Measuring People Management Performance: “Who Cares?” and “Oh Sh*t!”

Just as it’s critical to business success to measure and analyse revenue and profit, investment performance, and monitor the costs of production or service delivery, so it is critical to measure the outcomes and processes associated with managing people. This applies regardless of the size of the business. After all, employment-related costs are the single greatest expense for many businesses (research suggests an average of 60-75% of business costs are employment-related). Read more

Sales Consulting

Sales Leadership

What does good leadership mean? Wayne gives his insight by explaining that”Leadership is the art of getting people to willingly strive to achieve team goals”.

View Wayne’s latest appearance on Strategic Selling Group for further insight on this subject or watch the video below:

 

 

Business Finance Consulting

Can Finance be LEAN?

Most of our readers will be familiar with ‘Lean’ methodology and principles, which have been around for a number of years. But, like most people, some readers might primarily associate ‘Lean’ with manufacturing and everything that is linked with production.

In actual fact however, ‘Lean’ can be applied to every function in a business, including Sales, Marketing, Human Resources and Finance.

The Finance function is the same as all other functions in a company: It has processes (accounting, controlling, collection and reporting to name a few), which can be optimised through the application of Lean principles.

The three key Lean principles are Adding Value, Reducing Waste and the Continuous Improvement. Read more

Managing Sales Performance

Managing the performance of a sales team is about establishing a shared understanding of what is to be achieved at every level within the sales team to deliver the organisational goals. It’s about aligning the goals of the team and the individuals in a way that will allow each team member to achieve their respective goals while making the necessary contribution to the overall team performance.

“Your performance depends on your people. Select the best, train them and back them. When errors occur, give sharper guidance. If errors persist or if the fit feels wrong, help them move on…”
Donald Rumsfeld, American politician and businessman.

While there has been much ‘robust discussion’ in recent times as to the benefit of employee performance management and, specifically relating to sales, the use of automated sales performance management, managing the performance of your team and the individuals in your team remains an essential part of sales management.

It’s up to you, the sales manager, to inspire and enable the best possible performance of each member of your team. The performance of each individual is dependent on a complex set of variables that will be unique to each salesperson. These variables include ‘hard’ abilities such as job knowledge, skills and expertise; as well as ‘soft’ capacities such as social and emotional intelligences, attitudes and self-esteem, behaviours and habits.

Adopting a well-defined performance management process enables you to systemically fulfil your role as the team’s ‘performance supervisor’. Read more

Financial Assistance for Exporters

Are you an exporter or aspiring exporter? Is your turnover below $50 million?

If the answer is yes to both questions, you may be eligible to benefit from the Export Market Development Grants (EMDG).

The EMDG scheme is a key Australian Government financial assistance program for aspiring and current exporters. Administered by Austrade, the scheme supports a wide range of industry sectors and products, including inbound tourism and the export of intellectual property and know-how.

If you are currently benefiting from the EMDG, you already know of the 30th November 2016 deadline to lodge your application for the Financial Year ending 30th June 2016.

If you are not benefiting from the EMDG, keep reading… Read more

Business Process Improvement

Process Improvement – Essential Steps

Improving business processes requires companies to first understand their existing processes. While this sounds obvious, senior management will often stipulate that a particular process or series of processes need to be improved based upon their understanding of these processes. However, their understanding and the reality at the coal-face, are more often than not, miles apart.

In order to improve any operational process and provide greater customer value, the process first needs to be understood, and the easiest way to understand a process is by drawing or mapping it. So, step 1 is to map the existing process and gain consensus that “this is how we do it”, i.e. the “current” state. Once you’ve mapped your “current” state, it is essential to then map your “future” and “ideal” states, where the former is how you envisage the revised processes to be in the short to medium term. The “ideal” represents the ultimate long-term goal (perfection), which should serve as a guide or reminder for future improvement efforts. Read more

Great Salespeople Do Not (necessarily) Make Great Sales Managers

It is often seen as a natural career progression for a high performance salesperson to move into sales management. That was certainly my experience as a young, successful salesperson when, early in my career, I was quickly ‘promoted’ into management.

However, those offering me this ‘great opportunity’ gave little consideration to the differences in the roles. It was simply assumed that as I could sell, and sell well, I would get similar results from a team of salespeople. There was little review done to determine whether I had the attributes required to be a good sales manager. In fact, in those days I expect there was little understanding of what these attributes were.

77% of the time businesses make mistakes promoting sales reps into sales management.

Drew Stevens, a business strategist and the author of ‘Split Second Selling’ discovered through his research that “77% of the time businesses make mistakes promoting sales reps into sales management. This is because many business managers believe that those who sell the most make the best sales managers.”

Drew’s findings confirm what I have experienced through my corporate and consulting life. Most high performance salespeople are not automatically high performance sales managers. In fact, the skills and personality that makes a great salesperson may work against them as a sales manager. Read more

What are your People Management Priorities for 2016?

The start of a new year prompts many of us to think about our goals and priorities for the year. Indeed, we’ll be working with the management teams of several of our established clients over the coming weeks to help them clarify their priorities, particularly in respect of their people management strategies.

Based on our recent work, here are a few common themes we expect to emerge (in no particular order):

1. Clarifying vision and strategy – Sure, a regular paypacket is a good “satisfier” for many, but to really optimise the efforts of your people it needs to be clear just where the team/business is heading, how you plan to get there and what role you are asking them to play in helping you get there. Ideally, formulation of vision and strategy will be a joint effort in order to encourage further “buy in”. Once you have a clear vision and strategy, be sure to review to ensure people-management practices are aligned (eg. if it’s part of the strategy to be number 1 in customer service, staff bonus/incentive plans shouldn’t be entirely about sales volume). Read more

Money Has A Time Value

In these times of low inflation, it’s easy to forget or at least underestimate the impact of time on the value of money.

$1 today is worth $1. That is easy to understand. However, $1 last year was worth more than $1 today, and $1 next year will be worth less than $1 today.

One may believe that with inflation under 2% per annum, surely the impact of time on money is minor. But who knows of a business that has borrowed money at a 2% interest rate? Anyone? I certainly don’t. Most of the businesses I know are paying between 5 and 12%. And I am even not talking about the individuals or businesses that draw finance with a credit card and pay around 20%!

So money does have a time value and businesses need to take it into consideration when calculating future cash flows.

The general formula to calculate today’s value of a sum of money (or cash flow) that will be received in the future is:

Present value = Future value / (1 + Interest Rate) Time Read more

Business Strategy Consulting

Aligning Sales Strategy with Business Strategy

Sales strategy must be aligned to the business strategy… That sounds like common sense… however Wayne claims it doesn’t happen in many businesses and their bottom line suffers as a result.

“It’s a matter of making sure that whatever the business strategy you deploy in order to win at business your sales processes should reflect that”.

View Wayne’s latest appearance on Strategic Selling Group for further insight on this subject or watch the video below: