Is Your Leadership A Bunch Of Horses Arses?

When did you commit to being horse’s arse?

“…If you want to make sure your customers are treated well, you have to make sure you treat your employees well and recognize their efforts.” ~ F. Robert Salerno

Imagine the scene.

You, and thousands of others arrive in France after 3 months basic training. Average age 19. You’re about to start your first of at least 6 x 2 week deployments on the front line. On your way there, you see convoys of the dead and injured being carted behind the lines.

Your life expectancy has just plummeted to 6 weeks.

The stench of death, gunpowder, mud and fear is all around; the noise of the shells, rifle and machine gunfire assaults your senses. You’re cold, scared witless and the order comes down the line, “Over the top”.

The whistle blows.

By the end of the day over 6000 of you will be dead and wounded. Shot, blown to smithereens, gassed, drowned or slaughtered in brutal hand to hand combat. If you’re lucky you might end up with trench foot or the clap.

When you treat sales and marketing like a numbers game and use military language to describe what you do, chances are you will behave a cavalier manner. The law of large numbers means that if you throw enough brute force, waste enough money and have no compunction in burning through people to reach customers, someone will get lucky … eventually, but at what price?

The collateral damage in sales are careers instead of corpses, though mental health problems in sales are rife. At the time of writing in late 2020, we’ve experienced 20 months of the global Covid pandemic. Recent stats from Gartner make for sobering reading. 75% of SDRs are missing quota and 85% of Account Executives are not even attaining 75% of quota. Only 3% of sales teams worldwide are hitting their target.

And … in 2020, over 40% of employees in the USA intended to change jobs. 4 million people a month. Sales suffers a particularly high level of forced turnover. Around 19% was considered normal and relatively healthy, but the knowledge drain caused by such high turnover rates is potentially crippling.

High turnover is eye-wateringly costly, not just in lost productivity, unnecessary recruitment and hiring costs, but wasted training, burned leads, lifetime customer value, the drain of knowledge.

Every study the authors have ever read massively underestimates the hidden cost of unintended turnover in sales. All of them look at the costs that appear on the balance sheet. In the real world the costs jump off the balance sheet and affect the culture, reputation, pipeline, relationships with customers, with recruiters, lost referrals, upsells and cross sells, customer intimacy and trust all of which impact lifetime customer value.

“An independent sales organisation estimated that it would take five years for the company to recover from the loss of a 25-year veteran that has unique knowledge and connections selling into states and government verticals” — Anthony Chaine. Multiply the impact by hundreds or thousands of people exiting or being exited and you really do have a colander for a business.

According to a study produced by Stephen Harvard Davis, at SRC, if one of your top talent leaves, there’s a 50% probability that at least one other top talent will leave within 6 months.

Chaine goes on to describe, “A major bank lost its top revenue generator which usually brings more than $300 million worth of business on a yearly basis because the SVP wouldn’t agree to a minor well-deserved salary increase. The salesperson was offered double salary, higher bonus and a promotion to join a competing regional bank. Several of his peers followed his footsteps, joining the competing bank based on his recommendations. The SVP was terminated for being responsible for talent exodus.”

The level of industrialised destruction being caused by greedy investors, misdirected leadership and incompetent management (yes, we mean you!!) baffles belief.

For all the talk of delivering shareholder value, you really are doing a bloody awful job in most cases. Jonathan Farrington conducted a study on behalf of a global sales training company in 2019, found that 94% (NINETY FOUR PERCENT) of sales managers are NOT fit for purpose.

In the gold rush to become a unicorn (BTW, they’re named after mythical beasts for a bloody good reason), founders are seduced by the spin doctors in marketing in vulture capital (VC) and private equity (PE). Fewer than 3% make it to this legendary status. Over 80% die on the vine and disappear along with the hopes, dreams and homes of the founders.

They become the PBI — poor bloody infantry whilst the generals send more bodies over the top to be cut down by unrealistic quotas, arbitrary management that promotes for sales ability NOT management potential or favouritism, playing fast and loose with commission payments (who hasn’t suffered from or seen someone have their commission arbitrarily cut because a higher up thinks the salesperson doesn’t deserve it.

A stunningly good salesperson who closed $46,000,000 (yes millions) in 2019 wasn’t paid the commission due to her which ran into the millions and was offered $14,000 (yes thousand). 2 weeks later she was gone and revisiting that company’s customers and I’m delighted to say, eating her former employer’s lunch. A short term, temporary win for the CFO and SVP and decades of lost sales and repeat business, referrals, market knowledge and a fantastic team player, gift wrapped with a ribbon to their competitor for their shareholders. Serve the bastards right!

If you’ve ever done this to one of your top performers, you sir/madam, are a fucking idiot!

Treat your people like this and they will leave. And talk. To recruiters. And soon you will struggle to hire D-players even if you bribe them with high salaries because your credibility will be shot to shit. I was chatting to a couple of my recruiter friends in my research and both have refused to work with companies because of their reputation for hire and fire, clipping commissions, toxic culture, shit management. Those companies quickly get pillaged by recruiters who find a steady stream of people wanting to leave. Only the naive, under-performers and desperate hang around to be mistreated. Now you are really in serious trouble.

The revolving door will get very crowded, very quickly and that is a cycle of violence that will take a miracle to fix. Odds are it will move up the chain of command with managers being fired in rapid succession as leadership passes the buck for their own stupidity. Then there will be a stream of VPs and CEOs coming and going until your valuation is in the bottom of the toilet in Trainspotting!

Make no mistake. The reason your results are disappointing and your salespeople are bloody atrocious, giving our noble profession a richly deserved shitty reputation that compares as unfavourably as politicians, grave robbers and swindlers is because YOU ARE TERRIBLE, INCOMPETENT LEADERS who would be better serving as colonic irrigators because you are masters at plucking impossible targets from the air with no effort made to help your people work out how to achieve them and the output is the same.

How dare you treat other human beings as expendable commodities to line your own pockets?

Before you get on your high horse, answer me these questions:

• Does someone senior and competent produce the prospect lists?
• Do you have clean, fresh, up to date accurate and relevant data for your salespeople?
• Is your CRM specifically designed to enhance the salesperson’s effectiveness, or did you buy it, cut corners on the the design, rollout, and hygiene of the data contained in it?
• Are you focusing your people on the least effective end of the pipeline (cold) or are you helping them sell into your hot market?
• Do your managers consider recruitment their NUMBER 1 responsibility to build a team of the best people in the market?
• Do you have a turnover rate under 20% in sales?
• Do you have an effective onboarding process that equips your salespeople for success or do you give a list, a phone and tell them to make dials until the heart turns to stone?
• Do you tolerate lying, omissions and exaggeration?
• Are your marketing, lead generation, sales, customer success and account growth teams aligned AROUND YOUR CUSTOMER?
• Do you train salespeople to be timely, relevant and deliver value with every touch?
• Is there a clear, attainable career path which is in the control of the individual salespeople and you do everything you need to, to help them succeed in achieving their ambitions in life and sales?
• Do you foster collaboration or apply a divide and conquer to give YOU THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL and stroke you ego and tiny dumb stick (most of the worst managers and leaders are men)?
• Do you encourage diversity in your team?
• Do you give your people a voice and empower them to fail forward?
• Do you hire for diversity and fire for difference?
• Do you love your salespeople?

OK, that’s a good start. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Agree. Disagree. Let’s get the debate going.

Join and be active in Sales: A Force For Good #SAFFG a global community we are building to take back control from the arseholes in charge and create the conditions for #BuyerSafety to be the minimum level. My wonderful friend Simon Bowen describes this as the “I should bloody hope so” line. We are taking the toughest problems in sales and applying a diverse group of committed minds to these problems and making them FREELY available to members forever.

And if you want to unlock your HOT MARKET, DM me or email marcus@laughs-last.com.

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