This is the fourth 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.
© artinspiring | stock.adobe.com
Jim had never before made a major presentation directly to Bigglie’s president, so when the time came for his private meeting with David Buchanan and Harold Katz, Bigglie’s most senior VP, he was both excited and nervous. Katz’s formal title was VP of operations and manufacturing, but he’d been pinch-hitting some of the sales manager’s administrative responsibilities during the search for Edgeworth’s replacement. Those duties required Katz to be familiar with the distributor council’s concerns, so he sat in on Jim’s presentation.
David Buchanan puffed up a little bit as Jim related the distributor council’s comments about minimum billing. “Jim, this is very good stuff. I am a numbers kind of guy, and when somebody can lay out a situation clearly in black and white like this, I am the first one to jump on board.”
Buchanan’s tone made Jim wonder if Buchanan was more pleased with the opportunity to improve Bigglie’s policies or with the opportunity to announce he was a “numbers kind of guy.” It was a small meeting, just three men seated facing each other across Buchanan’s desk, but Buchanan’s voice had boomed as though he were addressing a packed auditorium. Buchanan relished his reputation as a tough manager, and Jim was sure being a “numbers kind of guy” was one way Buchanan chose to reinforce that image.
“Thanks for standing in for us at the council, Jim. I’ll send out a letter that waives minimum billing for distributors with annual purchases of at least $50,000. As far as that compensation thing goes, you’ve come to me with a problem but not a solution. When you and Harold can come back to me with a solution instead of just a problem, we will have something to talk about — and make sure you bounce your ideas past Enrique and Maria Gonzales before you bring them back to me. No point in wasting my time on something the distributor council won’t buy into. If you can’t come up with a brainstorm you can sell to the council and to me, send them a bedbug letter1 and we’ll see if the problem fades away by next year’s council.”
Jim floated out of the meeting. “When you and Harold can come back to me with a solution” sounded a lot to Jim like he had been elevated toward Harold’s level, where a sales manager would expect to be. Harold broke into Jim’s reverie. “Jim, why don’t you stop by my office tomorrow morning and let’s kick around this compensation thing a little bit. Say 8:30?”
The next morning Jim stuck his head through Harold’s doorway at 8:25. He had walked past the office of the VP of manufacturing and operations before, but he never had been inside. The office sat out on the plant floor, a prefabricated 20’ x 20’ structure with enough sound proofing so Harold could conduct a conversation, but not so much that he would miss any change in the dull roar of sounds that accompanied Bigglie’s production processes. One April 1st, the shop foremen decided to find out just how well Harold tuned in to the sounds of the plant, and arranged to silence all of the production processes at 10:30. They had intended to time how long it took Harold to notice, but he had burst out of his office so quickly that they didn’t even get a chance to look at their watches. The consensus was that his door had swung open before 10:31.
As Jim settled into a well-worn chair in the spartan office, he noticed the walls were covered with charts labeled “Productivity” or “Quality” and subtitled with various production processes like “Rouselle Press #2” or “NISSEI Molding Press #3.” The only non-statistical posting looked like it might be one of the faxed joke lists that the salespeople often circulated in the office. Looking closer, he saw the title was “W. Edwards Deming’s 14 points2.”
1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs.
2. Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.
3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.
4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.
5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.
6. Institute training on the job.
7. Institute leadership (see Point 12 and Ch. 8). The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul as well as supervision of production workers.
8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company (see Ch. 3).
9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.
10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.
- Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership.
- Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.
11. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.
12. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual merit rating and of management by objective (see Ch. 3).
13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.
14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody’s job.
Harold caught Jim’s eye as Jim scanned down the list. “Sorry, Harold. I thought it might be a joke list.” Harold winced a little, and then he carefully measured his response.
“Jim, that is about the most unfunny list in the history of manufacturing. Are you at all familiar with how Japan went from a defeated country with almost no infrastructure or manufacturing facilities at the end of World War II to achieve the status of a world economic superpower?” Jim shrugged, a little embarrassed at the vigor of Harold’s rebuke.
“Japan had absolutely hit bottom,” Harold continued. “Quite frankly, maybe if they hadn’t hit bottom they wouldn’t have been so open to new ideas, but the guy who put them on the right track in 1950 was W. Edwards Deming. The statistical processes and philosophy that Deming ultimately collected into these 14 points is what turned Japan into what it is today.” Harold pulled out the thumb tacks that had secured Deming’s “14 Points” to the corkboard wall and handed the sheet across the desk. Jim looked them over, still unsettled by Harold’s passionate reproach.
“Harold, I don’t know much about manufacturing, and I know that’s your specialty, but when I look at this list in a sales context, I can see some problems. Look here at number eight: ‘drive out fear.’ I mean, every sales manager I’ve ever worked for has tried to keep the salespeople a little scared about their jobs to keep them on their toes. And number 10 is a problem too. Every company uses ‘slogans, exhortations and targets’ to drive the sales force harder. And if you’ll forgive me, number 11 is a no-brainer too. How can you have a sales force that doesn’t have quotas? If they didn’t have quotas, they would just coast. Again, I wouldn’t try to tell you how to run your factory, but this stuff does not apply to an outside sales force.”
Harold reddened as Jim spoke, but his reply was remarkably controlled. “Jim, I’ll tell you what. I have been applying statistics and Deming’s principles to our shop operations for a long time, but doing it is a whole different skill set from explaining it and teaching it.” He reached behind him and pulled a slim volume from his bookshelf. “Why don’t you give me a little time to revisit the fundamentals so I can do a decent job of making my point the next time we get together? How does the same time next week sound to you?”
Jim bristled slightly at the stress Harold put on the word “fundamentals,” as though Harold had to “dumb the topic down” enough for Jim to understand it, but he knew better than to show his irritation.
“OK, Harold, I guess I could do that….” Jim’s voice trailed off, undermining his efforts to avoid revealing that he was agreeing under duress.
Harold noticed, and wondered if he was up to the task of convincing a 45-something salesman to buy into Deming’s 14 points and statistical thinking, but he stood firm. “I appreciate that, Jim. I am sure that it will be a very productive meeting.”
To be continued next month.
1 Perhaps an urban legend, “bedbug” letters are said to date back to the era of overnight railroad Pullman cars and an apocryphal story of a dissatisfied customer who wrote a letter to the railroad to complain about bedbugs in his Pullman car sleeper bed. The letter he received by return mail was apparently a heartfelt apology, with a detailed list of steps that would be taken to insure that the problem never recurred. The customer was very encouraged by the railroad’s concerned reply, until he noticed his original letter had been inadvertently included in the same envelope as the railroad’s reply. Paper-clipped to his letter was a piece of notepaper, with these words scribbled on it: “Send this guy the bedbug letter.”
2 W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Advanced Engineering Study, 1982) p. 23-24.
MANA welcomes your comments on this article. Write to us at [email protected].
