Making Their Mark
Getting more out of top producers means continually sharpening their skills. That's right, A players need coaching too. Here's how to make your stars shine even brighter
As appeared in Sales and Marketing Management, March 2005
By Julie Barker
In April 2002 when Maureen Martinez took over the CarMart sales force at PennySaver, the weekly shopping guides company based in Brea, California, she did something radical. She hired a coach for her team of high achievers.
CarMart reps worked hard to get to this division, averaging 12 years each with the company. "In order to get in here and stay they had to have some years with a lot of recognition and awards," Martinez says. But she thought they were stale. In 14 coaching sessions — eight in 2003 and six in 2004 — designed by Profit Builders, a business training and coaching firm based in Merrick, New York, the veteran team learned new ways to approach their clients. At the end of 2004, CarMart sales were up for the first time in three years and finished at 107 percent of plan, Martinez says.
On the surface, training people who already know selling up, down, and sideways, and who are reluctant to leave their territories to sit in classrooms, is a waste of time and money. So most managers spend training dollars either on the entire group of salespeople, or on the so-called B and C players, who need to learn and practice basic concepts. But the top end of the sales force is where profitability lies. Will Rodgers, president of Hamilton Consultants based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose specialty is driving growth through sales force optimization, recently did a study for a client, analyzing each rep's sales volume, and zeroing in on gross margin (the salesperson's contribution after cost of goods sold and after compensation). Of 49 salespeople, 15 accounted for 71 percent of margin dollars. "The ones at the top were so much more profitable," Rodgers says. "It's a reminder that you want to spend more time focusing on your [best-performing salespeople]."
Monster Worldwide based in New York, runs training programs specifically geared to the needs of the top 10 percent of the company's sellers. Why this investment in coaching top performers? "The A's sometimes produce four or five times what the B's and C's do," says Chris Merritt, vice president of sales operations at Monster. "That's one of the driving factors — just the sheer numbers of the situation."
Monster Training
Ten years after Monster.com started as an online job board, it is the
11th most visited site on the Internet, according to Internet measurement
firm comScore
Media Metrix. It didn't accomplish that by keeping a 1994 mindset. At one time, getting the pitch right and knowing the product were enough for success in sales. Now, Monster's salespeople are business consultants. "As our customers spend money on recruitment," Merritt says, "they're really looking at it as an investment."
Monster's top salespeople — 50 or so A players — have to understand return-on-investment "in a very detailed way," Merritt says. For instance, some people measure a payback period in two years, others five, with hard, soft, and indirect benefits. Monster's A players have to be fluent in this terminology.
Other skills that a business consultant needs have to do with aspects of customer care. Much of that training is delivered in one-on-one sessions, with the manager providing the coaching. "We try to role-play it situationally," Merritt says. "We're a big believer in [the idea that] you coach very tactically; you talk about a situation that's just happened." The reps also get continuing education at least three times a year as a group.
The benefits to the manager are several. First, the salesperson will sell more because it is motivating to be treated as a business manager of a territory. Second, his boss gets a person who will model behavior and help develop the skills of others on the team, Merritt says. Furthermore, "The A rep is more open to giving feedback to the manager. This relationship is a partnership," he says. "[The rep becomes] almost like a confidante on the team."
Tailoring to Personality
A players are different from the B's and C's. They are highly motivated
by money, and because of that they drive themselves mercilessly. Bill
Cole, founder and CEO of ProCoach Systems, a sales training company based
in San Jose, California, says salespeople "are the athletes of the
business world. They have to take the punishment." But the A players
are, in particular, "risk-takers, thrill-seekers." They're basically
unbalanced, he says, with little or no outside life.
"B's do other things to get strokes. They might play a musical instrument, or when they come home from work their dogs will lick their faces," Cole says. Not the A's. They're in their managers' faces every day looking for approval.
Coaching is one way managers can give A's attention — and help them develop empathic qualities. Profit Builders president Keith Rosen, who created PennySaver's training program, delivers training by teleconference, but always begins with an online diagnostic to discover each trainee's skills and attitudes. "There are two ways to become a better salesperson," he says. "You're either changing what you're doing or you're changing how you think."
A players know this. "They're A players because they embrace their own personal development — like the most successful athletes," Rosen says.
Zapping Objections
At Pitney Bowes, based in Stamford, Connecticut, A players, who number
about 100 out of a 2,000-person sales staff, get coaching in various skills
including time management, influence and persuasion, and entering the
C-suite. The philosophy is that "the employee and the company each
have to go halfway toward investing their resources" to raise the
employee's performance, says Rob Fruithandler, vice president of channel
management for the business-services company.
In the past year, Pitney Bowes has offered A players two courses: financial training and negotiating skills. "The salespeople who have gone through the negotiating course have seen immediate benefits in being able to close bigger orders faster," says Fruithandler, who says the results are anecdotal, not quantitative. The company uses testimonials in its newsletter to counter resistance from salespeople who say, "'Leave me alone and let me do what I do best, which is go sell,'" he says. Pitney Bowes' monthly marketing meetings offer another opportunity to plug the training through testimonials included in videos.
Why go through all that trouble to convince those who aren't interested? Because the benefits accrue on many levels. Earnings typically improve for salespeople, and managers get better productivity from the entire team because trainees mentor other reps, Fruithandler says. "Trainees become more productive and pass along their skills. They become more engaged in their jobs."