Tuesday April 26, 2016: It was the penalty of success. When software firm Ideagen started buying smaller rivals it found itself repeatedly having to absorb their motley and often demotivated sales teams.
The calibre of their work varied alarmingly as many had been over-managed and under-led, chief customer officer Ben Dorks told the APS at a seminar on managing sales teams.
Ideagen wanted its clients to have a consistent experience, and was afraid of the negative impact of letting this crew loose on its customers.
The solution it came up with transformed the way the entire company worked. It was so successful that it doubled transactional sales within six months, and increased the company’s win ratio.
“I was surprised at how successful it was, to be honest,” says Dorks, whose start up was one of the first to be swallowed by Ideagen, and who helped drive the transformation.
Put simply, Ideagen chose to switch to a sales culture. Every employee from the CEO to the software developers was expected to focus on meeting the needs of the sales teams, and found that their financial bonuses had been engineered to depend on sales success.
The staff brainstormed a detailed, multi-stage sales process which became the company bible.
So far, so congenial for Dorks, a salesman to his fingertips whose first job at 16 was to be dropped off at an industrial estate by a white van to sell pens and pencils.
But the biggest change, and one outside Dorks’ previous comfort zone, has been investing in the personal development of every member of staff.
To bring the motley sales recruits into alignment and working to a brisk cadence, Ideagen has introduced a culture of coaching on the job.
Sales managers offer support and feedback during the working day, in real time and always in person. Coaching emails are banned.
Every week, sales managers across the company agree a skill area for everyone to focus on – this week it was call planning, the research done before phoning a customer – in order to drill staff so that sticking to the sales process becomes natural.
Every quarter each employee attends training, linked to a personal career plan that is drawn up jointly with their manager following gruelling interviews and psychometric tests.
Under a process known as “I PLC”, individuals drive their own progress up a clearly signposted promotions path that leads from the telemarketing team to the head of sales.
“It is the coach-in-the-moment culture that has been the big revelation,” says Dorks.
“If you had asked me five years ago I would probably have given you the same reply that 80 per cent of managers give – sales training has had its day. I regarded it as an opportunity to sit at the back, get out the Blackberry and catch up on emails. But now coaching is part of everything we do.”
The stress on transparency has some awkward aspects. Everyone in the company knows who the worst performing sales person is.
Dorks believes that the reason performance has improved so markedly is that most staff love being in an aspirational environment. Star sales performers will always be motivated by money, he concedes, but for the bulk of the company’s staff it is the encouragement to get better that matters.
Speaking after the event. APS COO Andrew Hough said that the Ideagen model demonstrated how important and beneficial it was to drive up standards by professionalising sales.
“Sales people have been treated like the dog in the yard, never allowed into the club,” says Hough.
“It is high time they were brought inside.”
Further information: www.ideagen.com
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