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June 23, 2014 Issue

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Sales Management Training and Development that Puts the Managers In Control of their Sales Force Performance

Interview with: Jason Jordan, Partner
 

AboutVantage Point Performance

www.vantagepointperformance.com

Vantage Point Performance is the leading sales management training and development company in the world. Based on the groundbreaking research in our best-selling book, Cracking the Sales Management Code, we are redefining sales management by deploying simple but powerful frameworks that finally put sales managers in control of their sales forces' performance. We have been particularly successful in partnering with large global corporations, where we replace stale coaching models with a powerful sales management methodology. We simplify sales managers' lives and empower them to lead by providing intuitive, straight-forward insight into the levers and pulleys that actually drive sales performance.

“Traditionally, we’ve just promoted our best sales people and assumed that they’ll become great sales managers.  But that doesn’t happened more than half the time, research has shown. In many cases, sales managers were viewed as the people who kind of ran the asylum and kept the salespeople motivated. I think only recently have people really begun to look at the second and third line sales managers and say ‘these people really are more than just babysitters of maverick salespeople.”- Jason Jordan


Vantage Point Performance
20130 Lakeview Center Plaza

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Ashburn, VA  20147

855-475-7647

www.vantagepointperformance.com
 

 

 

Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – June 23, 2014

 

CEOCFO: Mr. Jordan, what was the concept when Vantage Point Performance was started and where are you today?

Mr. Jordan: The company was started out of a perceived need in what we think is the most important role in any sales force - sales management. While many training companies have focused on the individual contributor salespeople and senior leadership, our observation was that the middle level of sales management has been neglected. The research we do and the services we offer are all pointed at that mid to senior level sales management player that we think has the highest impact on the revenue growth of any company. Obviously we have to acknowledge that marketing and corporate strategy play very important roles in the longer term. But in the nearer term, we think that sales management really owns the keys to the kingdom.

 

CEOCFO: Do many companies understand the level of management that needs attention or is it something that you have to point out?

Mr. Jordan: I think in the beginning we were pointing it out, along with some other organizations like the Corporate Executive Board. Historically, the focus has been at the top level and bottom layers of the company. At the top layer, it’s been about getting the corporate strategy right, getting the right products, and targeting the right customers. From there, the attention went straight through the entire organization to the individual salespeople. Make sure the sellers are trained on the products, and make sure they are trained in their selling skills.  But that middle level of sales management, which day-to-day is really guiding the sales effort, has been taken for granted. Traditionally, we’ve just promoted our best sales people and assumed that they’ll become great sales managers.  But that doesn’t happened more than half the time, research has shown. In many cases, sales managers were viewed as the people who kind of ran the asylum and kept the salespeople motivated. I think only recently have people really begun to look at the second and third line sales managers and say ‘these people really are more than just babysitters of maverick salespeople. If we want a sales force to run like a machine, or if we want sales to run with the discipline that finance or marketing has, this mid-level of management is really critical. It used to be that if your sales force was failing, you would just re-do the compensation plan and fire the head of sales. But now there is process and discipline there that needs to be attended to.

 

CEOCFO: How do you work with the population in focus? What is a typical engagement for you?

Mr. Jordan: We are fundamentally a training and development organization that is focused on the first and second line of sales management. Of course, we have to understand what is going on with the front-line sellers, and we have to understand the strategic vision above, but the first and second line sales managers - particularly in large business to business organizations - is where we focus our attention. We engage in several ways, depending on the size of the organization. But take a mid-size organization, which we would say has 15 to 150 sales managers. We send a team in and really get our hands dirty working with them to try to understand what the challenges are for sales management and understand what the high leverage activities are in the sales force. We then equip and enable the sales management team to focus on the important things. With larger organizations, say 150 sales managers up to thousands, we engage differently. Usually those organizations have a fairly well developed internal training and development group. In that case, we still do the up-front work trying to understand exactly what the high impact activities, but we’re more likely develop scalable tools and then enable the corporate training group to go out train the managers globally. At that scale, to have 1,000 to 2,000 sales managers, you are going to need a pretty big team deployed in different languages and in different parts of countries and different cultures. Often, a very large global company is better equipped and prefers to do that inside their own organization.

 

CEOCFO: What is the key to understanding what is really happening at a company - what a company really needs as opposed to what they say or think they need?

Mr. Jordan: We have a very practical lens on this. We don’t rely much on personality profiles or market trends – we take it down to the practical basics. Here is the customer’s buying behavior, here is what the customer needs from a salesperson. Given that, we identify what are the high-impact activities of the salespeople that are going to drive success in the marketplace.  Then we very quickly try to determine what are the important activities of the sales management team that will make sure that those sales activities are being executed and executed well. We view sales management as a sales enablement function, not as a pure management function. In our minds, pure management is very control and compliance-focused. Sort of like, ’here is a set of expectations we have for the sales force. Let’s measure it, manage it, identify the exceptions, and then beat them into compliance.’ From a sales manager’s perspective, sales enablement is about coaching – spending time with that individual salesperson to understand what is going to drive success in their particular situation. It’s tricky business, but I think we succeed because we do take a very practical view of the salespeople and their managers. And we have a very process-driven view rather than traditionally focusing on getting the right personalities and then keeping them motivated, which has really been the traditional sales management model for the last 100 years.

 

CEOCFO: When you are speaking with a prospective client, is there an ‘aha moment’ when they understand the difference of what you are offering as opposed to the rest of the industry?

Mr. Jordan: Absolutely. We are very differentiated from everyone else in the sales training industry because of our laser focus on sales management. Most sales training companies are focused on sales people, because there are so many more sellers than managers – around 20 times more, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. So most companies in our industry train salespeople, because that’s where the scale is. They might have a half day or so that they tack on to their sales rep training in order to make sure the managers understand what the sellers are supposed to be doing, but that’s about it. Their goal is to train sellers. And there are lots of companies that are good at that, quite frankly.  But for us, all of our research, all of our writing, all of our training, all of our consulting, all of our expertise is focused improving the management of those sellers. And we don’t require that a client replace anything that they’re currently doing with their sales reps – We try to leverage their investments in sales rep training by enabling the managers to wring more out of their sellers through more thoughtful and powerful sales management. When prospective clients understand what we do, they understand that we are one of a kind. And our clients would tell you that we’re the best at what we do.

 

CEOCFO: Tell us a little bit about how the training goes and how you work with a company.

Mr. Jordan: The training in itself is what you might think training would look like. Our difference is that we are as much a change management firm as we are a training firm. On the front end, we spend a fair amount of time helping organizations understand what are the high-impact activities for their sales people, given their roles and responsibilities. We spend a great deal of time trying to identify what the important things are in a given sales force, and then helping the sales management team identify what they need to do to make this happen. Very tactical things like what are the right types of meetings to have with their sales reps? With what frequency and what agenda? We call that a sales management rhythm or sales management process, and we find that most managers do not have a very rigorous management process. We then help them develop coaching tools and other tools, in addition to CRM, to ensure the right behaviors by the sales team. So then there is a training event, of course, and then we reinforce that on an ongoing basis. Many training companies have the perspective that training needs to be reinforced only by face-to-face coaching in the field, but we think there are many ways you can reinforce learning, and that is what we try to do. But quite honestly, if the change is identified thoughtfully and the change that you are asking the sales team to undertake is very practical and well understood, there is not that much change management required. People take the things that make sense to them, and people reject things that do not make sense to them. It is our observation that getting the change you want to effect right is more than half the battle of getting that change adopted in the end.

 

CEOCFO: Your list of customers certainly contains many well-known names. What do you look for in your people? How do you identify and nurture the people that work for Vantage Point Performance and present your story and methods?

Mr. Jordan: We view ourselves as a high-end change management, training, and development company. Therefore, we aspire to have the best people. The fact that we focus on sales management actually necessitates that we have the best people, because sales managers by nature are a very skeptical bunch. They’ve been in the sales force for decades sometimes, they have seen all the training and gone through all the programs, and there is generally an attitude that they either know what they are doing or they have seen all that there is to see. So when our people -- whether they are business development folks, trainers, consultants, or even our senior executive team -- get in front of sales leadership and sales managers in particular, we have to establish our credibility very quickly. The team that we have is very experienced in the field, and they are much more versatile than a lot of our peers, because they have to have a change management lens, training lens, and a reinforcement lens. But more importantly, they have to have a sales management lens… Most of our people have been in sales management at some point in their careers.

 

CEOCFO: Are people attracted to Vantage Point Performance because it is such a quality company? Are people attracted because they read your book?

Mr. Jordan: We are approached quite often by people seeking employment, and I think the number one differentiator in most people’s minds is that we’re the only company of substance that focuses on sales management. I think the first thing that interests people is our unique positioning in the marketplace. Our book is certainly a big part of that, because it lays out our approach to things and how our view of the world is different. From there, it’s our job to determine who are the right people to bring into Vantage Point. Not only from a new employee perspective, but also from our customers’ perspective – who is going to create the most value for our clients. I think within the last five or ten years, people have finally started to wake up and see that if they want the sales force to run like a profession and like the other verticals in their organization, they have to have a professional sales management team. Then they start looking for a partner who can help them make that happen, and Vantage Point is the one that seems to come to the top – mostly because of the quality of our people.


CEOCFO: Are you surprised at how slow it has been for people to get that concept?

Mr. Jordan: I have been, but that is not unlike every other new thing that has come to the sales force. Ten years ago, if I mentioned the term ‘sales process,’ I would pretty much be kicked out of a head of sales office. There was still that attitude that you hire the right sales people, you give them the right compensation plan, and you let them do their thing. The reservation was that if you try to force a sales process on the sales force, you are going to stifle the superstars. Then along came CRM, and now everyone wants to have the best possible sales process in place, because people now have faith that there is a best way to sell and that running the sales force with more discipline is going to lead to more productivity. I think ten years ago, similarly, if you had said that you really wanted to focus on the sales managers, a lot of senior leadership would have asked you why? They would have argued that they had the right sales people and the right compensation plan, so sales managers just need to make sure that the sellers stay motivated and that leadership gets their reports. Sales is just sometimes late to the game, because there has been this historical and inaccurate belief that you just hire the right people, pay enough money, and good things will happen. So yes, it’s surprising how long it has taken for sales management to come into focus as a key driver of results, but I think it follows a trend that we have seen. For whatever reason, the sales force is the final function in the organization to be called onto the carpet to actually run itself like a business. And it’s happening.

 

CEOCFO: What is next for Vantage Point Performance?

Mr. Jordan: The things we are focused on are the things that sales management does day to day. The first research we did and the first book we wrote is really on this idea of making sense of the management reports… How to use metrics not only to see what is going on, but to effect better coaching inside the organization. Then our attention turned to the sales management process, as I described it earlier. How should sales managers be spending their time, and how can they add more rigor to their day to make sure they have time to do the important stuff? Going forward, we have just launched a new set of training modules on sales pipeline management, and we see that taking off big time – In fact we just completed our first global deployment of that training. The next place we’re turning our attention is to sales forecasting, which is another place where we see lots of opportunity. Everyone does forecasting, but very few companies are happy with it. I think in the next few years our tasks will be to build out this set of offerings, so we have a pretty clear agenda before us. I think that if you look at us in three or four years, you’ll see a much bigger organization, given our very high growth rate. And I think you will also see a much bigger footprint of where we are making a difference in the organization.

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