By Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing
Late in 2015 we started producing a bi-weekly radio program called Sales Pipeline Radio, which currently runs every Thursday at 11:30 a.m. Pacific. It’s just 30 minutes long, fast-paced and full of actionable advice, best practices and more for B2B sales & marketing professionals.
We’ve already featured some great guests and have a line up of awesome content and special guests into 2016. Our very first guest was Funnelholic author and Topo co-founder Craig Rosenberg. Next we had Mike Weinberg, incredible writer, speaker, author, followed by Conrad Bayer, CEO & Founder of Tellwise. Recent Guests: Jim Keenan; Joanne Black; Aaron Ross; Josiane Feigon, Meagen Eisenberg, and Trish Bertuzzi.
We cover a wide range of topics, with a focus on sales development and inside sales priorities heading into and throughout the year. We’ll publish similar highlights here for upcoming episodes. You can listen to full recordings of past shows at SalesPipelineRadio.com and subscribe on iTunes.
This week Jim Obermayer sat in for Matt with guest, Ken Thoreson, of Acumen Management Group. Their firm is focused on execution, discipline, accountability to the sales organization.
He has just published his fourth book in a series:
SLAMMED: for the first time sales manager.
Paul: Time once again to pick up where we left off last week and explore the Sales Pipeline. This week we have a substitute host, Jim Obermayer. Hey, welcome Jim!
Jim: Thank you Paul! It’s nice to be here today on Sales Pipeline Radio. Matt Heinz is stuck on an airplane today and so therefore he has not been able to interview our guest today Ken Thoreson. Ken Thoreson is with the Acumen Management Group and he has got a deep knowledge of the industry. Ken has been on the SLMA radio some years ago, several years ago. He’s a four or five time author, I always loved his advice, I read his books. And today we are going to get into one of his books Slammed: For the First Time Sales Manager. But before we do that Ken, would you tell us a little bit more about your company before we get started about the book?
Ken: Yeah, absolutely, good to hear your voice and happy to be with you today. It’s been almost 19 years since we started Acumen Management and we are primarily focused at what sometimes tends to be the weak link in a lot of organizations and that’s the sales leader, sales manager so we are really focused on bringing execution, discipline and accountability to the sales organization.
Jim: Well I certainly believe that so many companies, they are in this problem of lack of sales and things were going down and they point to marketing and point to customer service, they point to all kinds of things. Then suddenly someplace along the line they decide to go ahead and point to the manager. And so tell us, and I am glad to see you as you said through the years, really focus on how to get the sales managers better because the sales manager is better, the company will be better, the salespeople will be more successful, profitability will flow, it will be a great relationship. Tell me, what drove you to write this first book.
This isn’t your first book let me see, I’ve got to take a look. What book is this in your lineup? You’ve got four.
Ken: This is the last of the series and it really came about as the first one was on how do you recruit salespeople? And then it was how do you lead high-performance sales teams, the third one was really on how do you develop sales compensation programs that worked.
And then I designed all four to fit together and the last one was really Slammed: For the First Time Sales Manager. And the reason for that is that not only in my own experience but also in seeing a lot of clients over the number of years that that first person who is either promoted from salesperson to sales manager or who somehow became a sales manager for the first time, that after about six months they were slammed.
Because what happened to them is generally two things; their to do list got very long because they were trying to do too much and trying to do too much for their salespeople. But they also had to learn to be a manager that had to work with their peer groups as well as the executive team as well as the salespeople so it was the ultimate middle management job. So Slammed is about setting priorities, it’s about how do you impact the sales team and things to focus on initially. There’s a lot of issues around new salespeople when they are hired, how they are on boarded, there is nothing about how do you onboard the new sales manager.
And so that’s really the whole concept that I saw that I wanted to add all of the components. Because as you know Jim there’s thousands of people who do sales training, there is very few people who focus on how do you get that sales leader to assume leadership responsibility as well as management responsibility to make it happen.
Jim: Well some consultants mention it and I know of one other high-level consultant that spends a lot of time on it. But it’s really your efforts probably that created this industry that even any of the consultants are spending any time on it. Because you are right, most of them always worry about the salespeople and when sales are lagging it’s: oh, they need training. And when sales are lagging – oh, they need marketing, customer service isn’t doing a good job – it’s the products, it’s all kind of things. And yet it comes back to, you say the average lifespan of a sales manager is 18 months, is that all it is?
Ken: It’s true. It’s interesting how I say that when sales doesn’t hit their quotas, the sales manager gets fired but marketing just goes back and writes a new marketing plan. So I like to suggest that that’s really what we see; they are hired, they are brought in, the executive who hires them or the vice president of sales who may hire that field sales manager depending on the size of the organization, gives the person enough rope to see how they do it and maybe put them through some cursory HR coaching experience which is good, which is absolutely necessary.
But trying to understand what that role is is critical. That sales manager in a small business or that field sales manager in a large business or even the vice president of sales running multiple sales managers, have to have a need for systems or what I call operations. But they also have to have a need for what I call emotional leadership and that’s something that a lot of people miss. A lot of times people see first time sales managers get in and they start tracking numbers, they start tracking activity, they start focusing on micro-issues and they forget that they also have to have emotional leadership around building belief in the organization, getting people inspired to execute.
I am speaking in a couple of weeks in Chicago by the way on the topic about sales leadership creating the right level of intensity. I believe that salespeople don’t show up every day and do what 110% of work ethic, that is the manager’s job to instill work ethic, intensity, high levels of performance and a willingness and an interest to achieve great results.
Jim: You’ve got me writing faster than I can keep up here, I am scribbling all over the place. It’s the manager’s job to install or initiate this intensity on the part of the salesperson. Most of these salespeople I see show up and they don’t have plans for the day, they are wandering around. You ask them what they are going to do and they say what you mean what am I going to do? Well I am going to go on the phone, I am going to call prospects. And I say what are you going to accomplish for the day?
What do you mean accomplish? Well how many sales are you going to make? How many calls are you going to make? At the end of the day, what determines whether your day was successful or not? You can tell me that then I know you can be as good salesperson. So many are just poorly led because it takes a sales manager to teach them to do these things.
Ken: Yeah, a lot of sales managers haven’t seen it, they are working in a world based on whoever they last worked for and so at Acumen, we really try to build a methodology around talking about planning for example. Every six months we have a salesperson’s business plan template that we use that allows them to focus around their territory if that’s the issue or their market or their business goals and their training needs and their forecasting. We have a rule that the salesperson has to forecast three times quota and depending on the company, maybe five clients.
We also have account planning tools that allow us to think about if they have accounts, how to strategize and be proactive in account planning and then we break that down a little bit depending on the type of company and what they need to do into monthly objectives and monthly plans so that people can be proactive versus reactive.
Jim: Some of the things that you’ve mentioned on your website here on Acumen Management Limited, so it’s www.acumenmanagement.com. So do you have some of those documents to help in planning on your website?
Ken: Thank you, yes we do! There is free videos out there, there is a white paper on the top 40 actions a sales manager must activate to build predictable revenue and that is free, those are all free and they are out there.
We have something called the sales managers online toolkit that’s on the site. It has 40+ tools, ideas, a very robust library of products that we developed over the years for people from an interviewing kit to interviewing salespeople to be on boarding programs, to onboard new salespeople. There is even an agenda out there Jim on how to run a Monday morning sales meeting. Because one of the first things we change generally when we walk in to a client is how they run their sales meetings so we have a template for that as well.
Jim: I’ve got to cheat here, I just downloaded How to Manage Sales for Predictable Revenue: 40 Critical Sales Management Activities That Drive Sales Results. I’m going to tell everybody that these are my own ideas. But maybe I will reference you someplace along the line as we get there.
Ken: I appreciate that.
Jim: As a first-time sales manager, what do you see as their biggest challenge? Do you think it’s an emotional connection? Is it learning the CRM system? Is it connecting with the C level managers so you can keep them happy? What is the real responsibility to be successful do you think the first two or three months?
Ken: Great question and I think it lies at the essence of success or failure for that first time sales manager. And like any executive, it’s setting priorities based upon a situation and I will only just give you a couple examples.
Let’s assume you are walking into a role that is a turnaround situation where sales have been poor and salespeople are not very effective in their issue. And if you understand that and if you are hired from within and promoted to sales manager, you may have some feeling for that. So what generally happens is to the smart person, they will sit back and observe, reflect, make a few changes so that the salespeople understand that change is occurring and they see that things are getting fixed. But that is critical so they get a good judgment of what needs to be done and then they take action.
Setting a priority, setting goals and then at that time expressing your vision of what you want to achieve over the next 90 days or six months becomes a very successful factor. Because a lot of people will chew off more than they can achieve and or they act very quickly and therefore may be act ineffectively. Now if it’s in a negative very serious turnaround situation, they need to make some hard decisions quick. I’ve had to do that from a cost reduction changing issues to do that but you have to be smart and understand and think through how to do that.
If you are walking into our role where you are replacing someone and someone has been successful, then it’s really swinging back again and understanding the players, getting to know each person but building that trust between you and the team becomes critical.
One of the things we find when we interview new clients both the salespeople and the sales management team and the executive team is that in the organizations we know that are failing, we hear people talk about them and us and those people and there is a line between we as in team versus those people. And if that line is there, we have to start breaking that down immediately to make sure everybody is on the same page and we have the vision and direction and the belief of where we are going. Once that culture has started to be impacted, then that’s a soft skill, that’s the emotional side that we are talking about then we see people take action and are successful.
Jim: Well it’s interesting when you talked about observe, reflect, make the changes over time except in those situations where you have been brought in to fix something quickly, you see a great majority of the salespeople failing, salesmen going down for two or three months.
I recently wrote the white paper based on how to look at your sales forecast, how do you look at your pipeline as a CEO and determine what’s real and what isn’t. We are going to take a break here for just a second to hear from our commercial sponsor but when we come back, can we touch on this – what about experienced sales managers? You get hired by experienced sales managers to come in and help them and where do you feel that you see that most of these people need their success and then we’ll get into a few more nitty-gritties. But at the very end we would like to know how people can reach you.
[Break]
Paul: All right, back to Jim and his guest!
Jim: Again, this is Jim Obermayer sitting in for Matt Heinz today on Sales Pipeline Radio. We are speaking with Ken Thoreson and we are tackling… we are getting a feeling for his books, Slammed: For the First Time Sales Manager and a little bit more about what it really takes. And we’ve covered some of the most obvious challenges; why the life of a sales manager, the business life is about 18 months and we talked a little bit about the weak links in organizations being sales management very often rather than the salespeople themselves and we’ve talked about being able to focus on the sales management role as they are brand-new to the job, what do they have to do.
My next question before we took a break was to talk a little bit about what about experienced sales managers? What does Ken see when he goes in and the issue is it’s so much that there’s a problem but the sales manager seems to be good but what does he see that these people need to change on average? How do they need to grow? Is it managing the salespeople? Is it the pipeline? Are they not statistically up to speed? Some of them don’t like to use CRM systems; where are they most lacking Ken?
Ken: Interesting question because obviously I’ve seen a lot of variations around that but some general trends that I think everybody would relate to but if you are an experienced sales manager and you are coming in and you need to be an experienced sales manager that’s being successful, you’re going to be the experienced sales manager who is not being successful so we’ll try not to get into those nuances too much.
But what I see generally of the sales manager, in fact I have a client that I started with about 18 months, two years ago I stopped working with, I’m being brought back in because after 18 months he’s doing well, he’s not doing great. They want me to come back and refocus and see how do we take them to 2.0 because all of a sudden he’s got more salespeople, he starting to focus on issues.
What we see generally are really two areas; they’ve done well functionally getting the team organized and then maybe functionally on boarding salespeople well, they may be functionally running a Monday morning sales meeting, very simplistic stuff and they are doing things well, they are making their calls. But they’ve gotten themselves into a rut, they’ve either created division between themselves and their salespeople or they really haven’t built what I call the sales machine or what a lot of people call a sales machine. They haven’t built the methodology to replicate.
If you look at the successful franchises in the food industry for example and I use Subway as an example, the largest franchisee in the world. When you walk into a Subway what do they say? 6 inch or 12? Then they walk you into what kind of bread, then they walk you down the line and at the end they sell you a chocolate chip cookie.
That kind of methodology needs to be implemented in order for the organization to propel themselves into the next level of revenue and stratosphere. And that’s where we see a lot of sales managers, that they haven’t really built mutually what I call a sales process map. And that relates directly to why CRM sometimes is not efficient; they haven’t built the metrics to understand their pipeline, to understand from a marketing perspective, what’s the number of suspects, ideal prospects, how many campaigns, how many leads per month that have come into the sales pipeline and then how many leads the salespeople have to generate and then taking them through the pipeline of how many of those leads turn into prospects, how many of those prospects turn into opportunities and what’s their close ratio. And if they build that kind of understanding from a formulization perspective, it becomes critical.
Jim, you might remember I like to cook a lot, I have a lot of recipe cookbooks and I bring things into recipes. I think it’s important that the next level of sales manager, the experienced sales manager generally then needs to bring that kind of, I don’t want to say scientific, but analytical analysis into their business so they can build predictable revenue because predictable revenue isn’t necessarily always revenue going higher.
As a good sales manager, you should be able to say today what the odds of your revenue goals are in 90 days and how close are you going to be able to obtain quota so you can go to the CFO, go to the president and say you know, I think this particular month, 90 days from now, we could be a little weak from a cash flow perspective because the revenue is going to drop down and that’s when you start to understand and that’s why we like to track what I call forecast accuracy by a salesperson.
So if the salesperson suggests they are going to sell the hundred thousand dollars on the first of September, you track what they actually sold at the end of the month and you do that over time and you get a feel of how good Ken Thoreson understands their pipeline and their ability to forecast. And that’s just one of many metrics but that’s where we see that next experienced sales manager needs to take their game to the next level.
Jim: Well, you mentioned sales process and is that similar to sales steps or are those two separate from one another?
Ken: Yes and no. Sales steps are certainly part of sales process. Sales process defines first of all what are the seven steps of the sales process or three steps of the sales process depending on velocity. But sales process starts to look inside each one of those steps to say how do I prepare for the call, this kind of call, what are my expectations of this kind of call at this stage and what do I do on the call and then what do I do post call?
So sales process word document could be nine pages, it could be 15 pages long. It’s one of the failures of CRM, getting it to boil down very simply for your listeners is that let’s assume you have seven steps and you’ve scheduled a demonstration with a customer of your product or your service, now that I’ve scheduled the demonstration, do I move the customer to the demonstration stage or do I move the customer to the demonstration stage after I give the demonstration? Those minute differences start to fine-tune how quality and define how well your salespeople execute.
Jim: Well understanding those sales steps and understand when you can leapfrog to them and not leapfrog to them and too many companies don’t have the sales process or sales steps down pat and therefore they just let salespeople wander all over the place.
Ken: Exactly.
Jim: And I remember your analogies with cooking, I think our program five or six years ago I remember I used to go to a restaurant, Newport Beach California, the manager, the owner came up and I said I love your chicken marsala, can you give me the recipe? And she says Jim, she says come on in the back. Well she said I can give you the recipe but just giving you the recipe doesn’t show you how to cook. And I thought that was quite insightful. I’ve remembered through the years.
We’ve only got about two minutes left, what is the number one advice you can give to a CEO whose sales have slammed down over a two or three months period and they are wondering whether it’s the salespeople or the sales manager; what would you… what advice would you give that CEO?
Ken: Well, I actually wrote a blog about something that topic and its one of the things that we find, and the name of the blog was How Do You Manage Your Sales Manager? A lot of CEOs hire a vice president of sales, higher a sales manager, they turn their head and focus on the next problem and what happens is that the sales manager works their priorities but in reality they are not the priorities of the CEO.
My first priority is do you really understand what you’re vice president of sales is doing or what you vice president of marketing is doing and are you managing them effectively? Are they reporting what you want to hear? So that’s the first thing I would look at – are you really meeting with your sales manager, vice president of sales on a weekly basis to make sure they are in alignment with what you want them to do?
Number two, it’s really trying to then, besides hiring me to come in and find out the problem, it’s really trying to make sure that if you have a sales mentality as a CEO, that we understand pipeline management because that’s what going on. But the real and most important secret I would tell you is that I would make sure that the CEO and the vice president of sales are always recruiting salespeople because you can always find better talent. The new person that you want to hire or the best person you want to hire may not be looking when you’re looking and or they are looking when you’re not looking so you always need to recruit so you always upgrade your team. John Wooden said you always want to have better players than your competition.
Jim: That makes sense. Ask you for one thing and you give me three great ideas. How can someone reach you Ken?
Ken: Great. Well www.acumenmanagement.com is the website; a lot of great stuff up there. You can contact me directly on the website. You can certainly call me at 423-884-6328 or you can find me and my blog is www.yoursalesmanagementguru.com we were just rated one of the top 50 blogs in the world by the way.
Jim: You’ve been a mentor to me whether you know it or not and I am sure a lot of other consultants and sales managers out there. We have been speaking with Ken Thoreson. He’s an author, he’s a speaker, he’s a coach and a consultant from Acumen management. He’s written four books; Building Sales Compensation Plans for High-Performance, Recruiting High-Performance Sales Teams, Leading High-Performance Sales Teams and Slammed: for the First Time Sales Manager. It’s available through Amazon as a Kindle book – $14.95 and it’s also available through Ken’s website. You can get the hardcopy version for $19.96 and an e-book version $14.95. Thank you very much Ken for being on Sales Pipeline Radio!
Paul: You’ve been listening to the only show that explores the entire sales pipeline process with your host brought to you by Heinz Marketing!
***End***
The post Sales Pipeline Radio, Episode 33: Q & A with Ken Thoreson, President of Acumen Management Group appeared first on Heinz Marketing.