sales compensation Archives

Most Plans Lack One Crucial Ingredient: Humility

You’ve gotta have a plan.

Plans are essential, are they not? Without a plan, your weekend jaunt to the Carribean can, thanks to a tropical storm, turn into a hotel room Netflix marathon. Without a budget, you may unknowingly forego your next home repair for an extra round of drinks. In short, if you had clean underwear and gas in your tank this morning, you have planning to thank.

Without a doubt, we need to have plans and not just for practical reasons like the ones discussed. Thinking ahead makes us FEEL better too. Theoretically, without the worries of tomorrow we are free to enjoy today. Not only that, a solid plan can make us feel just a little superior to others, like those poor souls who didn’t use call ahead seating at the restaurant.

It makes no sense to fight city hall (or the Future).

Despite their enumerable benefits, our best laid plans inevitably come under scrutiny. If you’ve ever done a major addition to your house, you’ve probably had to submit building plans for approval from a Zoning Board or Commissioner before beginning construction. In response to your submission, you typically get one of three responses: an approval, a denial, or an approval contingent on changes. In short, the process is not as simple as picking up a hammer and swinging.

Unfortunately, even outside of the construction world, life’s response to our planning efforts can be similarly uncontrollable. It’s as if a Future Commissioner hands down judgements of our plans. However, unlike the Zoning Commissioner, the Future Commissioner requires us to enact our plan before she decrees one of the same three answers, a denial, an approval, or a conditional approval.

Humility – the missing link to most plans.

Can you imagine cooking multiple meals for guests and allowing them to sample and pick their desired main course? In essence, we never truly know the right course of action in any given situation until we take action. And, however well-researched or thought-out, our plans can still be toppled as easily as a child’s tower of blocks. To acknowledge this fact we must be humble.

What if we somehow could see the future? No, I don’t mean in a prophetic way like a character in The Matrix. Instead, we can use an ability we’ve had since childhood – our imagination. Most conventional planning wisdom regards failure as something to be planned against, not accepted. What if, instead of fearing the worst we made peace with it? Wouldn’t we then be more capable to respond when things go bad?

It’s one of the most commonly misunderstood facts about planning. Failure is not an option, it’s an outcome. Success is also an outcome. Neither is a choice. If a Boeing MAX 8 lands on your car during your commute, anything else you planned to do that day will technically be a failure. True humility involves a surrender to fate.

Even if failure is not an option, it’s still a possibility.

At this point, you might claim your secret to success is denying the possibility of failure. In essence, you use pressure to motivate yourself. While stress has been shown to produce a short term boost in productivity, it’s also been proven to reduce creativity and drain our energy. Doesn’t this seem like a steep price to pay for the luxury of temporarily fooling oneself

Humility – the best insurance policy.

When it’s time to face the truth, humility can free us from the feeling of loss. The humble person knows they were never entitled to a good outcome in the first place. Our hard work was a prerequisite not a guarantee. The good news? It’s impossible to lose something we never had in the first place. We didn’t lose anything and, instead may have gained valuable experience.

I propose the key to better planning is a better perspective on planning. It’s a valuable tool to move us toward better outcomes – no more, no less. It’s time to acknowledge that we can never fully control what happens as a result of our efforts. Just as we have plans for the future, the future will inevitably have it’s own plans for us. We can only learn, adapt, and respond.

Sincerely,

Chris Pawar

Meaning2work.com

Bias as Usual: Beware of Representativeness

Photo by Taneli Lahtinen via Unsplash.com.

Are you an ideal salesperson? Do you possess the right habits and personality traits? Before you critique yourself, consider you may be battling an unseen enemy- representativeness.

Consider the following hypothetical scenario:
You’ve just learned your getting a new next-door neighbor. All you know is she will be one of two salespeople. Salesperson A drives a BMW. Salesperson B drives a BMW, has a confident personality, and travels extensively for work. Who is more likely to be your new neighbor, person A or person B? If you chose person B you would be… (drum roll please) wrong!

How is this possible? By definition, people like Salesperson B are a subset of people like Salesperson A. Therefore, the group of people who comprise all BMW-driving salespeople has to be bigger than those with the same car who are also self-assured road warriors. This means the likelihood of your neighbor being Salesperson A is higher. The reason it’s so easy to chose Salesperson B is because, in our minds, the extra details provided make them more representative of a typical sales rep.

According to Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking Fast and Slow, representativeness is a mental shortcut. We use it to judge probability by looking for patterns. As a result, it’s easier to believe the validity of comparisons between reps when one meets our stereotype of the ideal rep and the other doesn’t.

In real life, high performing salespeople are a topic of great interest. Leaders, often set out to find what makes these overachievers unique. In doing so they often mistakenly settle on the traits they expected them already to have. And, rarely do they look any further. Rushing to judgement, leaders may neglect factors, like the local economic climate, that can have a strong influence on sales.

As we know, the comparing of salespeople is serious business. For reps themselves, it can determine not only their income but their overall job security. Given the stakes, sales reps and leaders both need to slow their thinking and look deeper into the validity of their measurements. It’s time to value representatives over mere representativeness.

Meaning2work.com

Sales Incentives: Love The Game, Not The Trophy

Many parents, including yours truly, have made the same mistake. Let’s call it the Ice Cream Effect. “Score a goal junior, and we buy you an ice cream cone!”, we might say. Score two and you get a hot-fudges sundae! Sooner or later, we find our child needs an ever-increasing supply of ice cream (or trophies, or other incentives) just to play the sport.

Why does this happen? Isn’t generous pay for a hard day’s work, an effective tradition? In the short term, yes. When our sales numbers are good and we’re getting praised, we love sales. Can we blame our leaders for dangling trips, bonuses, and other rewards in front of us?

But, hurry and enjoy your sales incentives quick, before they melt away! Soon, a new fiscal year arrives and we’re back to square one. Impossible objections, indecisive customers, and service issues, they’re all part of life in sales. All of a sudden, we not in love anymore. Instead, we’re the kid who hates baseball until he hits a home run. Here’s the problem: to our employers, our job is to sell. To our customers (you know, the people who pay for everything), it’s to solve problems. They don’t care how many rewards we rack up.

And, it’s solving problems that gets us the sales we want. We need to take the leap of faith required to focus on the job itself, not sales incentives, or even job security. Soldiers, who risk much more than a pink slip, want to see live battle. ER doctors, who can easily handle patients with sinus infections, want to treat traumatic injuries. These people want to do the hardest parts of their job.

Perhaps we in sales can learn from them.

Sincerely,
Meaning2work.com

Non-Selling Activities: Let the Salespeople Sell!

Why do we hire salespeople, at great effort and expense, and ask them to do non-selling work like completing reports?

“Because, aside from selling, that’s what we pay them to do,” is the response I’d expect from many a manager. Still, would you hire a plumber for your sink and ask him to fix a ceiling fan? Even if he agreed, wouldn’t you expect him to get the plumbing work done first?

Just as your Spring lawn looks it’s best when your landscaper isn’t also doing your taxes, salespeople sell more when they’re focused on selling.

If we want salespeople to give us marketing or decision support data, we should pay them for it. In lieu of money, this can mean lowered sales expectations or increased time off.

Seriously, don’t we have to pay for most goods and services of value? Non-selling activities take away from what salespeople are hired to do, sell.

Sincerely,

Meaning2work.com

Big Rewards: Why They Make Us Less Happy

Bigger salaries? Better commissions? Bring ‘em on! Whoever coined the phrase “less is more”, was clearly not in sales where rewards reign supreme.

A few years ago, I interviewed for a sales job with a prominent IT company. The realistic pay expectations offered were multiples higher than my current salary.

You can imagine my elation after both learning this AND being put into the company interview process. What would this new lifestyle mean? A better house, car, or schooling for my kids? “Be realistic! The job’s not yours yet!” I would tell myself. However, a couple of interviews later, I had myself fooled. The job was mine to lose.

Weeks went by with no answer. Then, BAM! Hearing the regretful words from the elusive hiring manager felt like a botched skydive. And, on came the guilt. How could I have gambled away such a bright future? It was past 9pm with a cold, pouring rain outside. I went for a run.

On a smaller scale, big sales rewards can have the same debilitating effect. Managers often want 100% of the sales force to believe they can win a prize given to only the top 5%. And, who can blame them? Inevitably, some us take the bait and chase the dream.

Salespeople need to remember that luck is, and may always be, part of our results. It’s nice to have the opportunity to win big. We just need to remember the money isn’t ours until the check has cleared.

Sincerely,

Meaning2work.com

Pharma Rep Confessions – What the Job’s Really Like

Dear Pharma Sales Reps,

Here are my observations from 14 years in the business. Do you agree?

Six confessions of a long-time pharmaceutical sales rep:

Achievement is highly overrated. I’ve been both in the bottom 15% of rankings and at the top. I’ve earned bonuses as high as $47k and as low as zero. Every success felt like a lucky break. I was almost never present when a prescription was being written. Plenty of doctors told me they were excited to prescribe but never followed through. Others, who I thought hated my product (or even me) became my biggest supporters. The money is nice, but quickly spent.
Doctors don’t care nearly as much as we want them to. I’ve sold lifestyle medicines, chronic medicines, and life-saving rescue medicines and it’s been mostly the same. Doctors typically DO care about their patients. The drugs they use, however, are like tools in a carpenters hand. Unless they cause trouble or fail to work, they’re largely an afterthought.
Out of sight, Out of mind. For many physicians and their staff, their responsibility is to TELL the patient the right thing to do – not to ensure it gets done. They may prescribe the medicine you sell but give little care to whether or not the patient fills the script.
For the patient and the office, money trumps all. We reps know this. Our managers know it too but are sometimes too afraid to say it. Patients don’t see medication as being a matter of life and death until they are in pain or are dying. Medicines that make them prettier, better in bed, or (sadly) give them a buzz, are worth cold, hard cash.
The only thing that makes you an expert, to management, is your numbers. Therefore, never get too full of yourself. We’re all a couple bad quarters from some kind of probationary status.
If you judge yourself using sales acheivement, you will never fully like your job, or yourself. Whether or not you’ve finally become an expert is a question only you can answer!

Congratulations! You win the Ritalin award for reading the whole article!

Feel free to comment below or send me a note at Meaning2work@gmail.com with your thoughts. And, don’t forget to subscribe if you want to hear more!

Sincerely,

Meaning2work.com

Are You in the Right Sales Job? Answer This Simple Question.

Are you in the right sales job, or is there something better out there for you? I think I can help you find the answer – provided you consider what happened to me.

Once upon a time, a large, global corporation stopped compensating its sales force on actual sales volume. My colleagues and I, working for this company, hoped the change would bring about a more utopian work environment. Maybe we would be paid a healthier salary? Maybe we would be empowered to really serve our customers and no longer have to sugarcoat the truth? Most of us on the sales force would’ve agreed that we sold first class products. Therefore, it wasn’t hard to convince customers to use them.

Such naive exuberance! The new compensation system, turned out to simply be a replacement of the tradional pay for sales system to a pay for sales metrics system. These metrics meant we were measured more frequently than ever on activities that had little meaning to us or our customers. I remember quickly resenting the loss of the old system. In hindsight, it wasn’t the money. I was still made around the same amount as before. What I really lost was the ability to craft the job on my own terms.

From this experience, I learned a very important lesson. When we complain about unrealistic quotas, we ignore the real problem – the concept of outside measurement itself. Any assigned sales metric, whether it’s sales volume or anything else, attempts to inspire the sale person into action. Yes, goals can be motivating, but only when WE set them. Taking on someone else’s goal is not the same thing. Be honest, when you accept a sales job, you’re not actually taking on the company’s goals. You don’t really care about selling over-and-above the required 10,000 widgets. Deep down, you are saying to yourself, “This job’s prescribed goal helps me achieve my personal goals.” More specifically, we accept that the money coming from the job’s achievements will lead us to our desired personal achievements.

Unfortunately, always doing (and believing) what you’re told can be the fast track to growing old. You wake up ten years later with a higher mortgage payment and no more happiness than you started with. In most salesforces, only a small percentage of sales people make the bulk of the compensation. For those lucky few who make it big and retire to a beach, there are about 1,000 of us who don’t. What’s easier to believe – only one of every 1,000 sales people really works hard, or measuring life fulfillment based on something so random is ridiculous?

Instead of focusing on getting rich, try being rich. I don’t suggest spending beyond your means, but taking a mean look at your spending. Your neighbor with the Porsche may be swimming in debt. That cruise that your teammate brags about may be collecting interest on her credit card. Real wealth is an equation:

What you make – What you spend = Real Wealth

Here’s what you really need to ask yourself: If your commissions (or other measurement system) where taken away and replaced with a comfortable salary and benefits package, could you still do your job? Are you truly inspired by the work itself? A job worthy of your time should do this. Keep telling yourself the money alone makes it worthwhile. At best, you will only ever tolerate your job. Still don’t believe me? Daniel Pink, in “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”, says workers should be paid enough to take salary off the table. Research has proven, the more money you make beyond about 70k per year, not only fails to add hapinesss, it starts to take away from it. Are you in the right sales job? You now have the answer!

Sincerely,
Meaning2work

Ps: I doubt one blog post will change your mind about the futility of finding happiness from making more money. Have the courage to read Daniel Pink’s book if your belief in it is that strong. To find it on Amazon, click here.
Pss.: Are you instead wondering if sales is the right job for you, period? According to David Hoffield, you will likely be selling in your next job – even if it’s not in sales:
https://www.hoffeldgroup.com/sales-articles/the-new-reality-everyone-is-now-in-sales/