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Rewards

Highlights from the November 12 Sales Effectiveness breakfast

by Paul Sparks on January 9, 2011

Over 75 people interested in learning the latest ideas, trends and innovation in professional selling and sales management joined me recently at Luna Park in Sydney for the sixth and final Sales Effectiveness breakfast event for 2010.  In a fitting end to the series, we discussed emerging trends in the world of professional selling ending with Michael Schiffner and Robin Gibson encouraging us to celebrate the “death” of sales training and to welcome the emergence of sales development as the new performance paradigm.   We’ll be back in 2011 with another series of events to inform and educate the sales community.  Until then, here are some highlights from November 2010 for you.

Giles Rhodes.  “A taxonomy of sales roles: matching performance & reward mix with different sales roles” 

Are you paying your sales people what they’re worth?

Are you paying too much – or too little?

Giles Rhodes gave us some insights into a recent study by consulting firm Aon-Hewitt which looked at over 25,000 sales roles and the pay structure associated with each role.

We know it’s important to get pay right – but with such a variation in sales roles, how is it possible to compare roles?  The study Giles discussed shed light on this by breaking sales roles into their components, and by so doing, a taxonomy of sales roles begins to emerge.

The Aon-Hewitt analysis identified 12 components that informed sales roles.  These included:

  • Sales mode – direct or channel
  • Sales focus – new business or account management
  • Team selling – sole operator or team member
  • Product or service selling
  • Sales cycle – long or short
  • Product focus – single product or product range
  • Plus another 6 parameters

This structured approach to describing sales roles by activities informs the pay structures of roles with specific requirements to ensure that managers match appropriate reward structures with particular sales activities.

Find out more by ordering your copy of the DVD of the full presentation:

http://www.saleseffectiveness.com.au/sales-effectiveness-breakfast-event-series-november-2010/

You’ll find more information about the local work done by HR firm Aon Hewitt here:

http://www.hewittassociates.com/Intl/AP/en-AU/Default.aspx

Michael Schiffner & Robin Gibson.  “Why sales training doesn’t work”

Michael and Robyn began their presentation with a quick activity designed to both engage the audience (it’s an early morning event, after all), and demonstrate how our competitiveness can sometimes get in the way of achieving our goals.

Not only did this get the group up and moving – but it laid the platform for an engaging discussion on what is the function of sales training.  Michael’s key point is simple – but has extensive ramifications for how we approach training and preparing our sales teams.

Many of our current training models are mechanistic and more attuned to a time when our people were viewed as cogs in organisational machines.  Whilst this may have worked in days gone by – it doesn’t work in today’s world with today’s people.  What is needed is an organic approach to training – a developmental mindset.

Key to establishing this mindset is the application of the following three frameworks:

Create a sales development blueprint

Define individual development plans

Cultivate a coaching culture – with a focus on field coaching

Michael then shared his six step process for coaching sales people in the field:

Step 1 – Define the coaching objectives for the day

Step 2 – Pre-call Planning

Step 3 – Document your observations

Step 4 – Post-call Debrief and Feedback

Step 5 – Developmental Actions and SMART Goals

Step 6 – Feedback for you as a coach

Find out more by ordering your copy of the DVD of the full presentation:

http://www.saleseffectiveness.com.au/sales-effectiveness-breakfast-event-series-november-2010/

There’s more information about Michael Schiffner & Collective Intelligence here:

http://www.collectiveintelligence.net.au/

 Special Guest – Michelle Newton (Sales Training Manager Fairfax Media/Rural Press) – “Lessons from 3000 hours of sales coaching” 

Over the past 6 years Michelle Newton has co-ordinated the delivery of over 24 sales development programs to a sales force of over 500.  During this time she has personally delivered over 3000 sales coaching and training sessions in all parts of Australia and New Zealand – from Mt Isa to Launceston; from Perth to Auckland.

Michelle gave a wide ranging presentation, drawing on her extensive sales development experience, and also shared some insights to some emerging research about how the sales function differs due to the influence of gender, geography and generation.  Here are just a few of the many insights she presented:

  1. A casual approach to the sales function tends to be used by salespeople in the 40s who have resided in a town for 15 years or more
  2. Women salespeople like to know a lot about their clients but prefer a distant rather than a close relationship with clients
  3. Men talk more than women (really!)

If you missed the event – you can still see and hear the complete presentation set on DVD.  Order you copy here by registering as a virtual attendee of the breakfast series:

http://www.saleseffectiveness.com.au/sales-effectiveness-breakfast-event-series-november-2010/

 

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Thanks for reading this post – Paul Sparks, Sales Effectiveness Australasia.

“Taking you beyond sales training and keeping you informed about the latest ideas, trends, innovation, research & best practice in professional selling and sales management”

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Rethinking rewards for your sales team

by Paul Sparks on January 5, 2010

What motivates salespeople?

What incentives really drive the outcomes individuals and organisations are looking for?

 Do big commissions work?

Dan Pink has popularised research in psychology, and is well known for his work “A Whole New Mind”.

Over the last few years he has researched the impact of rewards in the workplace.  Put simply, he argues the case that what we do in terms of reward structures don’t reflect what science has discovered about human behaviour.  Rather than helping get better results, large commissions can create an environment where our salespeople simply won’t get the best results for their efforts.  Big incentives narrow focus – and for modern sales environments (particularly complex ones), this is exactly what we don’t need.

Have a look at his recent presentation to a TED audience, and then consider how your reward structures may be based on outdated views of what people really want from their work, and what really helps drive outcomes.  

The evidence coming in about executive pay and incentives is still the realm of great debate, but two things seem to be emerging:

  • The size of executive pay packets doesn’t correlate with organisational performance.  Paying big bucks doesn’t in any way guarantee better returns for shareholders, customers or other stakeholders.
  • Short term incentives will often result in – not surprisingly – long term destruction of organisational assets.  Since people are the main asset of many leading companies, it is critical that decisions at the top of organisations are made to ensure the long term sustainability of the organisation.  The last 12 months have seen a number of companies come to regret the layoffs made at the start of the GFC – particularly the experienced salespeople cut from organisations.

These lessons need to be applied to our sales teams to ensure that they are rewarded for building the relationships necessary to ensure long term mutual success – not simply a focus on numbers for the next quarter.

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Find out more about Dan Pink and his work here:

http://www.danpink.com/

Thanks for reading this post – Paul Sparks, Sales Effectiveness Australasia.

“Taking you beyond sales training and keeping you informed about the latest ideas, trends, innovation, research & best practice in professional selling and sales management”

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Beyond Maslow – a new view on motivating salespeople

by Paul Sparks on June 4, 2009

What motivates me as a salesperson?

How do I motivate my sales team?

These are perennial questions which continue to challenge salespeople and managers alike.  Whilst our understanding of human behaviour has developed significantly over recent years, we still struggle with the question of “what keeps me doing what I do”.

It is often suggested that salespeople are just motivated by money.  If this was true then motivation would be simple – just keep adding more coin.  But life – and human nature – is not this simple.

I recently came across a simple motivation framework developed by Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria, which can provide us with an understanding of things we need to do – both at a personal, team and organisational level to help us provide an environment which is as motivating as possible to as many in our sales team as possible.  As with all things human – it’s not possible to satisfy everybody all the time – but if we know why people are motivated, it should, at least, increase our chances.

Before I outline the theory that Lawrence and Nohria put forward, let’s spend a little bit of time revisiting the classic motivation theory – Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Abraham Maslow (1908 – 1970) is one of the best known psychologists of the 20th century, and is considered the founder of “humanistic” psychology.  In 1943 he published a paper called “A Theory of Human Motivation” – his now famous hierarchy of needs.

Maslows hierarchy of needs

According to Maslow, we need to satisfy our needs at the bottom of the pyramid, before we can attend to higher needs.  In other words, we need to satisfy our need for physical well-being (food, safety, shelter, etc) before we look to satisfy our need for self-esteem, respect and creativity.  In fact, in some representations, the hierarchy also includes a need for “transcendence”, or the desire to go beyond self-actualisation and give back to humanity and the world.

So what does this mean to us as salespeople and sales managers?

Continue Reading…

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