OPUSBOB: Employee Morale

Bob Kreisberg talks about how certain methods of sales training can be destructive to employee morale.

I want to talk to you today about how companies could inadvertently destroy the morale of their employees although they are well intentioned in their efforts.  I want to talk to you about a sales woman by the name of Miller.  She went to a sales training class where she was learning about complex sales and this is the type of a training class that many companies have and one of the exercises that they did at the beginning of the class was a very simple personality assessment kind of a tool, not something that we offered in this particular class but the kind of work that we actually do.  Well, after the sales people went through the exercise, they were broken up into the different behavioral styles that showed up in the group.  There were people that were high in dominance and there were people that were high in extraversion, people high in patience and people high in conformity.  My friend, Miller, happens to be in the high conformity group.  Well, the sales trainer who perhaps was a high dominance person himself started to talk to the class about all of the positive things about being a high dominance sales person.  The competitive nature, the desire to win to do what ever needs to be done at all costs and then proceeded to pretty much slam the other three behavioral styles that the high extraverts talk too much and the high patience people don’t know how to create conflict and the high conformity people get all wrapped up in minutiae.  And my friend Miller didn’t come out of this feeling very good about herself.

Well here is the amazing fact, the week before on the last day of the quarter, my friend Miller closed a $5.3 million deal in software licenses for her company and all of those high dominance people that were fist pumping and chest bumping themselves about the great personality styles… They didn’t close anything.  And if you really look at what the skill set is for handling a complex sale that involved a year’s worth of discussions and demonstrations at the technology level, at the application level, meeting after meeting after meeting at all different levels of the organization.  You can understand that Miller’s high conformity trades really served her very, very well because after all was said and done the buyer bought from her because they genuinely believed in her competence and her ability to have her company deliver what needed to be delivered.  Now that’s not to say that high conformity people are the only strong behavioral profile for sales but we get so wrapped up and thinking that what we need is the aggressive no hold bars type of a behavioral style that we forget that the complex sales cycle requires many different talents.  No one brings all of them to the table and as a manager’s job it is your responsibility to understand what your people naturally do best and help them focus on adapting their style to meet the other requirements and providing them with the resources that they need, so they can be successful.

By the way, this was a new name, new logo account and they beat out their number one competitor who was the incumbent who by the time the deal got done was prepared to provide the license software to the client for free.  So think about that and think about what the behavioral style must have been of the sales person who had just taken over this account for the competitor.  So don’t be so quick to put down the other sales people on your team that may not bring that very aggressive “A” type personality to the table.  They may be just what you need, in fact my friend Miller told me that the other sales person who was the high conformity sales person in the group is about to get a $10 million deal this quarter.  Why? For basically the same reasons.  Thanks for your time.