There’s No Business Like Snow Business

By Paul Dumouchelle 

As I write this my travel plans have been disrupted by the major winter storm blanketing Ohio with up to a foot of snow.  I happen to be at the College-Conservatory of Music (CCM) at the University of Cincinnati, which has a major theatrical performance section, which is perhaps what inspired the title above.  My son had a competition for merit-based scholarships to the university today and is scheduled for an audition for entry to CCM tomorrow.  Now the storm has forced an unplanned overnight stay upon us.

So the weather has forced me to improvise a new plan on the fly and I’ve found an empty classroom to get some work done – including this blog entry. 

This past week I’ve been immersed in a variety of sales activities:

-  Coaching a National Sales Manager in Michigan on how to develop his team – including better performance in improvising new approaches on the fly within a sales call based on client behavior.

-  Preparing a sales training program for next week – including custom modifications based on the unique circumstances of our client in Indiana.

-  Selling our services to a new prospect in Dayton, which meant modifying sales call objectives on the fly as my sales team rapidly ascended the learning curve in this first-ever meeting.

Improvisational skill is essential to business survival.  Rapidly changing conditions, whether it is the weather or the economy at large, require the ability to think on your feet and adjust as necessary. 

This skill demands intelligence, affinity for high-pressure performance and, above all, preparation.  My son and I could not stay here in Cincinnati tonight if we had not planned for the situation – he brought his French Horn with him – which he will need for his audition tomorrow.

Adjusting sales call objectives in real time based on client interaction is most effective when preparation lays out a series of options you can adopt based on the situation.

We all have varying levels of intelligence and different employee productivity in high-pressure situations – these are things over which we have little or no control – but we all can control our level of preparation and when the snow hits the fan it is those who have prepared most thoroughly who will come through the storm in the best shape.

Brand Loyalty & Cars

By Paul Dumouchelle

What a miserable week for Toyota!  The gas-pedal recall has the automaker reeling, suspending sales on its most-popular models.  Can you imagine a worse public-relations nightmare than nightly news videos showing worried Toyota-owners crying in front of Toyota dealerships that have no answer to the safety crisis?

So here I sit with two Toyotas in my garage – both of which qualify for the recall fix.  I’m on a bit of Toyota buying spree, my last three vehicles have been Toyotas.  My brand switch to Toyota from American brands did not come easily.

I was born in Detroit and grew up in the Downriver suburb of Grosse Ile.  Many of my friends, neighbors and family made a living from Ford, GM & Chrysler and some still do.  The brand loyalty of the Detroit area is as firm as ever, if my recent drive up the Southfield Freeway in Detroit is any indication.  For about 10 minutes I was the only foreign brand I saw on the heavily congested motorway – it was really quite remarkable.

My last Ford, though, was pretty much a lemon (requiring two expensive transmission replacements before reaching 75,000 miles) and its been Toyotas for me ever since.  Of course, Ford reported this week its first annual profit in four years, of the big automakers it seems to have the best momentum right now.

This gas-pedal recall shakes my confidence of bit.  If the thing actually fails on one of my cars and I end up flying off a freeway in an uncontrollable acceleration mishap – well, I probably won’t be buying any more Toyotas, if I survive.

Personality Assessments in Sports

by Paul Dumouchelle

Motivation in athletics drives people to achieve widely-admired accomplishments.  Recently I had the opportunity to work on a project regarding a professional athlete.  The job was that of a Tennis Pro at an athletic club.  The results provide a good illustration of the value and limitation of personality assessments in this area.

The key value of personality assessments in athletics has to do with qualities that describe the “type” of athlete a person may be and the likelihood they will perform a certain way in certain situations.  Personality assessments will not tell you if a person has athletic ability.

This situation is the same in any skill-based work – personality assessments have value but they WILL NOT address skill-related questions.  You still need to assess those in some other way. 

A good example of using personality assessments in sports is illustrated in this excerpt from a 3/26/09 press release from assessment-provider PI Worldwide:

Tennessee head coach, Pat Summitt, who recently reached an astonishing record 1,000 wins in her coaching career, leverages the data provided by PI Worldwide’s assessment tool, Predictive Index®, to better understand the drives and motivations of her players. Using the PI helps “…you learn so much about who has patience, who has competitive drive, who you can count on to have the composure you need in big game situations, and how much pressure they can take,” said Summitt in a recent interview with ESPN.

What Coach Summitt describes are key qualities for performance – but nothing about being able to put the ball through the hoop!

For my Tennis Pro, we were concerned that she be able to organize events, “sell” the program to current and prospective customers as well as supervise a staff of support personnel.  A challenging assignment for anybody, but our Pro also has to hit an aggressive first serve inbounds on a regular basis.  Using a personality assessment we reviewed the available tennis professionals who applied for the job, all of whom had already been screened for the requisite athletic skill, and then ranked them on the behavioral qualities most-applicable for the other responsibilities she would have.

This is a good approach any time you have a skill-based position – screen them for the necessary skill first, then evaluate their personality assessments for the best fit.

Glove Love

By Paul Dumouchelle

Smith & Hawken, which until last month was a specialty retailer selling premium lawn & garden products as a division of Scotts Miracle-Gro Co., closed its 56 stores at the end of 2009.  While the recession boosted do-it-yourself business in most areas, it doomed this retailer focused on high-end products skewed toward extravagant ornamentation and over-the-top uniqueness.  When I first heard the news I looked at my poor, tired hands and said, “Sorry fellas, back to ordinary gloves for you.”

I do a fair amount of gardening and work about the house and I’d found the most excellent work gloves of my life at Smith & Hawken a few years ago.  The palm-side was made of deliciously supple deerskin with padding in just the right places and reinforced double-strength in the areas my gloves typically failed after some rough use.  The backs were a  breathable, stretchable plastic mesh of some sort that made them fit like, well, a glove!  Finally, the gloves had Velcro pads to hold them on that adjusted to my wrist size.

The price on these gloves was ridiculous but the thrill of strapping them on as I headed to work outdoors in fine weather made me happy to buy a replacement pair when the first ones finally succumbed to repeated beatings.  I still use the old pair for painting – the few holes in them aren’t a problem for that work.  So when I heard Smith & Hawken was dying I rushed to see what brand was on my gloves to find out where I could look for them elsewhere and learned they were branded by the store.

Aaarrrrgh!

The gloves I loved were to be gone forever!

I don’t know who the product designers and marketers were who fashioned those gloves – but they did a great job.  By tending to the workaday needs of my gardening hands they had touched my heart.  I can’t say that about many of my branded-products experiences these days.

Then a ray of sunshine burst through the clouds of glove-deprivation, Target stores has bought the brand and will be carrying Smith & Hawken products this upcoming season!

I hope Target stocks my gloves – I may buy two pairs this time.

Of Webinars, Segmentation & Learning

By Paul Dumouchelle

Feedback from my first promotional webinar this past week provided me some valuable learning.

The topic of the webinar was about improving sales performance through the use of a “Sales Performance Dashboard.”  The dashboard contains information on sales performance, personality assessments and sales skill assessment.   The dashboard is designed to facilitate better sales performance coaching. 

My learning came in two areas:

1.  Target Segmentation – One of the attendees told me afterward that he felt lost at times during the webinar.  We agreed this was because the discussion on work satisfaction for salespeople assumed a high level of knowledge regarding use of behavioral assessments.  I had prepared the webinar with our current clients in mind – and they understand this topic well – but I’d invited non-clients to the webinar, too, and, like the person providing the feedback, they had a less-advanced awareness on this topic.

2.  Recruitment Assessment vs. Staff Motivation – The webinar’s content regarding personality assessments came from the perspective of the most-widespread use of this tool – for hiring and selection.  I had neglected to take into account that the Sales Performance Dashboard is used almost exclusively with incumbent salespeople.  My discussion needed to focus more on employee motivation techniques and coaching with less emphasis on “matching people to work.”

I should have thought of all this before I began but such are the trials of a “live and learner” such as myself.

Food Stamp Failure

While driving through Bucyrus, Ohio, on my way north to a client located on the shore of Lake Erie, I saw what looked like a classic mini-fiasco in marketing strategy.  What caught my attention was an abandoned convenience store, the snow underneath the gas pump canopy barely disturbed, and the promotional space beneath the empty gas-price sign proclaiming “WE ACCEPT FOOD STAMPS.”

It seemed a pathetic, desperate attempt to attract customers to a soon-to-fail business.  What is most pathetic, though, is the utter wrong-headedness of the maneuver.  Who wants to be seen as a customer of the store that advertises food-stamp acceptance?  I suspect food-stamp usage is more tied to grocery stores, in any case, and if so, the message runs counter to established consumer behavior.

I feel compelled to include a disclaimer that I hope this observation is not understood as demeaning in any way to those who use food stamps.  In January of 2009, with double-digit unemployment and an economy still suffering from a disastrous recession, food-stamp usage is way up and I’m thankful the tool is there for those that need it.

If the former convenience-store manager saw an opportunity in letting customers know about using food stamps in his store, I would have suggested doing it in a less-prominent way.

In my quick transit through Bucyrus, though, I saw several prosperous convenience stores on my route and the contrast with the food-stamp failure could not have been starker.  I took it as another lesson in marketing basics – e.g. focus on your core competency, find ways to add value through service enhancements, product innovation, differentiation, segmentation and communication.  Never forget, also, that when you abandon those basics and chase business through a quick-hit discount or a too-obvious and blatant appeal to a government subsidy you are forever cheapening your position – and that is the road to disaster.

Marketing is a Team Sport

As my home region of Central Ohio basks in the warm afterglow of an Ohio State victory in the 2010 Rose Bowl it seems appropriate to roll out a sports analogy for our profession.

Whether you’re a go-it-alone entrepreneur who relies on professional advice and support for your sales and marketing programs or you’re a corporate marketer leading a cross-functional team in a large organization you engage in teamwork to make things happen. Focusing on a marketing team’s leadership role, productive results are most likely when a leader:

a) Has excellent self-awareness regarding their natural leadership style
b) Understands how others respond that natural style
c) Can adapt their style to work effectively with people who don’t respond well to that natural style

Leaders in marketing efforts tend to be proactive, goal-oriented and extroverted. Their natural style is to achieve things by working with and through other people. They find teamwork enjoyable and a natural process to maximize impact. Details, for them, are a sometimes necessary fact of life but not something in which they revel.

Some typical challenges such personalities encounter in team efforts include:

a) Tunnel vision regarding goals, with an emphasis on their own definition of the goal
b) Tunnel vision regarding the best strategy, with an emphasis on their own strategy
c) Competition for “the spotlight” regarding who gets the most credit for accomplishments
d) Impatience with process and methodology and those who advocate following a process
e) Viewing other team members as “resources” rather than valuing them as people

If you suspect your own leadership efforts may suffer from one or more of these (or other) issues, there may be some comfort in knowing you are not alone. More productively, though, use your natural strength of working with and through others to add a “teamwork expert” to your team. Improved facilitation of the team process and building your leadership skills is critical in the team sport of marketing as are smart segmentation and pricing.

Using Judgment in Job Design

This is an occasional series describing (anonymously) a real challenge faced by one of my clients and my recommendation to them.

Please let me know what topics you’d like to see included in this series.

- Paul

Using Judgment in Job Design

Scenario:  A company has two primary markets – private industry and government.  The company has used personality assessments with its sales team and identified an “ideal personality target” to describe the behavioral requirements for Private Industry Salespeople.  The “ideal personality target” has been validated by looking at the personality patterns of salespeople who have BOTH succeeded and failed with private industry.  The company now wants to develop an “ideal personality target” for Government Salespeople.

The Issue:  The current challenge is to develop an “ideal personality target” for Government Sales based on judgment alone, since there is no set of incumbents focused on government markets to use for validation.

Job Target Patterns

Working with the company’s HR Manager, we took the Private Industry Sales “ideal personality target” – which was:

• Very Extroverted
• Strong Sense of Urgency
• Goal-Oriented
• Comfortable with Risk
• Venturesome

We then modified it based on our understanding of what would be necessary for Government Sales.  Since Government Sales depends on successful responses to highly detailed government specifications we put a premium on attention to detail and risk-minimizing and proposed the following:

• Strong Attention to Detail
• Strong Sense of Urgency
• Extroverted
• Goal-Oriented
• Calculated Risk Minimizer (balances risk vs. reward with a bias toward caution)

In reviewing this initial proposal with sales management, they indicated a preference for a pattern with greater willingness to takes risks.  While it is true that the job requires highly detailed document preparation in response to Requests for Proposal from government entities, the job also requires reaching out in new directions and visualizing opportunities BEFORE a formal RFP is published.  We then modified the “ideal personality target” the following:

• Very Extroverted
• Strong Sense of Urgency
• Goal-Oriented
• Calculated Risk Taker (balances risk vs. reward with a bias toward action)
• Good Attention to Detail

 Summary: 

 When you don’t have incumbent data to validate an “ideal personality target” you can substitute judgment by:

 1.  Looking for jobs that are similar and using the “ideal personality target” for those jobs as a starting point

2.  Consider the behaviors described by such an initial proposal and amend the pattern as necessary to fit the behaviors you really want

3.  Monitor your success in filling the position and how well people perform and use that data for future refinements to the “ideal personality target.”

Driving to Better Sales – Video #1 – Overview

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRsffUawBCI

The “Driving to Better Sales” video series focuses on improving sales performance through systematic sales manager training alongside the construction and use of a Sales Performance Dashboard.  The Dashboard contains the critical information necessary for effective sales coaching.  This first video introduces the series and provides an overview of the Four Key Elements of the Sales Performance Dashboard:

1.   Actual Sales Performance Data

2.  Sales Skills

3.  Matching People to Work

4.  Motivation & Drive 

Driving to Better Sales – Video #2 – Begin with Actual Sales Results

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TL2qCjXseGw

The “Driving to Better Sales” video series focuses on improving sales performance through systematic sales manager training alongside the construction and use of a Sales Performance Dashboard.  The Dashboard contains the critical information necessary for effective sales coaching. 

This second video emphasizes the importance of starting the program with a thorough understanding of current sales performance on an individual level with your sales team.  Improving sales performance requires ongoing tracking, as well, and a systematic approach to this is crucial.