There are a host of pains organizations inflict on themselves that present clear and present dangers to their very viability. Among those we often see are:
- Goals and objectives that are out of sync with job descriptions and employee expectations
- Compensation plans that don’t reflect the will of the organizations executive leadership
- Management who believes it is their prerogative to manipulate sales compensation plans, changing quotas, territories and commission schedules mid-stream
- Sales automation/CRM systems that are installed to provide management reporting with sales productivity as a by product
- Few understand the complicated nature of channels, how to avoid conflict, and how to motivate organizations they don’t own, yet many businesses just can’t grow organically fast enough. Effective committed channels are a necessity.
So what can companies do? - They must learn to hire for a season. Recognize that a significant percentage of employees will move on within a few years. Call it out confront it and embrace by designing the job description accordingly, and eliminate confusion and contention. Hire the very best for the tasks at hand. It’ll require a bit more thought and planning, but it’ll be worth it.
- Delicate themselves to serving their employees and to making them successful; not managing them for compliance, rather leading them for significance; leading them rather than directing them
- Embrace technology. Many managers are digital immigrants leading digital natives. They resist it and demean it with comments like “I’ll never text.”. We must immerse ourselves in it, admit our fears and frustrations, and join the ranks of the next generation who takes all this technology as a matter of fact and can’t understand why their management doesn’t.
- When we employee systems we must think first of the impact on the employee. Implement a CRM to make the sales people more productive, and have management reports as a byproduct. It’s the only way they will embrace it and the data will be accurate and timely.
- Hire scientifically. Success at a previous company is no guarantee of success with the next.. It can no longer be acceptable to give an employee 9 months or longer to see if they will succeed. Thai’s as much as 1/3 of their tenure. They must be positioned to contribute much quicker.
- Build support tools like the company web site that personalize the web experience, allowing the inquirer to truly understand how your products and services can met his unique needs, and build it a way that leaves a thumb print behind so more and more can be turned into customers. It’s not the number of web hits that counts, it’s the number of customers that are generated.
- Have a mission statement that is meaningful, measure ideas against it, reward innovation, and create the opportunities that demand transformation versus incremental improvement.
A soft economy can be the best time to gain market share. It’ll take a non-traditional approach, but embracing a win/win mentality, a servants heart for employees success, an acceptance that each employee really wants to make the best decisions possible, combined with an ability to accept effort and failure will help turn a business, even where the economy is having a negative impact, into a consistent winner.
