Ride-Time for Sales Managers

It's Time to Be Seen
It is 2008. Where has the time gone? With a New Year already upon us, it is time to venture out from behind our desks and be seen. Not only should you be seen by those beyond the security of your own office, more importantly, it is time to get out there and visit your customers.

Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place
It's funny when you overhear discussions about sales management. Most of the time, these discussions are centered around a few key things. There is the tendency for upper level management to want more accountability and measurable results from the sales effort. The sales manager is caught between their boss, who wants to quantify sales results, and their salespeople, who sometimes struggle (as we all often do) to turn in an expense report on time. Frustrated, sales managers exhaustively find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. The goal is hardly worth the punishment

The One Single Thing
OK, so what’s the point? The point is, the most important subject gets lost in the shuffle. I know it’s hard to imagine there is anything more critical to sales management than accountability or keeping up with the competition. Even though sales reports seem like the Holy Grail of sales management, there is something more important to the process. There is a secret, a hidden treasure of the successful sales managers of the world. The bizarre thing is that the secret is what made you successful when you were a top-notch salesperson in the first place. The secret is simply this: Spending more time in the field talking to customers is more important than any other single thing you do. Period.

You’re probably scratching your head. You might be thinking, "isn’t that what I have salespeople for?" Well, yes, and no. Yes, your salespeople do a good job at developing and maintaining relationships on a daily basis. But, you don’t have to be everywhere and do everything for everyone, as much as it often feels that way. When you are in the field with customers, a lot of really important things happen. Let’s look at some of them in a little more detail.

Benefits of Field Time
As sales management, when you call on customers, you get a different level of interest. It’s amazing what a little 'perceived' power will do for your sales process. The title on your business card will give your access to people, places, and issues others will never be a part of. It’s not until you’ve been invited inside do you realize the opportunity had been there all along.
You should be going out in the field with your salespeople a minimum of once per quarter, using a call route you design. Here’s why. Seeing your rep in action gives you a chance to experience their strengths (and weaknesses?) first hand. It gives you the ability to make recommendations, offer encouragement and give compliments when you catch them doing something right.
Your field call schedule should include the big offices or top producers you want to your reps to be targeting. Offer pointers and help support the interaction; either way, you’ll both learn something.

This also allows you get a great sense of the salespersons’ work habits, how well-known they are, and how dominant your company is in the territory. In general, your rep’s value to the customer will become very apparent. Do the receptionists seem to know the rep? What about the top producers? Do they acknowledge the salesperson? Does the rep introduce you warmly to people they clearly have already met? Has the rep figured out how to get behind the iron curtain in closed offices? Answers to these questions will truly help you to gauge their effectiveness, something that can only be expressed first hand.

Staying In Touch
Being in the field allows you to stay in constant touch with customer opportunities and needs. When you are busy running sales meetings, having endless internal conversations, handling customer calls, and attending meetings, it’s easy to make the mistake of relying on salespeople to supply you with information about competitors, customers, and the market in general. It isn’t that the information they provide you isn't important, it’s just that outside observations will be from their frame of reference. It won’t (in most cases) be “global” enough. The goals of outside conversations for a sales manager might not be the same as the salesperson. Asking existing and prospective customers about their views of the market place, about your competition, about their business challenges, and their views of opportunity will help you get connected to things that are about to happen outside the office, rather than history of a particular escrow file. This inevitably helps you guide your strategic efforts while you’re building relationships with high-end prospects and customers. A “no-lose” scenario.

Sales managers who are in the field regularly have direct control over their results. Though it probably goes without saying, the most powerful benefit of getting out in the field with salespeople and customers might be the timing of the market knowledge you gain. For example, if you are discovering a market opportunity before your competition, you’ll have the chance to get there first. You’ll hear about customers who want to enter into joint ventures, competitors you should be recruiting, and overall market conditions. The information you gather will be high quality and will answer the global questions you struggle with when making strategic decisions. You’re able to test ideas that you’ve been considering before wasting a ton of time and energy on their implementation. You’ll be able to put your resources and people in motion going towards tangible customer opportunities, rather than making healthy guesses and getting lucky.
Sales managers have so many conflicting priorities, it can be difficult to make this one of them. Unfortunately, we find that more than 68% of the sales managers we consult don’t spend one full day in the field with each of their salespeople in a year, much less a quarter. The good news is, if you are one of the few, the elite managers who make a serious commitment to the “once per quarter” field effort, you’ll likely be the only sales manager in your area who does this and have a serious competitive advantage.

But, But... Ten Easy Reasons
If you struggle with finding the time to do it, let me leave you with a list of ideas that will put you in front of customer situations that take less than an hour to conduct.

• Call your company’s top existing customer and take her (or him) to coffee. Bring the appropriate rep.
• Call your Company’s top prospective customer and interview him/her in their office. Bring your rep.
• Set up an office presentation in one of your high priority existing customer’s office operations and bring your salesperson.
• On a weekend, go with a salesperson to visit three prospective customer’s open houses.
• Create a list of your top 10 target customers and interview them in the course of 90-day period. Bring the appropriate rep.
• Take the top competitor’s best salesperson out to lunch. Don’t bring a rep.
• Create an event that your company conducts entirely on its own. This could be a Mastermind group, a highly pertinent educational event, whatever. So long as it’s yours and you call to invite your top 10 customers personally. Get all of your reps involved
• Arrange to meet one of your highest opportunity office managers at an office where your company has little to no market share for lunch. Don’t bring the rep.
• Arrange to meet a customer who you are aware had a pretty ugly problem in their office and let them rant their frustration. Bring the appropriate rep.
• Stop by one real estate office every day and meet its top producer.
  

No Excuses
OK. There you have ten easy reasons to spend time out talking to customers, each in less than an hour. It is a New Year and time to renew your commitment to finding out what is important to your customer. Time to be seen, ask questions, and find out for yourself what makes your customers (and future clients) tick.On your way home, take this as an opportunity to pick one of the ideas and act immediately, (but don’t hurt yourself.) If you’re working at home, or working out, do one of these things immediately after you’re done. You’ll be on the road to being more informed, more in control, and even more successful. And by the way, the next time you hear someone talking about the three over analyzed issues in sales management, tell them the best kept secret. Go out and talk to customers and everything else will follow.
So why are you still reading this? Now get out there.