The Hindu Business Line : `Companies must have more engaged customers'

Many organisations have done very little to help managers understand what the best managers focus on or how they drive results, according to Benson Smith.

Mr Benson F. Smith

He scripted a book that urged budding salespersons to build winning careers based on their individual strengths, but his first trip to India recently — he visited Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai — was to explain to India Inc how to develop a top-notch sales force. Catalyst met Benson F. Smith who, along with Tony Rutigliano, wrote the bestseller Discover your Sales Strengths, which was based on The Gallup Organization's study of 2.5 lakh sales representatives and 25,000 sales managers.

Smith, who is a Global Practice Leader at Gallup, joined the organisation after retiring as Chief Operating Officer and President of a Fortune 500 corporation specialising in medical devices.

In this interview, Smith elaborates on his tour theme, besides offering insights into how the sales role will evolve in the future, as also the impact of technology on it.

How do you build a world-class sales force?

The key aspects, when we think about the word `world-class' are what do you measure, how do you know if you are getting better, and are you getting better doing the right things. And after we really looked at many, many organisations, we began to understand that they weren't always clear about whether their sales force was getting better. May be your sales have gone up 10 per cent this year; but that doesn't mean your sales force is 10 per cent better. And especially in a down economy, which we have had for the last several years in the US, maybe sales were down 10 per cent. But that doesn't mean your sales force is 10 per cent worse. Obviously, sales tell us something but they certainly doesn't tell us enough.

If you are running a manufacturing plant, one of your goals would be to run it more effectively and efficiently every year. If you are in charge of an advertising budget, you would want to make sure that it produces better and better results each year. And you wouldn't just look at sales, you would look at many other things in terms of a guy who handles the advertising budget. So, part of our research was to identify what the right things were to measure.

And we came out with three key characteristics. One of them is a growing base of engaged customers. Another is improving the talent intensity of your sales force. And the third one is improving the level of engagement of your salespeople. By looking at these three things, you have a much clearer idea of your organisation's health. And then depending on where you are, you have a much better idea of what to focus on to improve your sales organisation.

How do you ensure these three things happen?

Let's start off with talent intensity. One of the things that we have done is first help organisations understand what their most productive people look like, talent-wise. Then, develop a model, so when they are bringing people into the organisation, they are hiring more people who look like their very best people. And by look like, I mean have very similar talents. But it's surprising to us that many organisations have just too many people who only have an average capacity to do well in sales. And so improving that every time you hire someone is important. How many of the new people whom you brought in really match the characteristics of your best people? That in itself goes a long way in improving the quality of the organisation. If you were managing a sports team, how good are the new players that you are bringing in? There's a pretty close correlation between that and whom you are going to be able to beat next season. And too much attention has been placed in the past just in saying `how can I hire people' instead of saying `how can I hire people who look like my best people.' So, that's really a process of getting companies much more aware of what they should be looking for when they hire someone.

The next thing has to do with sales force engagement. Are they getting the right direction and attention from their managers? I asked in the room today, and I ask this in almost every seminar: How much training do you give your salespeople? The answer is pretty good — the answers today ranged from two weeks to six months, depending on the industry. I asked the same group: How much training do they give to a brand new manager? The answer is, `Zero.' One of the things that came out of our research was that the sales manager is absolutely key to improving the quality of the organisation.

Yet, many organisations, not just in India but all over, have done very little to help managers understand what the best managers focus on or how they drive results. So, part of the seminar today, for example, was to help the group look at those few activities that great managers do to get the most out of their best performers, and then to think about what they need to train their managers so they understand that. It is a little unfair to expect managers to produce outstanding results when you have never even spent much time with him, showing him how to do it. It's like saying, `Look, I would like you to go play the piano. But, no lessons! No instructions! Just go ahead and figure it out.' Well, eventually, he might. But, it's a slow process. And many organisations can improve results pretty dramatically, pretty quickly, by making sure that their managers are well trained as their sales force.

The third element is a very interesting area of our research. And it's the area of customer engagement. Many companies measure customer satisfaction. But when we look at competitive arenas, Pepsi's customer satisfaction looks a lot like Coke's customer satisfaction. Most people in the room today — if we measure their customer satisfaction with their competitors', it would be pretty close. Wouldn't tell us much.

We found out that when we started to delve deeper — instead of just asking `are you satisfied?' we ask another series of questions about `whether or not you plan to repurchase the product' and then a third set about `whether or not you would be an advocate for the company.' When we start to understand the percentage of any company's customers who would willingly be an advocate, we really understand how healthy the company is. In fact, every company needs to have the goal of increasing the level of engaged customers every year. That's one indication that they really are building a sustainable business model.

Are there any changes between the period when you did the research and now? Does the quality of how you measure all these things change?

In terms of the importance of customer or sales force engagement, that's kind of constant. Those are really key factors. In terms of where a given company needs to be along that line, it depends in part on whom you are competing against. After, all, business is competitive. So, you may have made some improvements, but if your competitor has made equal improvements, then you are still slogging it out. So, in some cases where the rival has not made improvements, it has been conspicuously advantageous for some companies; in others, companies had to do it just to stay even with a fast-moving competitor.

I would say that there is an increasing awareness that the quality of your sales organisation is a big contributing factor to the sustainable growth that you are trying to achieve. Which, surprisingly, people didn't notice. They didn't know they had a sales force but the product pretty much sells itself: the sales force just much needs to be out there, take orders, and be available for customers.

We are finding a growing recognition of the fact that, in many cases, the sales force becomes the competitive advantage. A part of that is because companies are so fast in making product responses. One company comes out with a better laptop — smaller, lighter — two weeks later, the competitor has that same advantage. Whereas years ago it seemed it took competitors much longer to actually respond and get new products out. All those changes have been due to streamlining manufacturing and R&D, and this has resulted in a much more faster-moving environment. And so, the sales force, many times, becomes that one area that's really left to get some efficiencies out and make a real difference in terms of customer experience.

Could you give us examples of companies that have consistently churned out efficient salespeople and used that advantage?

As a company, we are usually very careful not to mention client names. But I can say that we have a great example in the US of a company that is in the healthcare devices field. They consistently churn out a larger increase than their competitors. They have good products, but so do their competitors. And yet, their sales force sells more each and every year and grows more.

A part of the reason is because they pay such careful attention to selecting really talented people. They build very close relationships with their customers, and they make sure their sales force is really well managed. And we see their competitors falling by the wayside.

It's almost frustrating for the competitors: they will come out with great products, sometimes even better products, and yet the other sales force is able to hold those gains down and keep its customers. In fact, a lot of times, a good sales force can get its customers to wait for some time, while your company comes out with a better product, if they really like to keep doing business with you. The short answer to the question is: in almost every industry, we see a difference in companies' performances when they start to focus on those kinds of characteristics.

In your book, you have mentioned that every salesperson has a strength, and that strength must be developed. In this context, what should be the role of schools which impart sales training?

Let's make this as an analogy between having the talent to play the piano and then needing some lessons. You can give lessons to lots of people, but they may never learn to be a really good piano player. On the other hand, you have lot of talent, but you still need some lessons to get started. If someone is trying to play how to play golf, a few lessons can help a lot. But lessons themselves won't turn a player into a great golfer. When we look at the progression from initially learning how to do anything to really getting great at it, what stands out is: more and more focussed and individualised attention.

I may start off with music lessons, teaching too many people at once, what to do? Gradually, I have got to get down to one-on-one with the student to really help that student. Tiger Woods still has a person working with him. It's highly individualised, and so for an initial sort of approach — the basics of how to sell, classroom education and so on — it gives people the right orientation to think about. When it really comes to developing the best salespeople, often it requires a much more individualistic approach.

Sometimes, though, some of the classroom settings don't get us to where we want to get. For example, if I was trying to train people to be a great artist, I am not going to turn out very many artists by getting them to paint by the numbers. Too many approaches to sales are equivalent of `paint by the numbers.' As if there is just this process that you go through and, boom, you are a good salesperson. One of the things about this is it works okay: we get people to paint by the numbers, but we never turn out any masterpieces. And, customers know when a salesperson is going through a sales script. And they don't like it. They don't feel there's much authenticity about it. They may buy. But the likelihood of their becoming really engaged customers is pretty small.

When we looked at the best people, first of all there wasn't that `paint by the numbers' approach; they often did it very idiosyncratically, and did it very typically based on what their real strengths were. In some cases, people were really good at building relationships with customers; they might not be very good at explaining stuff. Other people weren't so good with the relationship part of it, but they were unbelievable at explaining something; they explained it so compellingly. Those were two thematically different approaches. Trying to get one person to mimic the other person's approach would spell disaster, not help them. In fact, a large part of the book was written about: forget about how somebody else sells, what's the best way for you to sell.

(To be continued)

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