By
Simon Hazeldine
As I sat in the passenger seat of my worst performing salesperson’s car on a rainy Thursday early afternoon in a small town in the North West of England, I began to feel more and more irritated.
I had recently taken over as the new sales manager of a team of salespeople covering the North West region of the UK. We worked for one of the UK’s largest breweries and our job was to maximize the distribution, visibility, and sales of an excellent range of beers in the pubs, bars and clubs that made up our customer base.
As part of my on-boarding process I had taken a close look at the sales performance data for my new team and worked out who the top performers were, who the mid-table performers were and who the poor performers were.
I had made spending a day in the field with Marvin (I have changed his name for reasons of confidentiality) a priority. I had met him when I attended the team’s last sales meeting with their previous sales manager. From what I could tell from his behavior in the meeting Marvin seemed to be a positive and enthusiastic person.
When I met up with him on the morning of our day together, he was smartly dressed, his shoes were well polished, his company car was clean and tidy, and his sales materials were well organised. We used to pay close attention to such things back in the day, indeed I became quite infamous with my team for my obsession with all aspects of planning and preparation.
I was curious to find out what the problem was. Marvin was bottom of the league table for distribution, for volume sales and although he was making the required 8 calls a day that were the company standard his decision maker percentage was dreadful. He was required to meet the person who could make decision about buying on a minimum of 75% of his visits. He was running at a woeful 62% and the rest of the team were comfortably hitting levels of 80 to 85%.
On the day in question things were not going well. Of the eight calls planned for the day we had so far made six. And we hadn’t seen one single decision maker. As we went from call to call my curiosity turned to irritation. I managed to contain my growing irritation until after call number six when I asked what is probably the worst sales coaching question I have ever asked.
The company I worked for provided a world-class level of training and as a new sales manager I had been extensively trained in performance management, sales management, and sales coaching. The company believed strongly in its sales managers providing regular proactive sales performance coaching and I had been trained rigorously on what coaching was, the importance of “asking and not telling” in order to raise people’s awareness and responsibility and using powerful coaching questions and the GROW coaching model to help people to develop their own conclusions and solutions. I was a highly trained rookie sales coach, and I was ready to go!
We got back in Marvin’s car after the sixth call. It was clearly time for some coaching.
“OK Marvin. We have called on six outlets and we haven’t seen one single decision maker. What is going on?” I asked.
Marvin looked uncomfortable as he sat in the driver’s seat. He cleared his throat nervously before replying, “This is going to sound a bit strange, but Thursday is market day in this town and most of the owners of the pubs go to the market…. so… err.. they aren’t in.”
As I processed Marvin’s reply, my mind searched for just the right coaching question to ask. I needed the killer coaching question that would get to the heart of this issue. Sadly, I came up short. In my defence I was feeling very irritated and despite making a good initial impression, it was looking like Marvin wasn’t the sharpest pencil in my new sales team.
The only question I could think of came out of my mouth…
“So, what the (expletive deleted) are you doing calling here on a Thursday then?”
Marvin’s face flushed and he replied, “I’ve always called here on a Thursday.”
Now I was even more confused and irritated. “You have always called here on a Thursday! Do you usually not see anyone?”
“It’s not normally quite this bad, but it’s never very good.” he confessed.
“Have you ever thought about changing the day you come here?”
“I’m not allowed to.” Marvin replied.
“Who told you that?” I asked incredulously.
“Derek.” Was the reply. Derek was the sales manager I took over the team from. He came across as a somewhat arrogant and aggressive character and was an old school command and control sales manager. When we were conducting our hand over meeting, he did not appear to have much trust in his team and made a series of critical comments about each salesperson’s short comings. Interestingly, he didn’t seem to think that it was his responsibility to have done anything about any of these issues.
I raised a quizzical eyebrow at Marvin’s response, and he continued, “Derek said that once you have done your call planning you must stick to it no matter what. He got very unhappy if you didn’t follow your call plan exactly.”
I was now starting to see what the problem was, and I said, “Marvin as good as any plan is, you can always improve it. As you put your plan into action you gain more information that you can use to make it better for next time. If you could change the day you call on this town what day would be best?”
“Tuesday.” He said without a moment’s hesitation.
“OK change the day you call here to Tuesday going forward.”
Marvin hesitated for a moment and then said, “Am I allowed to do that?”
“Not only are you allowed to, but I am also going get very unhappy like Derek if you don’t!” I smiled at Marvin.
I had an idea. “Marvin, we have done the six calls so far very quickly as no-one is in, so we have got some time to spare. Let’s go and get some lunch and spend some time looking at your call plan for your territory. I think that you could probably come up with all sorts of ideas to improve it. And then we can do the last two calls a bit later and maybe the customers will be back from the market by then.”
In a local cafe over a sandwich Marvin and I invested two hours into re-cutting his call plan for his territory. When freed from the rigidity of Derek’s controlling edict Marvin rapidly pulled together the first draft of a far more efficient and effective way to cover his territory.
I needed to provide very limited input and just gently challenged and questioned him if I thought he could make further improvements. At one stage I encouraged him to plan his calls in a “loop”, scheduling calls that geographically travelled away from his home during the morning and then scheduling calls that “looped” and travelled geographically back towards his home in the afternoon.
“I know you can’t always do this due to where your customers are located but when you can do it, it reduces the amount of travel time. How much can you sell when you are driving your car, Marvin?” Marvin grinned at my rhetorical question.
I continued, “I really think you should make sure you do that particularly on a Friday Marvin. Make sure you loop your calls so that you get home a bit early on a Friday. Its madness to travel in the rush hour if you don’t need to. Then you can finish of any outstanding admin, complete your expenses for the week and then knock off a bit early and be with your family.”
Marvin had told me that his partner had recently given birth to their second child and as a new Dad myself at the time, I know how challenging a young family could be.
“Derek was furious if we were home early. He would often phone up in the late afternoon and want to know where we were.” Marvin told me.
“Marvin, we are in sales. What is most important is output, the sales we achieve. Now although the input, the sales call we make, are of importance what is most important is the results we achieve. If you are achieving target each month then that is what is most important. In all honesty, I am more interested in what you achieve than how you achieve it. And Marvin I am different to Derek. I trust you to do the right thing. You know your territory better than anyone.”
Marvin continued to make changes and fine tune his call plans each month. Initially he would ‘phone me quite frequently and ask me for “my advice”. Typically, he would explain the changes he wanted to make and ask for my opinion. I would sometimes ask him a few questions to explore his thinking but usually I would just tell him that it seemed sensible to me. I realized that we had not quite yet exorcised the ghost of Derek’s controlling style and that he was asking my permission to make the change. However, as his confidence built, he asked for less and less “advice”.
Over the coming months his distribution increased, his sales increased, his confidence increased, and he started to be able to make even more calls every week due to his excellent planning. And he started to rise steadily up the sales team league table. In addition, he was delighted to be able to spend some more time with his partner and their son and daughter.
Even as an inexperienced sales coach with a rather clumsy approach, thanks to the extensive coaching training I had received, I was starting to understand the power of coaching to unlock potential and improve performance.
And although I asked probably the worst sales coaching question in the world (I really should not have used that profanity!) we ended up getting somewhere positive in the end.
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About the author
Simon Hazeldine works internationally as a revenue growth and sales performance speaker, consultant, and coach. He empowers his clients to get more sales, more often with more margin.
He has spoken in over thirty countries and his client list includes some of the world’s largest and most successful companies.
Simon has a master’s degree in psychology, is the bestselling author of ten books that have been endorsed by a host of business leaders including multi-billionaire business legend Michael Dell and is co-founder of leading sales podcast “The Sales Chat Show”.
He is the creator of the neuroscience based “Brain Friendly Selling”® methodology.
Simon Hazeldine’s books:
- Neuro-Sell: How Neuroscience Can Power Your Sales Success
- Bare Knuckle Selling
- Bare Knuckle Negotiating
- Bare Knuckle Customer Service
- The Inner Winner
- How To Lead Your Sales Team – Virtually and in Person
- Virtual Selling Success
- How To Manage Your People’s Performance
- How To Create Effective Employee Development Plans
- Virtual Negotiation Success
