Three pillars support a great sales organization

Kevin Higgins — Three pillars support a great sales organization, says Kevin Higgins, CEO of Toronto sales-training firm Fusion Learning. Attitude, Skills and Discipline underpin the company’s engaged and high-performance sales team — not to mention contributing to an environment that makes Fusion one of Canada’s Top Small & Medium Employers for 2014.

Kevin is elaborating on the insights that brought the Toronto firm to this distinction — and these insights fill his new book, Engage Me: Strategies From The Sales Effectiveness Source — when the gong sounds. “You know about our gong?” he asks as he starts for the stairs. “Close a deal, you ring the gong.” The whole company joins in and the atrium is crowded as Aaron Kotick calls on Shannon Holmes to join him at the front as the most significant collaborator on this win.

The client is a familiar one, so Aaron’s description of the deal is succinct; in a high-performance organization, named seven times to Profit Magazine’s Fastest-Growing Companies list, no one dwells on victories long when there are more to be found. Shannon spins a Prize Wheel and the crowd applauds her win, a coffee-shop gift card.

Small demonstrations of Fusion Attitude like this are just the tip of a company culture that bolsters high expectations with strong support for the sales team. This might seem like a given in a company devoted to sales training, but time has taught Fusion Learning that there are degrees of walking its own walk. Above all, the lean years following 2008, says Higgins, showed the partners that while they were great at coaching individual players, they needed to work on team coaching. There was unevenness in what Fusion calls Sales Participation Rate — some salespeople delivered at or over their plans, while others struggled constantly — a situation common to many organizations. Fusion’s salespeople needed to embrace performance as a mutually supportive team, consistently meeting group targets by meeting personal ones. The Attitude was there, but the Skills and the Discipline, good as they were, needed attention.

The uneven Sales Participation Rate meant that the pipeline was undependable, the results could be rocky and engagement was uneven, even in strong performers. Fusion’s cultural ethos can be summed up as this: “Work hard, play hard, have fun in all you do.” Amenities like Beer Fridays, support for a healthy lifestyle and collective getaways can be the icing on the cake if people enjoy their work, but all these must rest on a foundation of enjoying and being fulfilled by the core task. Fun is a stretch when part of the team is struggling and stressed.

The literature of sales improvement says you can turn struggle into success with appropriate coaching. But there’s coaching and coaching. Sales managers, says Higgins, often think they are coaching when really they are lecturing — seagulling (dump and run) or sandwiching (criticism wrapped in slices of half-hearted praise). Good coaches, says Kevin, can be as tough-minded as the situation demands, and they apply their skills equally to the newbies and the proven achievers. Real coaching combines a confidence-building look at what went right followed by determinedly — and without too much prompting — nudging salespeople toward discovering and internalizing better practices on their own.

For instance, a good coaching session after an indifferent customer meeting might acknowledge the salesperson’s good preparation for the meeting, while recognizing that the questions asked of the customer were closed-ended, and did little to help the salesperson understand how the relationship could be developed. Instead of simply criticizing the questions that were asked, or laying down the questions that should be asked in the future, the coaching sales manager will nudge the struggling salesperson toward formulating and voicing those open-ended questions that provide critical business intelligence.

Coaching at this level is sometimes treated as a mysterious art, but Fusion Learning has demonstrated that it’s teachable within the company and among its clients. It takes work to learn and to keep at its peak, but the results for Fusion Learning and for its clients have been thrilling, whether it’s a call centre whose employees consistently outperform expectations or a “sleepy” credit union branch that is now shattering its targets after falling short for a decade.

Kevin’s definition of Sales Disciplines begins with hiring, around which he has constructed the acronym ROOMr. Smart hiring starts with Recruiting the best — a tough task, but critical. Support for a hiring decision demands serious On-boarding. For some companies, it’s finding a desk and a computer for the novice. For most salespeople, Fusion expects to support the new hire for up to 15 months until she is comfortable and capable in the designated role. The second O and M are Ongoing Management, which is the heart of Higgins’ book, Engage Me. (The last “r” is “retention,” which gets a small “r” because it’s a result, not a process, but is one of the main payoffs, as staff retention smooths results.)

Ongoing Management is a multi-stage process that builds on Kevin’s model for effective feedback:

• get the salesperson’s view of a call or situation;
• build on or constructively correct that;
• get his or her view on steps for improvement;
• build on or constructively lead the subject to additional steps if required.

This essentially collaborative model secures buy-in of the manager’s feedback as it’s delivered, building understanding and acceptance, whether a relatively informal session like a monthly one-on-one (yes, they need to be frequent, Kevin insists) or within the formality of a performance review — an event that, while it essentially follows the model, calls for input from so many players that it should only happen every twelve to eighteen months. The ideal sales meeting also benefits from Kevin’s model; it’s not time for a lecture from the sales leader, but a chance for the leader to focus and direct group energy on collective problem-solving, information-sharing and energy-building.

Raising all three pillars of Attitude, Skills and Discipline is no easy task, says Kevin, and it’s been a long haul from Fusion Learning’s 2008 realization of its own opportunities for improvement, but the concurrent work with clients has encouraged and energized the company through five years of steady, significant growth. Fusion’s methods work, inside Fusion and inside client companies. And this growth has set Kevin’s sights higher. “We’ve been recognized now as a Top 50 Employer among the small-to-medium enterprises,” he concludes, “but now we can set our sights on being named among the big boys — Top 100 in Canada.”

 Kevin Higgins is CEO of Fusion Learning, an award-winning, world-class sales training organization. He takes pride in his great team and the sales performance improvements they help to make in their clients’ organizations. Over the past 20 years, Higgins has trained thousands of sales managers from Fortune 500 companies, including American Express, BlackRock, BMO, Disney, Expedia, Honda, HSBC, iShares, JTI, Manulife, Pfizer, SAS, Sun Life, Scotiabank, TD Bank and 3M. An internationally recognized consultant and public speaker on selling, sales management and learning effectiveness, his passion for lifelong learning is well known and he is respected in the training industry as a “business person working in training, not a training person trying to figure out business.”

 Fusion Learning has a compound annual growth rate of 28% and has been recognized by Profit Magazine as one of Canada’s fastest-growing firms for 7 years in a row. Selling Power Magazine has named Fusion Learning one of the Top 20 Sales Training firms for the last 3 years.

Website: www.fusionlearninginc.com