Case Study — A Failed Client-Driven Sales Organization
Don’t blame the economy, the stock market or the burst technology bubble. Sales didn’t fall because of a bad market. Internal memos from failed companies make it abundantly clear the problem was not a lack of funding or poor technology, but a flawed business model that pooh-poohed sales and held no one accountable for selling. The market went south because salespeople suddenly started disappearing from business to be replaced with “relationship managers,” “business consultants,” “service specialists,” and a plethora of consultatively trainees. The collapse of many companies can be laid directly at the door of a failed approach to sales I call client-driven selling. (See my article from June, 2001).
In 2001 I was hired by a major player in the financial services industry to help diagnose and fix a failing sales organization. They faced massive layoffs and reorganization as sales plunged. They wanted to know what they could do to reverse the troubling trends. Bean counters had taken over because the sales department had abdicated its role of generating profit for the company in favor of making people feel good.
The company had invested heavily in consultative-type sales training. They had gone so far as to eliminate the word “sales” from all company vocabulary and had even implemented policies that disallowed prospecting! Reps could only contact current customers of which there were millions. But the average rep was only making two contacts per day. The rest of the time was spent in administrative paperwork, administrative meetings, and training in which salespeople were discouraged from closing sales in favor of opening long term relationships.
The entire sales population of the company completed The Sales Maximizer Analysis Profile (SalesMAP). We then compared SalesMAP scores with actual dollars and cents production. Eight behaviors differentiated top producers from mediocre reps at statistically significant levels (p<.05). Surprisingly, in every case they contradicted the prevalent sales culture. Top performers didn’t hesitate to take control of the sales process. Top producers were comfortable with calling themselves salespeople and took great pride in their career choice. The more analytical and client-focused salespeople were the mediocre and poor performers. Top salespeople were rebels and non-conformists within the corporate sales culture.
The dominant consultative, client-driven, problem solving approach to selling perpetuated in training programs and current company policy was creating and sustaining a sales culture that was directly at odds with the company’s goal of building a more proactive sales organization. When scores were broken down by tenure in the company, the only behaviors that were strengthened over time were Empathizing (close avoidance, indecisiveness) and Risk Sensitivity. This confirmed the client-driven nature of the sales culture. The fact that all other measures of productivity decreased with tenure exposed the culprit of lost productivity as the same corporate sales values. The company was recruiting highly productive reps, but the longer they are exposed to the organization’s values, the less productive they became.