the barriers and get your sales machine cranked up to maximum speed?

Overall the question should be not ‘do we focus on quantity or quality’ ... the question is how can we achieve both?

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