As new business targets become harder to hit, there’s an epidemic of SAD – sales affected disorder – spreading throughout companies. Growing Business has trawled around for ways to give your sales team a little help as they scour the horizon for new meaning to their lives
David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross put on record in a classic way the results of one kind of motivation within a sales force. Anyone who knows the movie can’t miss its horrible resonance in today’s economic climate. Set in the 1980s downturn, it tracks the desperation and ruthlessness that emerge when members of a sales team are made to compete under the threat of dismissal – human nature in the raw, with a lot of bad language.
There’s just a touch of economic disturbance happening right now, and the people at the sharp end are the first to know about it. This year’s budget has become a work of fantasy, monthly targets a joke, bonuses a memory and job tenure very shaky. Salespeople are stressed out, worrying whether to jump before they are pushed. Their minds are on anything but their work, and they’re in danger of losing faith, so how can they realistically sell anything?
The caring profession
With bad news everywhere, how can you get your sales team believing in themselves again? The Bellwether Report, the advertising industry’s barometer on marketing spend, revealed that in the third quarter of 2008 marketing budgets were revised down to the greatest extent in the survey’s nine-year history. And your sales force will be aware of that. Graham McMullen, managing director of office services group Admiral, believes talking up the recession is costing livelihoods. “We don’t believe in our ability to win anymore,” he says. “That’s why I think the recession will be over when the media says so.”
Frankly, if you relied up until now on the archaic and unsophisticated strategy of the carrot of commission and the stick of the sack, which is still not as rare as it should be, then if you do survive the recession, it won’t be thanks to the sales team. “Motivating salespeople is difficult at the best of times, but even more so in recession,” says Chris Gallagher, director of sales, training and development at Upfront Business Development. “Since potential earnings are usually and rightly linked to some sort of commission scheme, smaller budgets and fewer briefs mean it is more difficult to maintain earnings for all but the very best agency salespeople.”
The first principle of motivation is: don’t equate it with pay. Gallagher identifies three types of motivation: macro (long term, including things like pay, career structure and company culture); interpersonal (incentives, team building and varied responsibility); and intrapersonal (the employee’s innate attributes). You can’t do much in the short term about the first and last, so focus on interpersonal motivators, he says, advising: “Be creative and imaginative when setting incentives.”
Time to deliver
To put it another way, sales staff are motivated by reward and recognition. When reward takes a dive, then recognition has to be stronger, and in a moment we’ll look at some ways of getting people to feel less glum about the environment. But for Andy Beer, Pitney Bowes’ tactical marketing director for the UK and Ireland, security is still an important factor. “In the present climate, the grass is just as brown on the other side of the fence, and that helps retention,” he says.
Beer believes laying people off will give altogether the wrong message, pointing to a new white paper from his company called Time to Deliver. “The challenge in a downturn is to keep marketing activity running,” he says. “Organisations with the vision to commit to their marketing activity and to continue to invest in communicating with customers and prospects can find themselves ahead of the field once the business climate brightens.”
Pitney Bowes could have saved £12,000 by axing a recent one-day get together in London for its sales force and key clients. “Cancelling the event would have sent all the wrong messages,” insists Beer. “It would have been seriously demotivating for the sales team if they thought the company was that hard up, and it would have definitely been the wrong message for the clients.”
That day, what was being sold was morale and belief in the company. Beer adds that his UK managing director likes to spend days out in the field with team members. Now that sends all the right messages, as well as keeping the team on its toes.
Exception rules
Salespeople do respond to incentives, but in a recession, the commission and bonus model leads only to unhappiness, as Glengarry Glen Ross demonstrated so graphically. It is vital to respect your employees as individuals. “We have a phrase: ‘Exception rules’,” says Neville Upton, chief executive of The Listening Company, which employs 3,500 sales and customer relationship marketing support staff at its UK contact centres. “Everyone who works in our business is an exception, as is every conversation they have.”
The ‘Glengarry’ approach leads to pareto HR – if 80% of your sales are generated by 20% of the team, sack the bottom 20% every month! That’s where the numbers game leads, according to Upton. “We often put our worst performers next to our best, because people need nurturing and training,” he says. “A good sales force is not about the one or two megastars (you always get those), but about the core of the team. Prima donnas achieve for themselves.” And Upton’s worth listening to, as he’s currently recruiting 300 more staff at his Newcastle centre to keep up with a 40% rise in business in the year to October 2009.
