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I have always believed that for a sales team lacking execution, the first to be punished should not be the frontline salespeople, but their directors, regional managers, and city managers. Only an incompetent general leads a sales team with serious execution problems. A key reason is the often-repeated mantra: "I only care about results, not the process."
Results Matter, Process Must Be Managed
It is not easy to make sales managers—such as office directors, city managers, regional managers, and sales managers—reflect on and criticize themselves. Thus, when sales are poor and senior management questions them, they often say things like: "The company's market support promises were not fulfilled, and distributors are very resistant and resentful"; "Consumers say our product tastes bad, worse than competitor XX"; "The product lacks brand awareness, and advertising and promotion are insufficient, so merchants are not enthusiastic about accepting and promoting it." In short, the blame lies mainly with the company, not with their own management or the sales team's execution ability.
But behind the so-called "company responsibility," what is the real situation? There are many problems, but two common ones deserve our attention:
First, they break down sales targets as the content of execution and assign them to individuals. If they are more detailed, they might have each responsible person provide a sales breakdown plan for various channel members or regional business partners. Apart from thinking about policies and promotions, these plans lack substantive content on how to actually get the work done.
In contrast, for companies with better execution, their sales managers typically teach their subordinates four basic methods to ensure sales: First, take the initiative to secure good shelf positions and strive for good displays, rather than accepting the arrangements of stores and outlets as fate; Second, ensure the high-quality consistency of terminal merchandising displays; Third, develop market blank spots, increase secondary wholesalers and terminal network members, improve product visibility, and maintain effective outlets; Fourth, try new channels to seek new sales growth points. Only after these do they consider advertising and promotional support, and use them flexibly and effectively.
Second, they often say "I want results, not process" and "no excuses," but lack necessary and strong supervision and inspection of subordinates' sales execution processes.
Let's discuss this issue separately.
Supervising the Execution Process
Result-oriented management by sales managers is a very harmful habit. Because sales managers are themselves managers of the process, this habit directly leads to two outcomes: First, they don't know what their subordinates are doing outside; Second, they mistake subordinates' deceptive information and excuses for real and major market problems, eventually causing the entire marketing direction to deviate.
When I was a sales representative, I also received various forms like daily sales reports, terminal visit forms, and competitor information summaries. At first, I resented these forms because I felt that running around in the wind and rain every day was tiring enough, but even back at the office, I couldn't get a moment of peace! Besides, I suspected the company—wasn't this just preparing for another round of "blood replacement"? Now, many salespeople in many companies around us have the same mentality.
However, sales managers' later behavior often makes salespeople more relaxed. They initially urge everyone to submit forms, but after a few days, they seem to lose interest in those forms. Even if salespeople falsify them, they can't tell truth from falsehood. In other words, apart from the morning verbal plans and the information on the forms before leaving, they have no idea what the salespeople are actually doing outside. Later, when outlets are lost, display quality declines, and sales drop due to subordinates gathering in teahouses to drink tea, play cards, or do private business, the focus of the problem is shifted to insufficient advertising and promotion.
Clearly, such sales managers are very incompetent. However, they might be right under your nose. From now on, discover them and either demote or fire them, or force them to change: no longer manage and execute based only on a few forms; follow subordinates to visit distributors, secondary wholesalers, and terminals to get the real crux of sales and execution; track, spot-check, and verify subordinates' work.
Of course, you should also require them to reflect more substantive content on how to solve problems in their business reviews and next-period work plans, rather than focusing on complaining about "company responsibility." In fact, if such a work plan is on your desk, you can basically judge that the provider is an incompetent manager with serious execution problems in the sales team.
Breaking Barriers and Strengthening Control over the Process
Slow and distorted information feedback has always been an important reason for poor execution in many companies. In many cases, this factor often gives us a headache because changing it may involve adjustments to organizational structure, management processes, and even channel levels.
Take Shanshan suits, which ranked first in market share for seven consecutive years, as an example. From 2000 to now, Shanshan, with over 40 main franchisees and over 1,500 sub-franchisees, has always lagged behind its same-city rival Youngor, ranking second. What's the problem? One very important reason is that Shanshan's main franchisees act like a wall between Shanshan and its sub-franchisees and the market, making it difficult for Shanshan to understand the real market situation and effectively manage terminals. For example, Shanshan's main franchisees adopt a buyout system. For their own interests, they often push old inventory to the lower levels, order fewer or no new products, and sub-franchisees cannot see Shanshan's new products.
To change this, Shanshan finally had to take measures such as: the market management department directly communicating with single-store franchise terminal customers, with after-sales service following; setting up its own management companies to expand franchised single stores for direct sales and supply, forming more direct links with sub-franchisees. But there is no doubt that channel members whose interests are threatened will certainly create significant obstacles and resistance.
However, even if obstacles and resistance are great, we still need to make efforts to reduce information barriers. Reducing channel management levels and establishing information communication links with lower-level members are such measures.
But to improve the execution of your own sales team, you need to make more efforts in other aspects:
First, in addition to the managers who directly report sales execution information to you, let more people join your information network. They can be logistics staff, salespeople, or terminal shop owners and secondary wholesalers. However, you need to note two points: First, choose the right people; information providers should not be spoiled or arrogant, and it's best if they are inconspicuous; Second, don't let sales managers feel that you don't trust or respect them.
Second, increase the cost of information falsification to enhance deterrence.
Third, make the rules for irregular information feedback more detailed, and maintain updated files of distributors and terminals to verify authenticity through information checks.
Fourth, strengthen market patrols to bring yourself or the department that can restrain the sales team closer to the market frontline.
Equipping More People with Process Execution Skills
To strengthen marketing execution, you must ensure that your salespeople and their managers have three conditions: First, they have the awareness of execution, knowing how not executing will affect their work performance; Second, they are willing to execute, which is often influenced by the awareness mentioned above and their recognition of the content to be executed; Third, they have execution skills, such as sales managers knowing how to ensure execution effectiveness and salespeople knowing how to execute. Let's focus on this point here.
Earlier, we mentioned that many companies now have various market operation manuals, but these skills may not necessarily have been transformed into their salespeople's execution skills. In fact, there are four common problems: First, they naively believe in so-called "learning by doing" and ignore differences in salespeople's learning enthusiasm and ability; Second, even though they know that people have different levels of comprehension, experience, qualifications, and diligence, they still habitually treat all salespeople as being on the same positive level; Third, they habitually treat salespeople as all-rounders, thinking they can deal with distributors, secondary wholesalers, and various hypermarkets, supermarkets, and small terminal shops; Fourth, they assume salespeople have the enthusiasm to use execution skills at every stage.
It is safe to say that if you have any of the above problems, your sales team's execution is problematic. But what should we do?
Here are my suggestions:
First, value systematic training and mentoring, because "learning by doing" cannot replace them.
Second, always remind yourself: leveraging salespeople's strengths is more important than temporarily fixing their weaknesses. For example, don't pull a salesperson who is good at dealing with small grocery stores to handle K/A (key accounts) they are not good at.
Third, confine salespeople to smaller circles and more detailed work. For example, let them know that execution is their mission, and issues like advertising and promotion are for others to handle, so they can better cultivate their own "one acre of land."
Fourth, increase the weight of process assessment rather than relying too much on sales volume and payment collection to evaluate salespeople. For example, the increase in outlets, maintenance of effective outlets, distribution rate of new products, display quality, and terminal merchandising maintenance can all be used as assessment content. Interested friends can also refer to the "Political Sales Personnel Assessment Coefficient" mentioned in the book "Weak Brand Marketing."
Fifth, try to extend the "honeymoon period" between salespeople and the company, allowing them to maintain their passion for a longer time. In fact, we all know that new salespeople and old salespeople differ greatly in work enthusiasm and responsibility. What we need to do is stimulate them and keep their passion for charging into battle with bayonets for a longer time, rather than letting it fade away over time.
Sixth, holding execution skill competitions, fulfilling the company's promises to them on time and in full, providing more promotion opportunities in positions or skill titles, and increasing their identification with corporate culture and sense of belonging can all help improve salespeople's execution skills and their enthusiasm for using them.
Original title: "Not Execution Results but Execution Process"