Change, Coaching, and Sales Results

Today pharmaceutical sales managers are expected to get more productivity with fewer people, increase top and bottom line results, improve quality, and insure customer satisfaction. The ever changing health care environment is resulting in sales managers having the added responsibility of enhancing cooperation between sales and other parts of the organization, gathering local market intelligence, creating and managing localized marketing initiatives, and driving change better, faster, and smarter than the competition. All this is happening during an environment of virtual unemployment and increased demand by sales people for professional and personal fulfillment.

The sales managers who thrive in today’s marketplace are adept at sales change management. Sales change management is defined as the ability to continuously drive results through others in a dynamic, ever changing environment. The cause of the change is not important. Whatever the cause, new competitors, price wars, employee turnover, mergers, revised territories, additional regulatory demands, new strategic directions, etc., effective sales change managers deliver the expected outcome. Successful organizations find, hire, develop, and keep managers that have this capability. They keep them in the field. They give them assignments that take advantage of their skill at delivering results while managing change situations.

Sales managers that have sales change management capability possess a distinctive set of characteristics and skills. These are organizational value and alignment, analyzing, planning, staffing, performance problem solving, and coaching and development. Each distinctive sales management behavior and skill is vital to successful sales change management. Organizations who are in the midst of change must select, evaluate, performance manage, and develop sales managers to these essentials in order to ensure field sales growth.

Our customers often ask where an organization should begin in order to enhance field sales management’s ability to drive results while managing people through change. There is no simple answer. The standard approach is to determine where each manager is and then begin a targeted development program. There are tools and approaches that exist to help organizations take that approach. It is the best long-term approach. However, many organizations need to get started immediately and must have a short-term, high impact, get results now approach. The best place to focus sales managers in order to get them effectively and quickly managing change while still producing results is in the area of coaching and development. We define coaching and development as the ability to define performance expectations, observe performance, give effective one-on-one feedback, and the willingness and skill for training and developing improved salesperson performance. In our work, we find an alarming shortage of sales managers who are good in this vital skill area, particularly when difficult change issues are present. It is an area that can be trained and developed. Yet, few organizations invest time and money developing sales managers 
in this critical area. It is an area that if addressed aggressively by an organization can help dramatically impact the near-term improvement of sales change management and the numbers.

There are some simple things one can pay attention to in order to improve the coaching and development area for sales change management. The first and maybe most important thing is to get sales managers to understand that the primary challenge and accountability for today’s sales managers is getting salespeople to accept change quickly and effectively. Sales managers have been well conditioned to know that their role is to achieve the numbers. They often forget that the achievement of the numbers is often impeded by how sales people react to change and how it affects day to day sales behavior. In a change environment the sales manager’s responsibility is to ensure that the behaviors of sales people support the achievement of the expected sales results.

The second critical thing is for sales managers to know peoples’ reactions to change and how to deal with them. Understanding it and the reactions to it is vital in order to help salespeople deal with change. Salespeople thrive on mastery. They attribute mastery to repetition, consistency, and comfort. That is why salespeople resist change. Change represents the fear of losing mastery. Once a salesperson reaches a perceived level of mastery, he/she does not want anyone or anything messing with that success. Paradoxically, salespeople need stimulation, challenge, and adventure. This demands that sales managers provide the necessary opportunities, tools, and situations that foster an environment of challenge and growth. It is bizarre. Salespeople want everything the same so they feel confident and in control, and yet they want to grow from experiencing new things. Unfortunately, many sales managers focus on trying to create a changeless work environment. They overreact to the objection to change and underreact to the demand for fulfillment and growth. Successful sales managers that get people to perform regardless of the distractions brought on by change do the following:

1. Increase the amount of one-on-one time they spend with salespeople.
2. Encourage salespeople to expand their capabilities in high impact areas that they do well. They seek to get their people to stretch the status quo.
3. Challenge salespeople to take an area of acceptable importance and develop it into an area of excellence and expertise.
4. Do not back off giving salespeople new and expanded assignments. They help salespeople understand the short and long term benefits and then stay the course.
5. Recognize salespeople who make progress adding to their work capability. They encourage and praise productive change.

Sales managers who understand the impact of change have the courage and confidence to challenge their people to their highest potential. They balance each one’s desire for comfort with their natural passion for stimulation.

The last simple factor to drive sales change management success is effective one-on-one coaching. Being effective at driving development through one-on-one coaching of salespeople is vital. Traditionally, sales managers have communicated and trained sales people through the use of team meetings. These periodic, in the field gatherings are effective for communicating general information and addressing group needs. However, salespeople seldom have the same development needs at the same time for dealing with their personal reactions to change. The best method for helping salespeople achieve results while dealing with change is just-in-time field development. One-on-one, individualized, field coaching provides the opportunity to help a salesperson develop ideas and approaches that best fit with his/her unique reactions to change. Ideas can be applied immediately and barriers quickly addressed. This speed to action is vital to the achievement of sales results for both the salesperson and the manager. Effective one-on-one sales change coaching and development involves the following fundamentals. These can be used by any level of field sales management.

1. Compile background information on the salesperson’s numbers and behaviors performance from a variety of resources.
2. Define the salesperson’s goals and motivations.
3. Observe the salesperson’s performance directly and indirectly.
4. Raise awareness of the salesperson’s strengths and weaknesses (The objective is to serve as the proverbial mirror of current performance).
5. Explore and discuss the salesperson’s alignment between wanted and present performance. Determine what can be enhanced or expanded.
6. Create a mutually agreed to plan on how to address necessary skill, knowledge, and attitude gaps.
7. Evaluate the salesperson’s performance on a frequent and consistent basis.

These are basic fundamentals for coaching success. The complexity is in trying to do these with flawless execution over a sustained period of time. Sustained effort is the essence of sales change coaching success.

The pace of change and the need for immediate results to keep pharmaceutical and all other organizations competitive commands great sales management. Significant results are being achieved by organizations that work hard to improve the ability of sales managers to drive change and achieve results. Traditional sales management development approaches are being abandoned in favor of thought provoking, high impact focused one-on-one development that gets sales managers and salespeople the desired outcomes they and the organization need. The bottom-line is that change can be overcome quickly and effectively while the numbers are still being achieved. Great sales management can and does get it done.