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.
It starts with the sales managers, and it then goes to the training, coaching and support THOSE managers receive. How can pass it down unless they know it as they breathe?
Steven Rosen has over 15 years of executive experience. His fresh approach to corporate leadership, strategy development, execution and team-building in the pharmaceutical and packaged goods sectors defined his success. His expertise in aligning sales and marketing initiatives to achieve key business results and exceed customer expectations has continually exceeded sales objectives from his days as a sales rep to his achievements as a VP of sales for Alcon and Biovail.
If you manage sales managers, check out starresults.com and sign up for any guide you can find there, including the The 2016 Managers’ Survey:
Key takeaways
coaching
key performance
hiring
busines acument
leadership
The answer to sales related problems is this app, this program, that widget – but it may not solve the problem of RESULTS.
Sales Management coaching drives more sales.
Managers ranked the lowest on coaching.
53% of companies are providing some sort of coaching, training and development. LISTEN or Read Below:
Paul: Welcome everybody once again to the only show that takes a look at sales pipelines. So grab your board, catch a wave and ride along with Matt Heinz from Heinz Marketing, hey Matt.
Matt: How are we doing Paul?
Paul: I’m good. We are pre-taping this one today here, or are we not supposed to let the cat out of the bag here?
Matt: Well, it doesn’t really matter the answer to that question now does it?
Yeah well, it’s fine. I was actually going to say through the magic of technology, you are listening to live radio when I am sitting somewhere completely different during the show. But thanks to Paul or awesome producer and a great team behind us on Sales Pipeline Radio we are recording this show a little bit early due to some conflicts on our usual live date. So if you wanted to call in, we will take advantage of calls next week and a couple of weeks after.
Paul: That’s right.
Matt: Every week Thursday at 2:30 Eastern, 11:30 Pacific you catch Sales Pipeline Radio right here. You can also catch our past episodes at www.salespipelineradio.com. You can catch us in podcast format anytime and always have access to the newest episodes on Google play and the iTunes store and you can check out a transcript of some of our best guests available at www.Heinzmarketing.com on our blog.
So really excited today to feature a friend of mine, I can’t believe it it’s funny we were talking the other day and I can’t believe we haven’t had him as a guest on the show to this point because he’s become so influential in the sales and management space, has published a number of great tips and has a new report out on sales management trends that we are excited to talk about today and just a good guy overall.
So we’ve got Steven Rosen. Steve how are you doing?
Steve: I’m doing well Matt, how about yourself?
Matt: I am great, thank you for being on the show, thanks for being flexible and recording this a little bit early, it sounds like it’s going to work for both of us because I’m going to be predisposed tomorrow and you’ve got some important playoff baseball to attend to as well.
Steve: I do, I do. We are not there yet but we are in first place…
Matt: This is my point, I don’t want to jinx it it. Look, I am a Cubs fan so if there’s anybody that’s going to be doing any jinxing around here, I’m the one that’s got to worry about that. You have at least won the series in the last century or so. But thanks so much for joining us today.
You’ve been someone that I just, and am not just saying this because you are a guest on the show, I have just learned from what you’ve written and any insight you provided, just getting to know you a little bit through the event circuit but also reading your stuff.
And so maybe just start off, let people know who you are. And I think of you as really a sales management and leadership development expert but talk a little bit about where you focus and the things you see in the market today.
Steve: Okay, well thank you Matt. I don’t want to go back too far but I started my career I started in sales and quickly progressed into sales management roles and ended up running I guess three divisions of my first company that I work for as VP of sales and marketing.
So I did some marketing, never had a product manager job but was responsible for marketing then I went to another larger organization as VP of sales and I had really good success although I did come from the school of hard knocks. I made my share of mistakes and I never really got any training how to be a sales leader, I kind of learned through trial and error. And for the last 13 years after I left industry I made it my goal to help other sales leaders develop, be successful, help them lead, help lead with authentic leadership style. And at the end of the day, all sales leaders besides leading, they want to crush their sales numbers and that’s what we help them do. I love to do it one-on-one because it’s very gratifying working with people.
And yes, we do have a new study out which we are very excited about. I guess it depends if you want to look at the glass half full or the glass half empty.
Matt: Well there’s a lot of insight in this and I want to get into that. We are talking to Steven Rosen today; you can find him and all of his great content at www.starresults.com.
Steven, you have published a number of great tools. I know that you’ve got Your Sales Manager Success Guide, your 52 Sales Management Tips. So if you are a sales manager, if you manage sales managers, definitely check out www.starresults.com. But yeah, let’s talk a little bit about your 2016 sales manager report. I mean I was reading through this the other day and just to your point there, there is good news and there is room for improvement clearly in what you found in the markets. So talk a little bit about some of the key takeaways from this year’s survey.
Steve: Sure Matt, so we set out to understand what the trends are in development. Our belief is there is five key or five core skills that are essential to be a great sales manager; one being coaching, performance management, hiring, business acumen and leadership. And of course there’s many others but these are the five core skills we look at. And there’s a variety of things we look at and people are welcome to download the report either through Matt or I can give you the URL on our site. And the bottom line is the first thing we looked at was asking respondents who are sales leaders around the world and saying okay, does your company support sales manager development in one of these five areas or each of these five areas and if you put it into a nutshell, we are finding that half of the companies are supporting sales manager development, ongoing sales manager development which is the glass half full.
The glass half empty is really folks, 50% of managers are not getting any type of ongoing development and support, I think that’s the catastrophe. As Matt said, there’s opportunities but that means a lot of sales managers are operating out there without any support, any company support to improve and get better their trade. And I know moving from a sales rep to a manager without any training… as I said I went through the school of hard knocks.
Matt: I heard you talking. In my mind I am like this is crazy like the people wouldn’t invest in this. I think people invest in management training which is great but sales management is a different animal. And the compounding impact of not helping your managers become better and the compounding effect that has then on the reps who end up failing, who end up on their own and who are not hitting their number will get frustrated and at best they are not hitting their number, at worst they then churn at a higher rate than you have to replace them which is we all know is very expensive.
I don’t mean to be the glass half empty but for those listening that either need to better prioritize sales management training or want some better fodder, talk a little bit about the down level impact in a negative way of not having your sales reps trained and more effective.
Steve: 100%. I mean it’s interesting because my view of the world and certainly I don’t believe it’s self-serving if I worked in industry; I am not a large organization, I am a thought leader in this area, I definitely work with people but to me the foundation of a sales organization and you know as a marketer and people will say sales is a marketing tactic which at times I used to say when I was inside of a business unit. So a lot of companies are fully invested in their sales force as their key driver for sales performance, right?
So if you look at it you are spending lots of money on salaries and travel and entertainment, the answer now to sales related problems to me is okay let’s get sales enablement. Let’s get technology, this get this app, let’s get that app and I think those I great, they do improve productivity. I am not quite sure how they improve performance.
So I’ll share the stats that have come out of other organizations in terms of the impact the front-line sales manager makes on sales. CB today I guess is a groundbreaking study because everybody quotes it saying that sales manager coaching is the number one sales management activity that drive sales performance. And in fact, great coaches drive 19% more sales than their ineffective counterparts.
They also found that in terms of skill sets and relatively different skill sets, managers ranked the lowest in coaching; that when we look specifically at coaching, well, 53% of companies are providing some support in terms of coaching, training and development. So the upside, just focusing on one specific skill set or if you look conversely, those other 47% of companies who 1) – probably don’t train very well or don’t have well-trained managers, we also look at the process and understanding of their coaching methodology and only 44% of companies had a well-defined, well understood coaching methodology.
So for me this is just the foundation of performance in an organization. I say okay well maybe this is a plausible answer but because everyone is looking for the silver bullet as to why so many sales reps don’t meet quota and why so many companies are failing to meet quota. That’s my thinking so I think there’s lots of opportunities that I am glad to share this information with your audience, your listeners.
Matt: And you’ve been super generous! We are talking to Steven Rosen who is the author of the new 2016 Sales Manager’s Survey. He’s also the author of a number of great tools and reports that I think you can find on your website www.starresults.com. He is a multiple time winner of Top 50 Sales Influencers, Top Sales and Marketing Blogs, Top 50 Sales Books, some really great stuff.
And before we wrap, before we get to our commercial break, just are there any particular tools that you want most people to focus on and is it best to give them access to your website or where should the people go?
Steve: Matt, thank you for the plug and one of the things that we’ve developed as we started seeing the information come in from the survey is we’ve developed a program for sales managers to teach them how to coach, coach them how to coach and assess them in terms of coaching which we call the Star Sales Management Development Program. You can actually get there through our site and of course we do one on one coaching but this is built on best practices in skill mastery; so not just selling a training program, we are actually helping sales managers become great coaches.
And there are so many out there that at the end of the day are not getting it from their companies. My view of the world is it has changed and folks who seek out opportunities to develop whether they use the web, books, online programs, free training which we will be offering as well if you go to my site there will be a popup. We are offering this free training session on how to lead on September 15 and there are so many resources. So we are offering one which is a premium one but one that managers who are willing to invest in their own future, can access outside the corporate world.
Matt: Talking to Steve Rosen today on Sales Pipeline Radio. We’re going to take a quick break. When we get back we will talk about who is coming up on the show, get deeper into some of Steven’s sales management advice and a lot more. You are listening to Sales Pipeline Radio!
[Break]
Paul: And now back to Matt and his guest!
Matt: Awesome, thanks very much Paul. We’ve got a great set of guests coming up on Sales Pipeline Radio in the next few weeks, excited to have Steven Rosen with us today to talk about sales management and sales leadership training.
Next week catch us back live at 2:30 Eastern, 11:30 Pacific on Thursdays every Thursday. Next week we will feature David Fortino who is from NetLine Corp. He’s going to be talking about lead generation, how new technology can help us get a lot more targeted in our efforts to get to the right person with the right message which benefits both sides. And after that we’ve got Ken Thoreson who I know Steven you know as well who is another sales thought leader, someone well-respected in this space.
We are going to be talking a lot more about sales leadership and we have a pretty diverse audience here at Sales Pipeline Radio. Though we call it Sales Pipeline Radio Steven it’s pretty much targeted at the entire pipeline and not just the sales and marketing professionals.
So we tend to have a lot of sales thought leader guests. And it’s really on purpose because I think it’s really important to make sure that we’re not only teaching salespeople how to get better but also making sure that the marketers who listen understand the sales mindset.
So when you are doing sales management training, what’s the implication of that for marketing? Are there things that marketers can do for their sales enablement standpoint or just from a coordination and leadership standpoint to support the important work that the sales managers are doing as well?
Steve: That’s a great question and I am going to shift gears here little bit away from the study because that actually is a subject that’s near and dear to my heart. Now is the time at least in my world where many companies are building their marketing plans and getting approvals from corporate offices, global offices for 2017, is that correct?
Matt: Yeah, absolutely.
Steve: Okay so and you would know this far better than myself, countless amount of time spent by the marketers to build bad plans, tactics, budgets, forecasts for the following year; their slide decks prepared. There is presentations and dry runs and hours are spent; marketers are probably the most stressful time of the year when they’ve got to go up and present their plans for next year.
When I look at that I say wow, marketers have a very rigorous process to do brand analysis, brand planning, strategies, brand strategy and tactics. And once they get approval, everyone kind of finishes off the year hoping they hit their numbers that they had estimated. Then my biggest question is what happens after that?
And why I am asking the question is, how much time is spent on planning and execution and aligning both the sales and marketing team? And I think that’s probably one of the biggest gaps and who is responsible, I don’t know but if you are running a business unit, then I look at the business unit manager who has both sales and marketing responsibilities to really look at how can they execute effectively and maybe not take the same amount of time but close to it in terms of planning and effective execution. So again I said my focus Matt is on helping companies crush their sales numbers.
And this has come up time and time again with my clients. Many folks I deal with are sort of business unit heads and I started working with marketers but the biggest challenge I think outside the development of sales managers is really effectively executing and taking great strategy and turning that into sales and I think there’s many ways that that can be improved.
Matt: And you talk a lot about process, you talk a lot about systems and I think it’s easy to hear you talk about that and think oh, that’s the boring stuff and it’s just not very sexy. But I have rarely found an effective sales manager that is purely a raw, raw coach who can get up and get people excited for a Monday morning but is incapable of actually coaching skills and performance improvements of their sales teams. So talk a little bit more about the importance of process and systems. It may not be what everyone loves to think about but it really is foundational to being more successful to managers as well as the frontline rep.
Steve: Okay, and you are right. Selling is a process that’s why we have selling methodologies. Marketing is a process, that’s why we have this brand planning; some companies are just phenomenal at it. So when it comes to sales management we tend to be a lot more lackadaisical on the actual selling side, on the marketing side. And people always ask me Steven, what’s the best selling model out there? And I have no idea. But what I do know is the one that’s understood and used is the one that’s the best because if you follow good process you’re going to get better results. So in terms of how that applies to sales managers, we look at the same five core areas and we looked at process and methodologies.
So let me give some tips from a coaching perspective on how to really effectively coach through a process. And it really is starting with asking effective questions. The sales manager who goes out and tells sales reps what to do is going to be ineffective because guess what? Nobody wants to be told what to do. Matt, I am sure when your spouse says – Matt can you do this? You say oh my god I don’t want to do that. This is the day and age we live in. So the first step managers can take themselves is just be aware when they are asking versus telling.
Second step too, as a process, is really getting individuals to self-evaluate because if you have a great manager, they are out with the sales rep once a month which is really one day in 20. What of the other 19 days? Well, they have the self-coach or self-manage. So getting your sales reps to be self-aware or self-evaluate because when you are not there they are going to be coaching themselves, I know it’s a complicated step.
And then we look at very simple process; self-evaluation, really having the rep drive their own development so coaching is a process of improving skills and competencies. You can only improve so many at one time otherwise you get overload and we work on a pretty focused approach, pick one area, maybe two and focus on that and then as a next step, I hope the process helps, is we have the rep define how they are going to improve in that skill set; not the manager.
And the manager’s role which is step four is really holding the sales rep accountable to the plan that they build and write on how they are going to improve. And that is a very simplistic process but if you can follow that, if you make each one of your reps better in one core skill area you’re going to get better performance.
Matt: It’s important and I love that you talk about doing this incrementally. I think a lot of people try to do an all or nothing and maybe down to the whole plan and place or it’s not worth it. And time and again we see studies that show that incremental improvement really moves the ball forward; this is not a black-and-white issue. I saw recently some stats on sales and marketing working together and its impact on likelihood of sales hitting their number.
And if you move from zero sales and marketing interaction to ineffective sales and marketing interaction, you actually move the needle, right? So those little things that you mentioned, for those listening that don’t have any system in place or if you are in marketing and you want to recommend an early step for some of your sales managers then sales leadership is a great way to do it.
Wrapping up here with Steven Rosen who is one of Canada’s leading sales coaches and thought leaders and I know is well thought of in a number of circles and well-regarded and has a number of clients throughout North America as well. Let’s talk before we wrap up because I know we’ve just got a couple of minutes. Any other highlights from your survey and just let people know other than just going to www.starresults.com where can they find the survey as well; some of your other sales management best practices?
Steve: Okay, great question. Well there is 3 core areas that came out I spoke about one – supportive sales managers in core areas which I guess you can decide whether the glass is half-full or half-empty. The same thing with key sales management processes are around the 50% mark in terms of having well understood process in organizations.
The third finding that came out is that only a third of companies have formal training to support new managers be successful and it is really if you are looking at someone from marketing that’s transitioning into a sales management role or a sales rep transitioning to a sales management role; we know that, I think it’s 40% of sales, the first 18 months.
Well it’s pretty obvious that two thirds of the companies are doing nothing for them, they are throwing them out there and that’s why I speak to the fact that I am from the school of hard knocks because I was just sent out there. Every promotion I got I was just sent out there and somehow through serendipity or luck or maybe a little bit of smarts I figured my way out. Now that I’ve got a chance to study and look at it I’ve become a lot better to hopefully help managers on that but the odds are against the new sales manager and the odds are 50-50 for sales manager to really hit their max.
So there’s lots of opportunities as I said earlier. The foundation for performance is your frontline sales managers and I really suggest companies take a different look at how much they invest because one – it’s usually at one for 10 so the impact gets multiplied by 10 if you improve sales management skills versus a sales rep skill.
If you want to get a copy of the report, the URL is https://www.starresults.com/sales-manager-report/. Very simple to find. Matt I believe I sent you a copy and I welcome you to send it out to your folks, anybody that wants it or feel free to come to my site. If you do, there’s also a program for sales managers called The Star Sales Manager Development Program which is really targeted at folks who are not getting it from their corporation and want to invest in their own development and it by far rocks over any program a corporation can bring that doesn’t include six months of ongoing coaching.
Nobody offers that type of program. So I think we are revolutionary in what we are offering; the online. The learning component is online, on-demand video which is a new way of delivery for me and of course we have online assessments so as much as it’s a simple flight program, it’s actually very sophisticated how we create master sales coaches.
Matt: Awesome. Thanks very much. We’ve got… we are really excited and we want to thank our guest today Steven Rosen who’s joining us live from the great white north up in Canada.
If you want to learn more about Steven, check him out at www.starresults.com. You can check out a replay of this presentation on www.salespipelineradio.com. You can check out all our past guests and all our past episodes on www.salespipelineradio.com as well as on Google play or the iTunes Store.
We will catch you here next week same time, same location 2:30 Eastern, 11:30 Pacific. It’s Sales Pipeline Radio; got a new bunch of guests around the end of Q3 to hit the stretch run for 2016. This is Matt Heinz, thanks for joining us on Sales Pipe and Radio!
Paul: You’ve been listening to the only place that talks about sales pipelines with the master himself Matt Heinz from Heinzmarketing!
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