People despise being micro managed yet many in the imaging industry seem to excel at this approach. Why this obvious dichotomy when most managers are fairly intelligent people? My belief is poor training, lack of analysis, and a desire to change things quickly. As a person who makes a living helping companies change, and in my prior life helping business units change, I can assure you that change never happens fast. Well let me qualify that statement: Good change never happens fast.
What do I consider examples of micro management?
- Telling sales professionals that they have to be out of the office from 9:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m.
- Setting call blocks
- Setting cold call metrics
- Setting demo metrics
Those four should give you an idea of what I am talking about. Some of you may be thinking, “That’s what I did and I’m successful.” My first observation is that our industry has burned through millions of sales professionals over the last 10 years, and I don’t think that is an exaggeration. So if you think 1:100 is success I want to play you in a high stakes poker game. My second observation is that those that have achieved success have learned how to maneuver around the rules without getting too far astray to attract the attention of their management. Maybe you left the office at 9:00 and went to Starbucks to conduct research, send e-mail, and make calls. Maybe you used the call block time to follow-up on customers or prospects you were actively working. You stayed within the boundaries without actually following the direction to the rule.
What a manager should be doing is focusing on results. If a sales professional’s quota is $50,000 per month the manager should have a conversation with the rep regarding what their plan is to achieve that quota. My hope is that the rep would start with their forecast, which indicates how they’ll do in the short-term relative to quota. After the forecast I’d look at their 4-18 month pipeline to determine if it supports the continued achievement of quota. If it doesn’t I’d hope the rep spoke to me about his business development efforts, which may require getting to a level of detail where we discuss activity.
Nobody is perfect and that’s why we have managers. So during this discussion the manager will be assessing the rep’s approach and providing feedback and suggestions, with a focus to results. Do you really care if “rep A” is an early bird, getting to the office at 7:00 a.m. to get through all the “to do” items in his CRM and leaving at 4:00 to ensure he’s there for his children’s activities and “rep B” rolls in at 8:30 but stays until 6:30 getting his next day organized and clearing all of his CRM activities? As long as they are both at quota I could care less; if they aren’t at quota I am not going to break my neck jumping to a conclusion that rep B’s issue is that he gets in at 8:30! That may have absolutely nothing to do with the results.
The four micro management items I detailed earlier are actually a lack of management. It takes no management to throw somebody out of the office or to take attendance for a call block—zero. That’s another significant crime with these approaches: We are turning our managers into drones. It takes management to provide real suggestions to a rep whose forecast for the current month is 70 percent of quota and whose pipeline indicates he’s going to remain at that level for the next two months.
Management needs to start with asking the right questions, which for me would start with “What are your plans to close the gap in the next 90 days”? My hope would be that he responds, “I am going to look at the prospects I have that are closing in the 4 – 6 month period and try to drag them forward. I realize by doing that I am going to move my problem into future months but I am going to block off an extra three hours throughout each week this month for business development efforts. My goal is to backfill my pipeline at 2X what I drag forward to ensure I stay at quota.” The manager achieved his goal by getting the rep to think vs. prescribing rudimentary activities that may or may not be the issue.
Another example is diagnosing the actual issue with the rep. Let’s say a rep makes 100 calls a day and only gets one appointment a week. Do we tell him to make 200 calls? Not only is that not possible but it completely ignores the real issue, his low appointment to call ratio. We could jump to the conclusion that he doesn’t know what to say, and that may be accurate, but it also may be wrong. Maybe he knows exactly what to say and he’s darn good on the call when he gets somebody to answer. Maybe he’s calling the wrong person in the company and they simply don’t care about imaging technology so his solid appointment-setting skills are being wasted on somebody who simply isn’t going to meet him because it’s not in their bailiwick. The point is it takes analysis not rote prescription to help this rep improve.
As a manager we need to spend the time to develop each member of our team. We accomplish that by spending time with them focused to how they achieve their goals and not by dispensing activities that may or may not be beneficial.
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