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Sales

Sales Coaching: Make Them Work for It

By Jack Malcolm / 4.21.2011 / No Comment

You never know where coaching opportunities may be found

One of the best stories I’ve heard about coaching is, strangely enough, a war story. In December 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge in Europe, the German army had smashed a huge hole in the Allied lines. To save the situation, elements of Patton’s Third Army made a rapid left turn and were working their way north to save the situation. The few roads that existed were icy and packed with tanks, trucks and marching men, and the going was slow. At one point, a young battalion commander named Creighton Abrams (yes, the one they later named a tank after) came upon a massive traffic jam caused by a tank that had slid into a ditch, and its inexperienced driver could not get it out.

Abrams jumped into the driver’s seat , jockeyed the gears to rock the tank back and forth and then at the right moment gunned the engine and the tank flew out of the ditch back on to the road. At that point, he asked the driver, “Now do you see how it’s done?” When the driver replied yes, Abrams backed the tank back into the ditch and said, “Good. Now you do it.” And promptly left.

If you’re a sales manager, you should keep this story in mind whenever you are tempted to rescue a sale for one of your reps.

Sales

Reading Your Customer’s Annual Report (Really)

By Jack Malcolm / 4.19.2011 / 2 Comments

There’s gold in those reports

It’s that time of year again: public companies with fiscal years ending on December 31 are issuing their annual reports. Like all good professional salespeople, you know you should get a copy and at least look through it, but honestly, how many of you have already done so?

If you have a hard copy of last year’s report in your files, pull it out and check to see whether the spine has even been cracked. Are sections highlighted, and do you have notes written in the margins? If not, you may have left money on the table this year. But don’t fret, because I’m going to tell you what to look for so you don’t have to read the whole thing and so you can actually get some use out of it.

Why should you even take the time to read it?

Book reviews - Uncategorized

Book Recommendation: The Art of Action

By Jack Malcolm / 4.15.2011 / 5 Comments

If only it were this easy…

Organizations don’t plan to fail, and they don’t fail to plan; in fact, most have excellent plans for success. But then those plans run up against real life, or a better competitor executes a better plan. It’s a familiar story: an organization long touted for its excellence in its field is trounced by an upstart competitor playing by different rules. It survives (barely) and then goes through a painful process of remaking itself and eventually returns to even greater prominence.

No, I’m not referring to IBM in the 1980s; the organization from which Stephen Bungay draws modern management lessons is the Prussian Army, which was all but annihilated by Napoleon in 1806. Carl von Clausewitz survived that battle and later went on to study the nature of war at the War College in Berlin. In the mid-nineteenth century General Helmuth von Moltke used Clausewitz’s theories to develop his officers and shape his organization as head of the Prussian General Staff, and many of his ideas have shaped the thinking of the American military today.

Uncategorized

Grit: The Secret Formula for Long-Term Success

By Jack Malcolm / 4.11.2011 / 5 Comments

“Endeavor to persevere…”

In Measurements That Mislead, Jonah Lehrer tells us that many tests designed to measure talent turn out to be very bad at predicting long term success, such as SATs and the annual NFL combine. Economists at the University of Louisville say there’s no “consistent statistical relationship” between Combine results and NFL performance.

The reason is that those tests measure maximum performance, which is applied in short bursts. They don’t measure typical performance, which is measured over long periods of time. For example, supermarket cashiers were tested to find out who could scan a few dozen items the fastest. Those results were found to have a very weak correlation with job performance as measured by actual scanning results.

The problem is that some people who have the talent to do well over short bursts do not always have the work ethic or the motivation to sustain that performance advantage over time. These tests do not measure how hard and how consistently people apply their talents.