Why Sales leadership needs to be open to feedback from any level and not just direct reports or full time employees?
Michael Phelan
Helping companies uncover B2B buyer insights to drive revenue opportunities
As I work with clients, I help them get closer to their customers and their channel partners. While many clients have the best intension in that regard, day-to-day company operations tend to hamper such goals. On a recent client project, I spoke to 4-6 customers every week during the project. For others, I spend extensive time with front line sales and customer support. Many companies have part time Brand Ambassadors or agencies that offer such services. These employees or contractors have more customer engagement than any other part of the organization and are a great source of customer and program feedback. Tapping into your front facing resources (full time, part-time or contractors) is the best way to get feedback on local program improvements, gather innovative ideas and/or define customer experience enhancements.
The best ideas typically come from those closest to the customer and directly within the retail environment. It surprises me when a company fails to listen to or respond to customer-facing teams who offer dramatic suggestions for improvement. The tendency can be to restrict feedback to direct reports or full time employees and to discount or redirect feedback from lower levels or part-time employees in the organization. This is a big mistake for sales leaders and does not reflect best practices in responsive/agile sales organizations.
One interesting example is a large billion dollar plus CPG food company. The company places part-time Brand Ambassadors (BAs) into retail account on weekends. The program generates strong revenue for the company. The company had a very conservative executive in that position and the program had stalled. A leadership change was announced. The BAs expressed excitement about the new leader who promised change and expressed openness to new ideas from anywhere in the organization. He had visited each region but did not broadly engage with the BAs in those regions. After, more than 6 months in the position, the BAs had received no direct communication from the sales leader. All communications was channeled through a multi-level sales organization.
One of the more innovative and experienced Brand Ambassadors took the time to send the new VP an email. He send a thoughtful and well planned email. It detailed the "Top Ten" things that the VP needs to change in order to drive revenue, improve customers experience and enhance the program in 2017. The rep followed the company's open door policy & the VP's expressed openness to new ideas. He sent this note directly to the VP and did not cc his DM or RSD. He wanted action and had been frustrated by regional inaction and lip service to those very same ideas.
Initially he was excited because he got a fast response form the VP, so he asked for 10-15 minutes to discussed his ideas. The VP quickly refused and expressed anger at being reached out to directly. The only question he wanted to know was, who was the BAs manager. He went on to say that most of these issues are local and should be addressed at that level. The BA knew that virtually all his ideas were national in scope and regional resources had either little or no interest in fixing them or any real tangible control over them.
The next communication was a series of aggressive texts, emails and calls from the BAs DM and RSD (Regional Sales Director) These emails immediately asked the BA to cease and desist any communication to the new VP. In fact, one email requested a formal written consent to never reach out to the Sales VP again. The BA was told that he needed to follow the normal "Chain of Command" The BA did not like the "Chain-of-Command" concept and saw such formal formal structures fail at other companies.
The company announced that they were going to execute a 360 degree questionnaire for the DM who was managing the BA. Obviously, the VP thought that this was an issue of poor local DM management. However, the company never executed the 360 degree questionnaire (despite that fact that the DM announced it on his BA team call)
Through the process, the BA's credibility and feedback was somewhat discounted. The BA's management team superficially thanked him for his ideas, said they valued his feedback and pronounced that they were open to change. They just needed to move such changes through the formal sales channels. Two months later, the BA had heard nothing about any of his ideas from his regional management. After that, the rep stopped submitting ideas for improvement and became non-responsive to outbound requests for his feedback.
The local DM took all this personally and never forgave the BA for communicating up the organization without his knowledge or support. He started to frustrate the rep and call the BA out on minor details. The BA was viewed by the company's retail partners as one of the best BAs in the company and the industry, his store sales uplift was among the top in the nation and competitors were starting to take notice. Within a short period that BA had several offers and left the company. In fact, he took on a bigger regional role for a competitor.
The company has a very hard time finding anyone to work weekends for the rate of pay they offer. It is below what most of their competitors are paying. In addition, the company has close to $5000 and on-boaring costs for each new BSA and a two month ramp to sales productivity.
The rep reached out one last time to share his feedback with the RSD as part of an exit interview. He never heard back and had no exit interview. Apparently the company does not value it's part-time employees enough to justify an exit interview.
In the end the BA came to conclusion that regional sales structure was looking to maintain and protect that status quo.
Thoughts, how would you advise the company and the VP of Sales?
Fractional product + marketing manager, program builder, problem solver
8 年This anecdote illustrates a common conflict between field and operations team members that is often rooted in mutual misunderstanding, misalignment of priorities and lack of effective communication. Team members in the field see the most urgent needs - for THEIR customers - and they are rightly passionate about sharing that information. After all, those customers are also the lifeblood of the company. Team members in operations receive and process feedback from a plethora of sources - the field, customers directly, other customer-facing and internal groups - along with needing to address legal/regulatory requirements - and let's not forget innovation! What is the solution? Know your roles, keep perspective, work together. When addressing product/service feedback, the product or program manager's role is to: 1. Build and utilize a feedback system, and tell team members and customers about it. 2. Budget the ability to respond to the feedback (senior leaders - your support is integral!). 3. Transform the feedback into defined problems while soliciting clarifying feedback as needed, then amalgamate and prioritize the problems, balancing company strategy (which hopefully has been communicated), customer/client importance, and other external factors. 4. Define requirements/programs that address the problems 5. Execute those requirements/programs. 6. Communicate and celebrate delivery/improvement/success The field's role is to: 1. Learn and believe in the process. 2. Gather and submit feedback (or tell customers how to submit it) 3. Endeavor to help customers understand that they're one of many - but that their voice is being heard 4. Communicate and celebrate delivery/improvement/success Leadership's role is to: 1. Assign the right people to manage the product/program 2. Empower them to define and build the process, and require team members and customers to follow it 3. Resist the urge to panic and conce 4. Communicate and celebrate delivery/improvement/success (is there an echo in here?) Following these steps while regularly communicating status is guaranteed to grow mutual trust, understanding and satisfaction. The product/program manager must deliver within a reasonable amount of time, and the field must evangelize that it will happen and then celebrate that it happened. This ongoing cycle is a highly effective contributor to long-lasting customer satisfaction and retention. So to answer the original questions (hah!), here's what I recommend: The senior leaders from each group (in this case, I believe it's the VP of Sales and the leader over the program manager, but there may be others who are impacted) get together and mutually agree that a defined feedback program is a strategic priority (ie, you want certain team members to spend their time on this and maybe not something else). It's good to make this decision during a senior leadership meeting so that all senior leaders are aware that it's been agreed on, who will be the executive sponsor, and a general timeline for delivery. Then appoint a small (<5-person) committee of stakeholders, including the awesome rep who provided the feedback, to define the program's processes and tools. It doesn't have to be big and complicated, but it does need to be defined, used and supported at all levels. Have the committee solicit and receive feedback from both their respective groups, and also keep their groups updated on the progress. Create and publish simple documentation on the program (include marketing - they'll insert it into sales collateral as well), execute it, and (you guessed it!) celebrate delivery/improvement/success.