Pat’s Blog

When I was listening to the president speak last night, it struck me when he said that we all must commit to obtaining more advance training or learning –well I can’t agree with him more.  A competitive marketplace is often separated by the better trained and more talented work force. This made me think—when I am at companies conducting management training sessions, what seems clear to me is that mass classes are not effective, because many of the attendees don’t want to attend or frankly, theydon’t have any ”skin ” in the game or financial investment in the training course.

I have often advised senior managers if you want more bang for the training buck, you should offer the sales people or managers a chance to have withheld a percent of their commission checks that will be set aside for frequent training or professional business coaching. Those employees who don’t want to participate is OK but they won’t get training subsidized by the company. Those that do participate and commit money will have made an investment in a career of learning .  The company could split the responsibility with the employee so both parties have a stake. Two things are accomplished by an investment by the employee–it shows how committed the employee is to being a professional sales person or manager and it addresses how involved they will be with the training class.

I think the days of everyone being trained by the company are over–training is costly because so many in the classes don’t want to be there and/or they have no investment in the training course.  So bottomline, isn’t it time that an invividual be given an opportunity to make a financial investment to improving themselves.

So what do you think?

I get asked all the time, especially today, what will sales force compensation look like in the future. One of the benefits of the current upheaval is that it gives management a chance to look at all important issues and I think sales compensation is a big issue.

Why? Because the market is clearly saying today that the sales person has a fiduciary responsibility to its customer. A big way to making the sales person accountable is to hold them responsible for the quality of their own production. The sales person would then be paid for the performance of the assets over some period of time. The days of paying completely for production upfront should be gone because the sales person can just walk away from their tie in to the asset. The financial industry needs to recognize that the sales person has to be accountable for what is originated. It doesn’t make sense to me when we have the technology to do track their portfolio–why this is not done? Sales managers and owners need to take a stand on this issue— too much is at stake to ignore it.

So what are your thoughts on this issue?

Following up on last week’s topic is another issue that I find difficult to undertstand and see constantly when we are in the field with sales teams—is the failure of companies to develop and use sales benchmarking techniques and to actually make decisions from the data they have. Managers many times ignore the data and explain their decisions that sales is an art and not a science.

This thinking of sales as art and not a science does not make sense to me today. Often times, the comment is that you can’t measure sales as if it is an art form and not a series of measureable steps. Hello–if baseball’s Billy Beane can measure the performance statistics that translate into wins and losses–I think sales can be evaluated and leaders can make a commitment to viewing sales in a consistent and quantitative way.

More next time on things that should be evaluated. Can you believe Phillies pitchers and catchers start play in 9 days! Like to hear your comments. Pat