Assessment takes guesswork out of performance

It is a common opinion that salespeople and sales management are the only – or the most – important aspect of developing a highly productive sales organization.

Even when I was selling ice cream from a truck, I knew this wasn’t true.

Yes, I was an ice cream lady. I drove an ice cream truck through neighborhoods, ringing a bell for the kids to come running with their coins and wishes.

When the support system didn’t work – for example, when the company ran out of fudge bars – my productivity dropped dramatically.

It had nothing to do with my sales skills or my sales manager; the organization didn’t deliver.

The same situation exists when selling business-to-business, but it becomes difficult to distinguish performance problems with the added complexity.

A sales organization that sells to businesses is automatically thrust into an environment of organizational change, politics and budgets. Situations are often confusing, and it takes multiple resources to satisfy the client’s need.

In complex sales situations, it is important to look at the knowledge and skills of salespeople and sales managers to determine their ability to influence others and represent their product or service appropriately. If they can’t, then an organization should place a high priority on development of the sales organization.

But the sales organization may not be the issue, so a lot of effort goes into blaming and fixing a sales organization that isn’t the problem.

I look at the general leadership and communication capability of the organization. I want to know that the sales organization is getting enough fudge bars, and that the ice cream and the ice cream trucks meet quality standards. I want to know if anyone regularly asks the salespeople what else they need besides fudge bars to satisfy customers.

In other words, I want to know if the sales organization is enabled or disabled by the rest of the company. Who runs the rest of the organization? Leaders who are not in sales. This is why general leadership matters to sales performance.

Let’s take this one step further. Consider that the leader’s role is really to ensure employee performance with employee fulfillment. It is obvious that a leader needs to drive performance. It is not so obvious to people why fulfilment is a leadership issue.

Think about how you experience work and your own productivity. How differently do you perform when you feel good about what you do, how you do it and with whom you work?

If many employees are unfulfilled, then their response time, quality and proactive attitude are severely hampered. The sales organization will feel it the most as they try to protect their customers from the company’s inefficiencies.

The answer is not to make salespeople more skilled so that they can cover up for the company better.

In order to increase sales productivity, the focus often needs to be on developing leaders and teams to run the support organizations more effectively and to align them with the sales organization.

Only when an organization is functioning fairly well can one really see the development needs of a sales organization. Since this is usually not the case, smart companies invest in assessing human capabilities throughout the organization.

A popular option for a typical assessment service is to collect reports detailing internal and external perceptions of employees, teams and the overall organizational capability.

What would reports like that tell you about your organization? Are there teams or departments that pull the sales organization down? Are your salespeople being blamed for something that isn’t their fault?

Ultimately, assessment takes the guesswork out of the equation.

Linda Bower is a speaker, executive coach and human performance improvement consultant in Rogersville.