The Betrayal Nobody Talks About

I love my job.

One of, if not the best part of it, is sitting down with sales reps who have been successful for a long time. There’s an unspoken vibe in those conversations. There are a lot of knowing winks, and an instant connectedness that comes along with recognizing that everyone in the room knows what the hell they’re doing. You can speak more freely, and almost let your guard down because you’re not being policed in some way.

I’m reminded of the movie “Oppenheimer.” One of the subtexts I picked up in that movie was among all of these world-class scientists that I remember from high school. They spoke to each other differently. There was a different energy to the conversations. Christopher Nolan picked that up brilliantly.

It’s a real privilege to earn my way into those conversations, and if it could be considered a hobby, it would be on a short list for me.

Here’s a gem from one of those discussions recently…

“There’s a big difference between selling to a quota and selling to a relationship.

A quota's day-to-day. It's, ‘Okay, I got these five sales today. How can I get six tomorrow?’ Yeah. But that doesn't breed long-term success. What breeds long-term success is selling that relationship that allows you to get repeat business, you know?”

My notetaker was running during this call, but I stopped to write that one down.

The motivations behind these two types of sales are different. Neither of them is bad, and I’ll argue that they’re both necessary, though at different times.

Selling to a quota is important because there has to be a standard. You have to have some idea of whether you’re doing enough to support the company, the business, your family, your golf budget, what have you…

The concept gets blown a little out of proportion when it becomes a Draconian measure that’s hanging over everyone’s head all the time. Still, revenue’s a pretty important metric. If a company’s expectations aren’t consistently met, it’s very hard to keep the lights on.

Selling to a relationship is also vital because, well, we’re people. The connectedness between us makes the experience of life richer. If you’re going to solve problems and do business with people, you should pick the ones who allow you to reach your highest aspirations and the ones you know you can trust.

Think about it. Your best relationships are with the people you’ve gone through shit with. College. Bad breakups. First real job. Family stuff. Maybe a few from high school where you can reminisce on how foolish you were at that age to believe you were almost grown up.

Work’s not a lot different. A new product launches. You and your team make magic to beat a deadline. You hire an all-star team to turn around a company. You nail the quarterly board meeting after rejiggering that deck for the umpteenth time.

Those relationships are integral to life. Unless you’re in a completely transactional role (few of us are), we cannot afford to take them for granted.

The problem exists when you betray the relationship for the quota. That one’s usually pretty easy to avoid, except when your boss puts you in a position where you have to.

I see this happening a lot now. PE firms are rolling up and merging a lot of smaller companies into larger entities. They bring in resources and make investments. They streamline operations. The value to the end customer is multiplied.

Those investments don’t come without expectations, though, and along come new KPIs and other measurements that often make reps perform differently. It’s a trade-off that’s incredibly fair on the surface, but often gets muddied during execution.

How do we pick the right KPIs? If two or three companies were merged, whose KPIs rule the road if they’re different? What if there were no previous KPIs to refer to, and the team just always found a way to produce enough? Now we’re going to a textbook or a different corporate playbook to find one that is hopefully close enough to go with.

Meanwhile, your sales team feels betrayed, disrespected, and like the rug’s been pulled right out from underneath them. What has always worked in the past is suddenly no longer good enough, and if they don’t adopt a new way of doing things, they can hit the bricks…

…after two or three decades of service.

There’s another option that doesn’t get explored often enough. Instead of looking at what the rest of the world is doing, you can take some time and study what’s always worked inside the(se) companies.

Get a small handful of your best reps together for an offsite. Feed them well. Give them the space to be creative. Have a brief, informal agenda.

Ask them:

• to run through the most recent deal they won from start to finish

• what they’re doing that they don’t see anybody else doing

• what they know about the industry that nobody else seems to understand

• if they retired tomorrow, what’s the thing that would walk out the door with them that nobody else knows or realizes

• what is it they wish they had been taught early on in their career that they learned the hard way

When they finish their answers, ask them to be more specific. Then, if you dare, ask them to be even more specific than that. There’s gold in those conversations. Watch everybody in that room leave inspired, and your best reps get even better.

Then imagine what happens when you take those insights back to the rest of your team.

I do these in about 90 minutes virtually, but there’s a day’s worth of conversation in there that bleeds over into dinner. It’s what I miss most about President’s Club meetings back in my field rep days, but you don’t need to reserve this for an annual getaway. Book a meeting room at a local hotel next to a great restaurant; all the value for a fraction of the price.

You’ll walk out of that room with a good handle on the KPIs you should be using in your organization. They’re probably not going to look like any in the textbooks, and that’s the point. These are what matter to you, your team, and your customers, not what some talking head on LinkedIn says is important.

You’ll start measuring more of the things that matter. Your top reps will feel seen instead of disrespected. The rest of the team will be energized because they work next to the source material every day. Results will follow quickly.

About this past week

I led a killer webinar about having killer customer conversations this past Thursday; the second in my summer Know-Win-Grow summer series. If you’re interested in the recording, let me know.

The little girl who made me a dad turned 17 yesterday. They say that time flies, but it has been such a delight to watch this young woman flourish.

The Shoutout

I don’t know anybody who claims selling is easy, but it’s a different kind of hard when your dad is a household name, and you share a first name.

This week’s ThankfulThursday post was about Jeb Blount, Jr., who’s doing a masterful job of carving his own niche by showing up every day and also showing his work along the way. He’s also a certifiable quality human being.

I’m grateful to have people like him in my life.

It’s Open Championship week. That means watching links golf with my coffee, which also means my annual golf trip starts Thursday in Northern Michigan. Looking forward to a much-needed break and recalibration. You’ll still see me in your inboxes next weekend, though.

Make it a great week!

Cheers,
JB