Builders vs. Maintainers

Leroy Wall

Wall Consulting Group

The magnificent grand pianos that grace the stages of concert halls, jazz clubs and music schools are handcrafted by artisans who bend wood, string wire and glue felt to build each instrument. Once the piano builders are done and the finished pianos leave the workshop, it’s up to piano tuners to maintain them; making regular adjustments to ensure they continue sounding the way the builders intended.

In any endeavour, be it providing a musician with a consistently exemplary concert grand piano or providing an asset manager with a best practice back office, there’s a certain harmony in knowing which roles are best left to builders and which are the purview of maintainers.

As well, knowing where you fall on the spectrum of builders and maintainers can help you manage your own career goals and expectations.

Those of us in the investment operations field have likely worked with some great builders and some equally great maintainers. But builders and maintainers are only at their best when they perform roles that are the right fit for their personalities. Leaving a builder in a maintenance role for too long can sometimes lead to boredom and stagnation. Someone with a builder’s personality might need a daily dose of risks and challenges that they won’t face in a maintenance role. Eventually the need for something new trumps all other needs and they tune out and move on. Those piano builders so used to working with their hands and tools to proudly create each unique instrument might not find it so satisfying to spend hours every few weeks monotonously adjusting each wire to maintain the instrument’s sound.

Likewise, putting a maintainer in a builder’s role for too long is likely to create unhealthy levels of stress and anxiety. Imagine the average piano tuner trying to build a piano from scratch. The piano makers at the venerable Steinway and Sons factories famously build the instruments from memory and experience, not a blueprint or plan in sight. Put a maintainer in a builder’s role without a blueprint and you’ll have a person likely paralyzed by fear and slow to make decisions.

Of course, some of the best piano tuners are also technicians capable of practically rebuilding damaged instruments. Similarly, in the world of finance, people are rarely completely just a builder or just a maintainer; they fit somewhere on a spectrum. Roles are also rarely exclusively one or the other; they too fit on a spectrum.

This means it is imperative that when you are designing roles, recruiting talent or motivating employees to achieve success, you need consider not just technical skills, but also personality match for the specific position.

Know where you fit and you will become happier in your career. Know how to define your team members and you will place the right people in the right jobs to be successful.  Most importantly, identify the mismatch when it occurs and fix it right away. Doing that will help you to hit the right chord for success in any endeavour.

For more information on Wall Consulting Group checkout our website on:

www.wallconsultinggroup.com and follow us on Twitter @wall_cgi

10 Mistakes You're Making in Building a Sales Team

Sales are the lifeblood of any business. Beating the plan yields optimism. Missing the number could mean a scramble for survival. Without sales, your business literally has nothing.

For this reason, I want sales to be scalable and predictable for our companies. And yet, “art form” is often a phrase used to describe sales. Art is neither scalable, nor predictable. Science is. When it comes to adding science to my sales team, I turn to my friend and advisor Mark Roberge, sales scientist, Chief Revenue Officer at HubSpot, and author of the new book, The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to Go from $0 to $100M.

Here are the ten mistakes Mark sees many businesses make when scaling sales:

Mistake #1: Hiring salespeople with your gut

Hiring rock star sales people is the most important aspect to sales success. Yet, so many organizations “wing” the entire hiring process. Every sales context is different and, thus, every company has a different ideal hiring profile. Appreciate the uniqueness of your sales context, establish a theory of the hiring criteria that will work for you, and be disciplined about scoring every candidate against that criteria. As you bring on salespeople, this process enables you to learn from your mistakes, iterate, and hone in on the perfect hiring profile.

Mistake #2: Under-utilizing the sales compensation plan

The sales compensation plan is the most under-appreciated tool in the CEO’s toolkit. In thinking back to the major strategic re-directions we navigated at HubSpot, many of them were instigated by aligning the sales compensation plan with the desired strategic change. Whether looking to enter a new industry, gain market share with a particular product line, or expand into a new geography, the sales compensation plan will be the most effective driver of change.

Mistake #3: Mis-aligning sales and marketing

Traditionally, sales and marketing are two groups that have not gotten along. Marketing perceives sales as a bunch of over-paid spoiled brats. Sales feels marketing sits around doing arts and crafts all day. In an age with the majority of buying journey’s starting online, this dysfunctional relationship is the kiss of death for a company.

A properly aligned sales and marketing team is a pre-requisite to a healthy business. Quantify the deliverables that marketing and sales should commit to one another. At HubSpot, we call this agreement the Sales and Marketing Service Level Agreement, or SMarketing SLA. For example, marketing will deliver 1,500 leads per quarter that are contacts from Fortune 5000 companies within the retail, manufacturing, or technology industries. Sales will call these leads within 2 hours and convert 20% of them into sales pipeline within 30 days. Measure the SLA progress and share the report daily with the entire team. You are now empowered to manage your sales and marketing funnel every day!

Mistake #4: Not planning far enough in advance

It takes 2 months to hire a new sales person, 3 months to ramp them to full productivity, and a 4 month sales cycle to close a deal. This situation is not uncommon for a business. If anything, these timeframes may be on the aggressive side. Yet, even with these assumptions, it takes 9 months from the decision to hire a new salesperson to the time when they are fully productive. If you are a sales driven organization, your 2015 results are largely baked with the team on board in Q1. Most of the hiring you are doing now is driving your 2016 results. Plan ahead.

Mistake #5: Making forecasting, rather than coaching, the sales manager’s primary focus

Many sales managers spend the majority of their time managing the sales forecast and pipeline. This is a lost opportunity. Managers should spend the majority of their time coaching and developing their sales people. Effective sales coaching increases sales productivity. The best coaches diagnose the one or two skills that will make the biggest difference in a salesperson’s performance and customize a coaching plan to that skill. They use metrics to conduct the diagnosis. I call this process “metrics-driven sales coaching”.

Mistake #6: Motivating through fear rather than metrics

I always ask candidates why they want to move on from their current employer. Many of them complain about the fear-based, micro-management of their current environment. This type of militant management style does not motivate sales people, especially today’s millennial generation. Instead, automate a daily dashboard stack ranking the team on total dials, total connects, total discovery calls, total demos, total sales, etc. Send the dashboard out every day to the entire sales and marketing team and include the CEO. As a result, salespeople will be able to understand where they are gravitating from the “success blue-print” and self-diagnosis the areas in the funnel where they need work. At the end of the day, the salesperson, sales manager, and the company are on the same team. Enabling everyone with the daily metrics will provide the motivation and discipline you desire.

Mistake #7: Letting new salespeople shadow top performers

“Welcome to our company Bob. Do you remember our top salesperson, Sue? For your training, you are going to shadow her for two months.”

The shadowing approach to sales training is neither scalable nor predictable. In my experience, top salespeople are at the top for different reasons. They all bring a unique “super-power” to the table and lean into it heavily. A ride-along sales training strategy may dissuade sales people from leaning into their super-power. It may also encourage them to pick up bad habits from their peers. Instead, create a sales process. Certify salespeople by quantifying their aptitude with each stage of the sales process. Provide enough detail in the sales process to guide the salesperson but don’t make it too constraining that the salesperson cannot apply their “super-power”.

Mistake #8: Buying technology for management rather than the front-line salespeople

The majority of sales technology purchased over the last few decades has been purchased for the sales leader to conduct pipeline reviews and manage forecasts. The end result? The front-line salespeople do not use the software. Data integrity suffers and the original utility of the purchase is never realized.

In the last year, we have seen an explosion in sales technology that actually benefits the salesperson. It helps the salesperson sell faster by removing admin tasks and streamlines the processes they conduct dozens of times per day. It helps sales people sell better by illustrating the full buyer context to the salesperson at all times. Furthermore, technology that benefits salespeople is the best path toward capturing the data that sales leaders need to run the business. Try Hubspot's free product www.getsidekick.com as a starting point for your organization.

Mistake #9: Not experimenting enough

Every sales context is unique. Who do you sell your product to? How complicated is your product? How expensive is it? Is your product sold direct or through partners? Do most sales originate from inbound leads or outbound calls? Is it 1995 or 2005 or 2015? Varying answers to these questions call for varying approaches to the sale. Establish a baseline funnel. Form some theories on how the funnel can be improved. Devise and execute experiments. Iterate and improve.

Mistake #10: Relying on outdated demand generation techniques

When was the last time you bought something from a cold caller? How about from a piece of direct mail or unsolicited email?

Today’s buyer is empowered by the Internet. They are no longer receptive to outbound calls, emails, or advertising. In fact, buyers invest in technologies to keep these messages out of their lives. Today’s buyer begins their journey online, with a search in Google or question in social media. Yet, organizations continue to poor the majority of their sales and marketing budgets into outbound demand generation. Diversify your efforts with an inbound strategy.

Hire a journalist and team them up with the thought leaders and domain experts at your company. Have the journalist produce an eBook, a handful of blog articles, and a few dozen social media messages every month. Align the content with the questions your buyers have at the start of their journey. Help buyers find you.

Written by

Dave Kerpen

The Three Things That Employees Really Care About

Being a leader means energizing and motivating your team of direct reports to perform at a higher level. Again, there is no shortage of literature and advice on this issue, yet more managers get it wrong than right. There is no doubt that a motivated and energized workforce translates directly into a better bottom line. Furthermore, most managers want to keep their people motivated. The problem is that in the clamor of all the advice on how best to motivate their people, managers don't even know where to begin. Sometimes I think we are so poor at motivating people because there is so much information on how to do it. Most of it is too complex. Another factor is that today's managers generally tend to be player-coaches, meaning that they have individual production responsibilities in addition to their managerial roles. Who has the time for all the "people issues"? If only there were a simple way of thinking about it. If only there were some tangible things managers could do without investing a ton of time. There are. Here's a one-minute course on energizing and motivating others:

1. However hard you try, you cannot motivate another human being. Humans are premotivated by their individual purpose and values.
2. Don't ask yourself what you can do to motivate them; try to find out how they are already motivated.
3. Once you know their personal motivation triggers, try as best you can to match their expectations with the work at hand. For example, if someone enjoys creative work, give them more assignments involving creative work. If someone likes customer interface more than processing, try to give them opportunities to interact with customers. The point is, now that you know what they like, to the extent possible, design their job in a way that gives them an opportunity to do what they like best.
4. If, however, there is a complete mismatch between personal motivators and the work at hand, rather than fixing the problem with carrots or sticks, the best course is to find a better fit. In other words, if the demands of the job are diametrically opposite of what the individual is energized by, then it is best to help this individual find another job or role.

So the key is: You have to figure out what your people expect from their jobs, and do your best to link people's expectations with the work you want them to do. Your immediate reaction upon reading this probably is: "This is easier said than done. How do I even begin to find out what each of my direct reports wants?" Fortunately, it is far less daunting than most people think, because most employees care about the same three things in their professional life. When I tell people that everyone cares about the same three things, most initially disagree with me. After all, we're all different. But take a few minutes to try the following exercise before you continue reading the rest of this chapter. 

Imagine you are about to change jobs and have two competing offers. Both jobs pay roughly the same amount of money and are in the same industry. Both are at reputable companies. How will you choose between the two jobs? What factors will you consider while making your decision? 

What factors did you consider? Did you think about the exact nature of your role, and how your work will fit in with the larger picture of the organization? Did you consider your own strengths and limitations and think about which of the two will be better suited for you? Did you think about the work culture of the two organizations? Did you consider the quality of your coworkers, and the way they interact with each other? Did you consider the reputation of the companies? Did you think about future career prospects? Most people go through a list like that when making career decisions.

I have facilitated this exercise in my seminars with hundreds of executives around the world. I pose the same imaginary dilemma, and ask them to tell me what they are likely to consider while making a decision. As they begin to talk, I write down their responses on one of three blank flip charts in front of the room. Each flip chart represents one of the three things people care about, but while I facilitate this discussion and capture their responses, there are no titles on the flip charts. After capturing participants' responses on the three charts, I reveal the hidden titles, which are:

• ROLE
• ENVIRONMENT
• DEVELOPMENT

I then explain that most employees care about the same three things--the nature of their Role, their work Environment, and their professional Development (RED). I ask them if they agree with me that all of their responses fit in with one or more of the three RED buckets. I have yet to hear a response that does not belong in one of these three categories. Slowly it begins to dawn upon people that while each employee's preferences are unique, everyone cares about those three overarching things. 

As managers, you need to talk regularly with employees about the three buckets, and as you keep the dialogue going, listen for information about their preferences and aspirations. Armed with this information, you can label and link day-to-day work with their expectations. For example, if you know that one of your employees wants to get more experience in dealing with cross-border transactions, you might staff her on a team that is working on an important transaction. However, before giving her that assignment, you must talk to her and tell her (label) that you are doing so because it will give her the experience she needs, and explain (link) that it will help her in her career progression if she gains cross-border expertise.

In my experience with managing people all over the world, I have found that most ineffective managers are considered ineffective not because they don't know how to motivate people, but because they don't know what motivates their people. This is an important distinction, and perhaps the biggest key to motivating others. Most managers think they know what motivates their direct reports, but when you ask them, they actually list things that motivate them. They falsely assume that what motivates them also motivates others. I have quizzed countless managers about their knowledge of their direct reports' motivation, and most fall short. 

Granted that one person's preferences and expectations are different from the next, once you know what they are, it is relatively easy to meet the expectations. Most managers are able to meet employees' expectations in the normal course of day-to-day work without making any major concessions. If, however, there is a massive disconnect between an employee's expectations and the role, environment, and development features of the job, then in the long run it is best both for the employee and the organization to separate. Unfortunately, many employees are dissatisfied even when it is possible to match the RED features with their preferences, and this is so because managers don't even try to find out what the employees' preferences are. The key really is in keeping the dialogue going with your people.

You will find that it does not take a lot of time to energize people if you organize your interaction and communication with employees around the simple RED framework. All it takes is a bit of proactive action on the part of managers during the normal course of day-to-day functioning. 

From TOO MANY BOSSES, TWO FEW LEADERS by Rajeev Pershawaria. Copyright © 2011 by Rajeev Peshawaria. Excerpted with permission by Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Why CEOs Don't Focus On People - Even If They Say It's Important

Erika Andersen,  

I often lament the state of people management and leadership in the world today, and note how important it is to the future of business for executives to be better at leading and managing. And you may have heard me opine that poor management and leadership are a key factor in both the exodus of top talent and the failure to build successful companies.

And I often wonder aloud why executives aren’t better managers and leaders, given all the data that shows the connection between engaged employees and great business results.

This morning I got some insight. A post here on Forbes by Susan Adams discusses a new study, conducted by two groups at Stanford Graduate School and the Miles Group, a New York-based consulting company. I was so fascinated by the results that I went to the study itself to investigate further.

The study polled over 160 CEOs and directors of North American public and private companies, focusing on what they saw as the CEOs’ strengths and weaknesses, and asking what measures and weighting the boards used in evaluating the CEOs.

I wasn’t at all surprised by the strengths and weaknesses. Boards (and the CEOs themselves) say that the CEOs are excellent at “decision-making” and “planning,” for instance, and not so good at things like “mentoring and development skills,” “board engagement,” “listening,” and “conflict management.”  Sadly, that’s what I would have expected.

As I read further, however, I had my ‘ah-ha.’  It turns out that there’s a big gap between what boards are actually requiring of their CEOS, and what they think they’re requiring.

That is, while a large majority of board members believe their evaluation of their CEO is balanced between financial and non-financial metrics, it’s simply not true.  For example, the survey found that, on average, a CEO’s performance in the areas of talent development and succession planning was given only a 5% weighting, and only a 2.5% weighting was given to employee satisfaction/turnover. The most heavily weighted metrics were in accounting, operating, and stock price.  The study also found that supposedly important measures like product service and quality, customer service, workplace safety, and innovation aren’t included in more than 95% of CEO evaluations.

Something I’ve learned over the years about us human beings: if you want people to behave in certain ways, you have to make them feel those behaviors are easy, rewarding, and normal.  That is, they have to believe they know how to do the behavior and nothing will get in the way of them doing it (easy), that it will give them something they value (rewarding), and that their peers and/or people they admire do it (normal).

Given this, it makes sense that CEOs don’t focus enough on building a committed, engaged workforce, on creating great customer service, or on innovation: their boards are making it not-easy, not-normal, and definitely not-rewarding to do so.

If boards are giving lip service to the importance of leading and managing well – but are actually only holding CEOs accountable for stock price and growth metrics, then most CEOs will continue to drive financial value for the short-term, in ways that may not be sustainable.  They will read all the data that shows how employee engagement is a key (perhaps the key) driver of performance – nod sagely and agree…and then continue to behave as they’re being required and rewarded to behave by their boards.

Here’s one thing we can do to change this: if you’re a stockholder in a public company, write to your board and let them know how you’d like them to evaluate the CEO: that you’d like that person – and his or her team – held accountable for both great financial results, and how they achieve them.

I’d love any other ideas you have about how to change this state of affairs…
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Check out Erika Andersen’s latest book, Leading So People Will Follow, and discover how to be a followable leader. Booklist called it “a book to read more than once and to consult many times.”