SPJ Q4 2012

Sales Performance
JOURNAL
www.millerheiman.com/subscribe Volume 7 - Issue 41
Lead a Coaching Culture in
Your Sales Organization
By 2020 workforce and marketplace shifts will
dramatically impact sales organizations and force
changes in how we operate. As sales leaders,
we need to evolve our organizations now or risk
losing our most talented people and, ultimately,
our competitiveness. Sales leaders who
recognize this new paradigm will position their
organizations to win.
Why You’re Measuring Too Much
Metrics matter in sales. The problem: Too much
time is being spent measuring the wrong data
and supporting nonessential metrics. Is the
growing availability of data having unintended
consequences? This article cuts through the
hype to guide you in determining the right data
that will support better business decisions.
The Champion’s Second Place Speech
Losing a deal hurts – personally and
professionally. How your sales teams react
matters. Sales leaders who use the strategies in
this article to prepare front-line reps and managers
for bad news can pave the way for future business.
Winning is an attitude and a philosophy. Two sales
leaders share their insights into how to broach this
important issue with your sales teams.
Trends that will Affect Your 2013 Priorities
Top-performing sales leaders are constantly challenging the status quo, because
to continue to be successful requires constantly staying ahead of trends in the
marketplace and taking actions that capitalize on these conditions.
We’ve been hearing a lot about the transfer of accountability for CRM from IT to
sales leaders. While this is not an entirely new trend for many organizations, the
implications of this shift are being felt more acutely. Sales leaders should hold
ultimate accountability for the effectiveness of CRM. There is no other way to
ensure the adoption and data accuracy that will support timely decision making,
and there is no other functional leadership in an organization better suited to
making this a reality.
What should be on a sales leader’s dashboard? With so much information
available to us combined with demands for accountability, the temptation to
measure too much is high. This is an all-too-common trap that will dilute a sales
leader’s effectiveness.
This edition of the Miller Heiman Sales Performance Journal addresses a few of
the trends that will affect your 2013 priorities.
Good selling,
Sam Reese
Chief Executive Officer

www.millerheiman.com/subscribe v7.42
Miller Heiman Sales Performance Journal Trends that will Affect Your 2013 Priorities
After years of trying to change the behavior of salespeople,
today’s fast-paced, data-driven world suggests a new, more
urgent priority for sales organizations.
As sales leaders we need to evolve our organizations or
risk losing our most talented people and, ultimately, our
competitiveness.
The key, I believe, is changing the culture of the sales
organization. Instead of focusing just on the skills and behaviors
of salespeople, we have to ask ourselves: “Are we doing enough
to change the behavior of sales managers? Are we turning our
managers into great coaches, into great leaders?
I don’t see it. I think we’re stuck in an old paradigm, and it’s one
that needs to change.
Today, I see sales managers doing the same old things they’ve
done in the past and expecting different results. Specifically, I
see a lot of field time (ride alongs) that just doesn’t add a lot of
value. Sales managers get stuck in meetings and stuck doing a
lot of non value-added activities. Coaching sessions become a
best-practice that just doesn’t happen.
I believe we need to do something different, and we need to do
it today.
Right now, 31 percent of employers worldwide find it difficult
to fill sales positions according to a Manpower Talent Shortage
Survey. It’s not that bad in the U.S. – yet. But as the economy
improves, we’re going to face an incredible talent shortage here
as well. The numbers tell the story.
Consider these challenging demographics: the U.S. Census
figures show 10,000 Baby Boomers are reaching retirement
age each day (about 3.7 million each year), which, coupled with
continued declines in the birth rate, will increasingly impact the
workforce.
By 2020, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects sales
organizations will be searching for college graduates to fill
nearly 275,000 net new (non-retail) professional sales rep and
sales service positions, an increase of 17.8 percent.1
Russia,
China, Canada and other countries face similar scenarios with
fewer and fewer qualified people entering the workforce.
Top-level sales executives need to ask, “What do we need to
do differently to make sure we’re attracting and keeping the
very best people in our organization?” I believe we need to do
a better job in training front-line management in both coaching
and leadership, and provide easy access to relevant analytical
data for them to use in coaching salespeople.
Everyone wants to hire salespeople with experience who can
hit the ground running. Yet even the best performers still need
coaching. Professional basketball teams with million-dollar
players have coaches because to play as a cohesive unit even
the best athletes in the world need someone to tell them where
they are making a mistake. When I survey sales managers by
asking how much true coaching they have done in the last 60
days, three-quarters admit they only coach sporadically. With
all the responsibilities managers juggle, coaching time just isn’t
a priority.
Good Coaching Pays Off
Numerous studies show that if we do a good job with coaching
we can improve sales performance significantly.
Coaching and leadership need to be addressed at all levels of
the sales organization because the cost of unplanned turnover
the sales force is expensive. We need to create a culture where
good people want to stay.
To keep the best of the best within our organizations we, as
sales leaders, need to ask ourselves:
• Do we have a coaching culture?
• How are we turning our managers into great coaches and
leaders?
• How are we talking to our frontline managers?
Lead a Coaching Culture in
Your Sales Organization
By Tom Lazzaro | Miller Heiman Sales Consultant

Defining a “Coaching Culture”
Celebrated UCLA basketball coach John Wooden said it this
way, “A coach is someone who can give correction without
creating resentment.”
As a commander in the U.S. Army, I reported to a boss
(Gen. Barry McCaffery, who retired as a four-star general)
who routinely grilled me about what I was doing to make my
lieutenants into better leaders. Essentially he was asking me
how I was training them to replace myself. I took that lesson into
sales management. As a sales manager, I’d tell my salespeople
“I want you to be better than me.” If I could get all my salespeople
to be great salespeople, well, then my job as manager would be
easy!
Frontline sales managers play a lot of roles: manager, mediator,
forecast analyst, leader, coach and enforcer. Most tell me they
are lucky to observe their salespeople once a month. Managers
are that busy. When they do have “coaching” sessions, if all
a manager ever talks about is numbers, then the sales force
knows what the manager is interested in. If the manager uses
numbers as a cudgel it spreads negativity.
Sales organizations with coaching cultures train managers to
be both leaders and coaches. From the C-suite to the frontline
sales manager, everyone is focused on developing their people
and enabling them to grow to their fullest potential. In these
organizations salespeople know it’s OK to make a mistake and
learn from it.
As a manager, one of the hardest things to do is to watch a
salesperson stumble. You want to step in and “fix” a less-than-
ideal situation, right there, right then. That’s not how people
learn. It’s not how teams improve. You need to let people stub
their toe – then talk about how to make it better.
Perhaps the single-most important tool that will enable better
coaching is in analytics reporting.
Leaders need to decide which metrics offer managers the best
data to use in guiding salespeople – whether its prospecting
better, identifying key players, developing a coach, effective
funnel management or good call planning. Currently such data
is hard to come by in most organizations – or it exists in a raw
format possibly stored on several separate systems. The data
needs to be easy to access and interpret – or it won’t be used.
Managers just don’t have time to track the numbers down.
Coaching sessions should not be performance reviews. Up and
down the organization the questions should be “How can I help
you do a better job selling/managing/coaching?”
A challenge for executives is developing a way to measure how
effective sales managers are at coaching the frontline sales
force. Measuring should start at the top with self evaluation:
• How are we building coaching into the sales organization?
• What are we doing from a technical standpoint to enable
managers?
• What data are we giving them and how are we pushing it so
it will be useful to them.
The number one reason people quit their jobs is because of
a bad boss or supervisor, according to a recent Gallup poll of
more than one million U.S. workers. Other studies echo this
finding in countries around the world.
Football Coach Tom Landry of the Dallas Cowboys said, “A
coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear,
who has you see what you don’t want to see so you can become
who you always wanted to be.”
Salespeople who believe that they are in an organization that
allows them to grow and thrive are less likely to leave. As a sales
manager, leader or executive, always ask yourself how you are
developing your young talent.
About the Author
As a Miller Heiman independent Sales Consultant, Tom
Lazzaro collaborates with Fortune 1000 companies to help
them build exceptional sales organizations—improving their
sales effectiveness and consistently growing their top-line
results. His has an extensive background in private industry
sales management and marketing, plus has taught operations,
behavioral science and management at the university level. He
served in the U.S. Army for 13 years, rising to the rank of Major.
His career included providing leadership training and logistics
for an organization of 15,000 personnel. Lazzaro graduated
from the University of Florida and earned his Master’s Degree
at Webster University.
1. Bureau of Labor Statistics Monthly Labor Review, January 2012

Why You’re Measuring Too Much
By Donna Walker | Senior Consultant, Client Engagement
Question: How many metrics does the average sales
management dashboard include?
Answer: Too many
Reason: Sales reps and managers put data entry low on their
priority lists and the resulting inconsistency in data collection
leads to unreliable and inaccurate forecasts and widespread
frustration. Investing in new CRM technology may offer an
opportunity to change what and how sales organizations track
data – or cause the same frustrations – because the problem
may not be the technology.
Keep it Simple
Dazzled by the ability to categorize data, sales leaders go
overboard in seeking every possible analytic, whether it is
measurable or trackable.
A global sales leader for a large software company told me she
is measuring “14 important sales metrics” for her company.
That’s too many. Even she admitted she only really looks at
about three of the numbers.
That’s about right. The number one thing organizations can
do to improve the accuracy of their data is to establish clear
goals about what they really need to know to move the business
forward.
Pick three to five metrics to track. That’s it. Don’t get too
complicated. Identify the most important measures of success
for your business such as driving new revenue, increasing
margin or average order size. This varies by industry, but pick
just a few – more is not better. Don’t over-engineer this. I see
it all the time. If you track everything, you will overwhelm the
sales force.
Think simple. Whatever you are measuring now, what could
replace it to produce better numbers in a more logical way – a
way that is easier and more relevant for the frontline? Most sales
organizations use CRM systems to look at lagging measures,
showing what happened in the past. Consider instead outlining
specific information to supports those three to five overall
success measures. Take time to list them out. Consider which
activities might support increasing margins – such as close
date and dollar amount then look at data elements to support
those metrics. If an action doesn’t support the metric, drop it.
Once the overall priorities are decided, determine which step-
by-step actions by the sales force will support those goals and
set the metrics. Unleashing the power of CRM technology
relies on data that can only come from the front-line sales force.
Source: 2012 Miller Heiman Sales Best Practices Study
Driving Adoption
Sales management often unwittingly undermines adoption and
usage of the CRM system by not using it themselves. While
frontline sales managers ultimately drive the process and
ensure the accuracy of the funnel data, culturally it sends a
strong message when everyone up and down the organization
refers to the system when talking numbers and data.
This means establishing a user-friendly dashboard that
every level of management can use. Have management and
executives test drive whatever they think the sales force should
do – have them actually evaluate a deal and enter the data and
metrics they want to track.
I’ve seen powerful changes when managers can pull up the
Our sales performance metrics are aligned with our
business objectives.
WORLD CLASSALL
93%45%

data, examine a sales rep’s opportunities and identify clear
coaching opportunities where one-on-one discussions will
help the rep in a current or future situation.
New System Opportunity
The Miller Heiman Research Institute’s Sales Performance
and Productivity Study, 2012 found that 52 percent of sales
organizations are now in the process of or planning to migrate
to a new CRM system in 2013.
CEOs, who want better insights and results from CRM
investments, increasingly are shifting the responsibility for its
success to Sales. Given that many CEOS rank CRM as their
most important area of investment to improve their business
over the next five years,1
sales leaders are tasked with proving
the value of this technology.
If your organization is one of these, use the new system as a
catalyst to improve adoption by introducing a better process
for reps and managers to use.
Train sales managers first and separately on the system and
its goals to get them to buy into the process, because if the
sales manager doesn’t “get it,” the sales rep never will.
Establish a company-wide framework that identifies essential
sales competencies. The framework should be simple with the
three to five defined activities that address the minimal and
optimal usage for the new system. This will clarify the process
and make it measurable, trackable and manageable. Reward
those who adopt the specified behaviors in the framework.
While adoption requires the on-going commitment of the
front-line sales force, establishing realistic, reasonable and
actionable goals must be a sales management priority.
This strategy changes behaviors, improves data entry and
ultimately supports corporate goals.
About the Author
Donna Walker, Miller Heiman’s Senior Consultant for Client
Engagement, draws on 25 years of business leadership
experience to provide key support to our large clients in
designing tailored programs to address specific needs. She is
a partner in Walker & Lundeen Consulting. As Vice President of
Sales Operations at Corporate Express, she led sales and CRM
integrations, cross-functional strategic and training initiatives
that improved processes of many complex companies. Walker
is a graduate of Bowling Green State University.
1. 2012 Gartner CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey

The Champion’s Second Place Speech
By Holly O’Driscoll | Senior Publications Editor
Sales leaders know their teams won’t win every deal.
Eventually, your company will come in second place – quite
possibly on a deal you or one of your salespeople absolutely
needs to win to make quota, to keep a job or make promotion
– the loss feels personal. It negatively impacts you, the
salesperson and the organization.
“The job of training the sales force to lose graciously, and to
be prepared to regroup on the spot, falls to the sales manager.
You need a strategy, and you need to coach your team on
this,” said Rob West, a Miller Heiman Sales Consultant with 24
years of sales leadership experience. “You always push every
advantage with the plan of winning, but when it comes down
to the wire, you and your sales reps have to be prepared to
lose before you can win.”
Many top sales leaders consider this philosophy a best-practice.
“There is always a time between the final presentation and the
decision, which torments salespeople. Whether the period is
a day, a week or a month, there are things you can do,” said
Mike Toner, Vice President for National Accounts at Travelers
Insurance Company.
He recommends preparing the sales force to develop what he
calls the Champion’s Second Place Speech.
“Buying decisions are made based on information we have, as
well as information we will never have. In all cases, buyers make
decisions based on what they perceive to be in their extended
best interest, given the totality of information they have. You
must believe that. Decisions are not against you, or for the
competition for that matter. Decisions are based on the buyer
and what they perceive as their best interests.” Toner explained.
When the prospect notifies your company it decided on the
rival’s solution, your salesperson has a choice on their response.
Too often, Toner said, sales reps react negatively:
“I am really disappointed, the team put in a lot of work. Do you
really believe the other firm will fulfill their commitments?”
If the salesperson continues to express disappointment, makes
it personal or tries to argue about the decision it adds a layer
of guilt and annoyance to the customer. It turns what was an
already difficult call for the customer into a painful experience.
If it becomes painful enough, not only will you not see future
opportunities, you may even succeed in making your prospect
angry and antagonistic, Toner explained.
There is a better way. Toner coaches his sales leaders and
sales force to take “The Champion’s Route.”
“This is not easy to do,” Toner said. “It is rooted in general
optimism for the future and in the belief that buyers always
make choices they believe to be in their own best interest. It
doesn’t matter what you, or your company, believe. You have
to look at it from their perspective.”
He suggests coaching the sales team to prepare for “no” by
preparing the “Champion’s Response.” A champion would say:
“We support your decision. We have enjoyed getting to know
you and the company better. We feel we are a good fit and we
are sure we will form a relationship over the longer term. You
have my 100-percent support for an orderly transition. If, for
any reason, you need our help, please call me. Thank you for
the opportunity.”
“With the champion route the prospect has seen you and your
company at its best, in the most difficult circumstances. To the
buyer, you have made the call easier – and you have surprised
them. They will remember it, and you quite probably ignited a
desire within the buyer to reward you for your professionalism
at some time in the future. Maybe not, but it has cost you
nothing,” Toner said.
After every big game, coaches review the tape, to really
understand the loss and learn from it. West advises sales
managers to have their sales reps follow this best practice

by having the point salesperson on the deal ask for a follow
up call within a week of the decision to ask straightforward
questions to learn why the customer didn’t choose their
solution. Knowing the reasons allows you to highlight best
practices and coach to what could be done better.
“Your team has to recognize that losing is not personal, it’s
business. If you lose the wrong way it will become personal,
and not in a good way,” West said.
Toner agreed with this analysis.
“We have witnessed many situations in which the ‘winner’
can’t deliver,” he explained.
Coaching sales reps to position your company to get the
rebound scores points.
“We have witnessed situations where the opportunity ‘lost’
is a fraction of the next opportunity, and they consider us
because of the way we conducted ourselves the last time
around,” West said.
“Don’t burn bridges,” advised West. “You want their business
down the road. Clients and prospects frequently change
companies. You want them to remember you and you want
them to take your good will with them.”
Toner’s final advice: “As you wait to hear if you won the business,
prepare your second place speech and believe it. Champions
are champions all the time.”
About Our Sources
Mike Toner brings 35 years of leadership experience in insurance
and risk management to his role as Vice President of National
Accounts at Travelers Insurance Company. He is a graduate
of the University of Massachusetts, Fordham Law School and
Advanced Management programs at Tuck School of Business,
The Wharton School and Insead. He is a member of the New
York, Massachusetts and U.S. Supreme Court bar associations.
He speaks at Risk and Insurance Management Society and
Turnaround Management Association events and is active in
numerous professional and philanthropic organizations.
Miller Heiman Sales Consultant Rob West has more than 24
years of sales and marketing leadership experience. As founder
and president of Evolve Selling, he helps clients develop
exceptional sales organizations by implementing the Miller
Heiman Sales System®
. His executive leadership experience
at Fortune 500 companies includes posts at ARAMARK Corp.,
Budget Rent-a-Car and Fidelity Capital. West graduated from
Stanford University, earned his MBA from Rutgers University
and serves as an advisor to the Russ Berrie Institute at William
Paterson University.
About the Author
Holly O’Driscoll is Miller Heiman’s Senior Publications Editor.
She is a journalist with more than 15 years experience writing and
editing for newspapers, magazines and business publications.

SPJ Q4 2012

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