Treat Your Sales People Like Customers!

Have you ever thought of your sales staff as customers? Henry Ford thought of his employees as customers for his cars. He wanted to pay them enough and charge the buyers so little that his employees could afford to buy the cars that they made. I think we should go even further with the sales staff: We should literally treat them as customers of their company management. If that's not something more and more businesses recognize in the coming year, it should be.

Many salespeople are incented to sell. They often make a percentage of their income based upon how well they do in sales. A recent Dilbert cartoon strip focused on strategies for selling without a sales staff. The pointy-haired boss thought he could reduce headcount by eliminating sales but needed marketing to find a way to get customers to select their products, pay for them and pick them up at the warehouse. Obviously, a sales staff is needed to meet customer needs.

Some companies have taken the idea of treating sales staff like customers to heart. What we have done in these companies is to follow the same process for developing ideas to improve the performance of sales staff as we would have executed to understand customers.

One company that followed this idea makes such high-tech hardware products as flow meters. First, we conducted a detailed Voice of the Sales Person study. Management had assumed that the salespeople would want more perks, more money and more time off. In fact, most of the wants, needs and pains that were described had to do with reducing roadblocks that get in the way of doing a good job: excess paperwork and reports put in place by management, travel restrictions and lack of up-to-date sales tools.

Wants and needs
Twenty salespeople from around the world were interviewed one-on-one, as is commonly recommended in Voice of the Customer studies. After we had generated a list of 75 specific wants and needs from these interviews, we had, in the language of the salespeople, a focus group of salespeople to organize and categorize the needs. They created 16 categories of wants and needs. These represented their major ideas for describing the ideal salesperson experience in this company.

A team of sales managers and salespeople met to construct a set of internal metrics to predict success with the 16 categories. For example, the amount of time required to generate reports back to the home office was seen as a metric linked to sales employee satisfaction. The salespeople wanted this metric to be reduced, so they could spend more time and effort selling. Another example was the ability to link information between different sales tools. Some of the tools required the sales person to enter customer information multiple times in different tracking tools. Team members felt that this was wasted time and effort that had nothing to do with sales success. The metric used was a subset of the previous metric, namely, the time required to enter customer identification and sales data in sales tools.

Twenty metrics were generated to link to the categories of salesperson wants and needs. These metrics were used to generate a salesperson employee satisfaction survey. In a very real sense, the sales employees wrote the employee satisfaction survey; the questions were derived from the categories they had created. In this way, the survey was telling managers what sales employees wanted to say, rather than what management might have asked. The sales staff worldwide was surveyed to determine how well people felt they were supported by the company. Nearly everyone responded, as they recognized that the issues in the survey were their issues, phrased in their language.

The employee team then related the internal predictive metrics and survey data to the categories of wants and needs through a process known as Quality Function Deployment (the most powerful metrics are those than can affect several needs rather than just one).
The internal predictive metrics and survey results were used to generate strategies for improving sales success and evaluated. The survey was implemented again, several months later. In this company, several key strategies emerged that led to a tremendous reduction in the time required to track and report sales progress. The sales tools were integrated and updated.

The result was a 25 percent increase in sales without hiring additional salespeople! A robust system of metrics, surveys and analysis had been created that could be perpetuated. Employee satisfaction improved significantly, as the sales staff felt that management was listening to them and being responsive.

Company executives had learned how to treat their sales force as customers of management and management decisions. Management saw that treating salespeople like customers resulted in better service to the customers and higher customer satisfaction scores.

Treating the sales staff as customers of management and management systems resulted in increased revenue and profits for the company as well. And that is the mission of the sales staff, is it not?