This is the first in a number of articles serializing The Sales Force — Working With Reps by Charles Cohon, MANA’s president and CEO. The entire book may be found in the member area of MANA’s website.

Somewhere, somebody just made a big sale. Was it skill or was it luck?

Any time an order is awarded, the winning salesperson credits success to ability. The loser blames a host of plausible reasons and claims the loss was unavoidable. The winner calls the loser’s reasons excuses. The loser claims a bad break and calls the winner lucky.

How does a sales manager reward the skillful and punish the incompetent without also rewarding the lucky and punishing the unlucky? The answer lies in the work of W. Edwards Deming.

In the 1950s, Deming introduced statistical precision to plant operations, and his work is the seed from which today’s greatest factory productivity systems have grown. Today’s managers apply Deming’s principles to power productivity in departments from customer service to accounting — to every group except outside sales.

The likely reason is a fundamental Deming principle that conflicts with traditional sales management. Deming proves that the cause for flaws in manufactured goods lies most often with a factory’s procedures, machinery or raw materials rather than with a worker’s error. Traditional management of salespeople whose activities outside the office cannot be directly monitored requires that salespeople believe that they alone are responsible for their wins and losses. This lets the lure of commissions combine with the specter of disgrace and unemployment as substitutes for the watchful eye management keeps on workers who stay on-site.

Salesman Jim Anderson believes what traditional sales managers want him to believe. We join him as events that introduced him to Deming begin to unfold.

“Edgeworth just got fired!”

Jim Anderson jerked to attention, pushing aside a month’s worth of blank call report forms he’d been trying to force himself to complete. Bernie Feldman, the most recently hired of Bigglie Products’ salespeople, stood in front of Jim’s desk, clearly agitated.

“Another sales manager gone? When did this happen?” Jim asked.

“Just now. I was sitting in his office, and he was telling me how my numbers were not growing fast enough. Then Jeannie from the personnel department walked in with a security guard and two empty cardboard boxes. She handed him a termination letter and the boxes, and left in less than two minutes. He started putting his stuff in the boxes and I just walked out. It was like watching a car wreck.” Bernie held out his right hand. “Look at me. I’m still shaking.”

Jim wasn’t shaking. As Bigglie’s most senior salesperson, Jim had daydreamed about becoming Bigglie’s sales manager the last time the position was open, but he hadn’t done anything to pursue the opportunity. He would not make the same mistake twice.

Bernie continued to talk about Edgeworth, but Jim had mostly tuned him out. Instead, he began thinking about what he would have to do to get Bigglie president David Buchanan to look at an inside candidate for the position. Even though it would make Jim Bigglie’s fourth sales manager in 36 months, Jim realized that snagging the position wouldn’t put him at any greater risk than he already faced. By now, he’d lasted longer than most in Bigglie’s revolving door environment and even a brief stint as sales manager would look good on his résumé. Plus, he’d recently learned that two of his biggest accounts were planning to move their manufacturing to Asia in the next six months, so Jim had expected to be fired soon anyway once his numbers plummeted.

Of course, six months would be too generous an estimate if word about those account relocations leaked to his co-workers. Bigglie’s sales force knew that when a salesperson’s numbers went down, termination was imminent, putting his or her accounts up for grabs. The first sign of weakness from Jim would trigger a feeding frenzy for his remaining accounts, making them almost impossible to protect, so it was critical not to let the scent of blood get into the water. Pirating coworkers’ customers was a survival skill at Bigglie — those who wouldn’t participate missed too many plum accounts to keep their numbers strong, and soon were gobbled up by those who would. Jim joined in when he had to, but as reluctantly as a member of the Donner party being summoned to dinner. He hated to watch a colleague founder and he felt cheated of the sense of accomplishment that came from closing an account that had never before bought from Bigglie.

Jim knew that sales experience alone was not enough to get him considered as a candidate to become sales manager. He remembered hearing Bigglie President Buchanan say, “The sales manager is not supposed to be a salesman,” each of the last three times he’d introduced a new sales manager to the sales force. “A sales manager’s job is to make heroes, not be one.”¹

The trick would be to get Buchanan’s attention in a management context instead of for sales reasons. He had an idea he’d been holding for a rainy day, so he gathered his notes and asked Buchanan’s secretary for the first available appointment. She gave him a half-hour slot at 8 a.m. the following Tuesday.

Jim planted himself outside Buchanan’s office by 7:30 Tuesday morning. Buchanan waved him in and motioned to a chair. The two exchanged only brief pleasantries before the meeting began in earnest. “Mr. Buchanan,” Jim began, “as you know, we have been using voice mail pretty much the same way other companies do. People call in looking for their salesperson, and we send them to voice mail. We did take the step of giving the salespeople pagers so they’ll know they have a voice mail message waiting, but they still have to phone in and collect the message before they can call the customer back.”

“Hold up, Jim,” Buchanan interrupted. “If you are looking for a new phone system, forget it. I know our system is a little old, but I am not going to drop 10 or 20 grand to save the salespeople a couple of phone calls.”

Jim knew that Buchanan never replaced anything that wasn’t broken, so he was prepared for that interruption. “Actually, Mr. Buchanan, I just wanted to suggest a new way of using the system we already own to let us give our customers better service.”

Buchanan leaned forward in his chair. Getting more service out of his existing equipment was one of his passions. “Sorry Jim, go ahead.”

“As our system stands, every time a customer calls for a salesperson who isn’t in the office, there are two delays. The first delay is the time it takes for the salesperson to call in and pick up the message. The second delay is the time it takes for the salesperson to call the customer back. All too often, we get their voice mail, so we end up playing phone tag. All of those delays hurt our service, and we also run the risk that the customer will get impatient and call another vendor while he’s waiting to hear from us.”

Buchanan thought he knew where Jim was going, and interrupted. “Jim, we already tried having our customers call the salespeople’s mobile phones directly, but it was a disaster. Every time we made a change in territorial boundaries, or promoted a salesperson, or fired a salesperson, we also needed to change the phone number that salesperson’s customers used to reach our company. We never managed to notify all of our salespeople’s customers of the new numbers and the ones we did reach didn’t always bother to change their records. When we realized that salespeople with their own cell phones kept their numbers when they left the company, we knew we needed to have our customers call our main number. Most of them prefer it anyway, because it’s toll-free. Thanks for your idea, but having customers call the salespeople’s cell phones isn’t practical.” Buchanan stood and held out his hand.

“Whoa, Mr. Buchanan, that isn’t where I’m going at all. If I can get just a few more minutes of your time I really think I can help us do a better job taking care of our customers.” Buchanan sat down, and Jim continued.

“Almost every phone system sold in the last 15 years, including ours, has a ‘switchhook’ or ‘flash’ function and speed dial. Our local phone company charges $5 a month per line for call forwarding. Here is what I have in mind. When a customer calls in for a salesperson who is out, we can offer to transfer the call to the salesperson’s cellular phone. One tap on the ‘switchhook’ button on our existing phones activates the phone company’s call forwarding feature and gives us a second dial tone. One tap on the speed dial button programmed for that salesperson’s cell phone number and the call is forwarded to that cell phone. Then the office drops out of the call and the customer is connected to the salesperson’s cell phone.

“If the salesperson is able to take the call at that time, the customer gets to speak with him immediately. No calling in for voice mail, no calling back the customer, no phone tag. If the salesperson isn’t available, the message goes into the cell phone’s voice mail. The next time the salesperson turns on his cell phone, it gives him the ‘message-waiting’ beep and he knows to pick up the call. The $5 per line cost for call forwarding is a lot less than we spend on the pagers, so we give the customers better service and save the company some money.” Jim sat back in his chair and waited for a reaction.

Buchanan sat quietly in his chair for a full 60 seconds. Clearly, he was absorbing what Jim just told him. Suddenly, he grinned, and then he looked at Jim with a different sort of expression on his face. “Jim, that is truly executive thinking. I am very impressed, and quite frankly, I never dreamed you would come in here with a fully formed and well-articulated plan to save the company money. If this works the way you say it will, you’ll be claiming a major ‘attaboy.’ Let’s get this in place and talk again early next week.”

To be continued next month.

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¹ Robert Calvin, Sales Management, (New York: The McGraw-Hill Executive MBA Series, 2001) p. 5.

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