13

EMPLOYEES: REAL GROWTH HORMONE FOR YOUR BUSINESS

Happy employees lead to happy customers, which leads to more profits.

Vaughn Aust, EVP of Integrated Solutions, MarketStar

If there’s anything you’ve come to realize by this point, it’s that unstoppable organizations which are growing their customers, revenue, and success on a continuum have fully adopted and deployed various approaches that, in turn, empower their organization and the people within it. They’ve empowered their customers by enticing them to become involved in identifying their own preferred experience, ensuring that customer feedback on ideas and improvements are not only solicited, but also integrated into the development and delivery of products and services. They’ve empowered their employees by connecting them and their organizations with a common purpose, and building a culture that provides them with more authority and autonomy to make decisions to satisfy customers. They’ve empowered their brand by creating and connecting their employee-facing brand with their customer-facing brand, focusing first on attracting and appealing to employees in order to make the organization attractive and appealing to customers. They’ve also empowered their market share, getting employees and customers involved in helping spread the word not only about the great products or services, but also what a great place it is to work and a great community to be a part of.

From the examples of organizations we’ve shared, you’ve likely noted that each is at varying levels of organizational maturity, some having been in the market place for more than 100 years, whereas others have been around less than 10 years. Regardless, organizations we’ve dissected, both new and old, have achieved significant growth despite economic and market forces by empowering various aspects of their organization. My intention in sharing with you such a wide variety of examples is to dispel any misconceptions or myths you may have relative to empowerment being a strategy that is only possible in organizations that are at a specific level of maturity. Although this possibly isn’t a concern of yours (and it shouldn’t be), all too often I have been told that either empowerment is only possible in young organizations who are just starting out, or on the contrary, it is only possible in organizations that are mature and stable. Both statements, extremes by nature, are false as we have proven throughout this book.

This said, in order to successfully introduce the various empowerment strategies we’ve discussed, some consideration should be made relative to the level of maturity of an organization and specific to where to begin, how quickly to move, and what targets are realistic. To be clear, however, there is no “ideal” level of maturity an organization must have to succeed. This means that now is always the best time to introduce empowerment in order to drive higher revenues, capture more market share, and gain new customers. It’s for this reason that in this chapter we will discuss three starting points to introduce empowerment specifically focused on small businesses: mid-market privately held organizations, large privately held organizations, and publicly traded organizations. We will discuss how each of these organizations should position themselves to adopt the ideas and approaches set forth in this book in order to empower employees and address building a more robust brand awareness, creating stronger employee-customer connections, and constructing a stronger collaboration amongst customer-facing roles. This is no small feat, but nonetheless it’s very achievable and, as I’m sure you’ve assessed from our discussions thus far, absolutely necessary if you want your organization to survive and thrive in the coming decades. Before we dive into how each of these organizations should begin their quest to success, let’s first ensure a few things are clear, as they are necessary for success along your empowerment journey.

Stop Looking for Growth in Isolation

I began this book discussing many of the misnomers relative to growing an organization that most leaders today get sucked into believing are the reasons for their lack of sustained growth. You’ve likely heard and experienced this yourself, with experts shouting from the rooftops about a focus on improving sales closing rates, becoming better at referrals, or improving marketing presence as being the solutions that will lead to growth. These so-called experts and their opinions aren’t wrong necessarily, but their view of growth in isolation is both risky and, more often than not, unsustainable. Consider, for example, that more inbound referrals on a regular basis will increase sales opportunities, but are a fast road to nowhere if the inbound leads aren’t convinced to buy, committed to buy, and content with the product or service itself. Along the same lines, increasing your sales team’s ability to track or close leads is a complete waste of energy if the experience the customer has once they’ve been closed and become a customer is less than stellar. These are simply examples of looking for growth in isolation, failing to consider the sheer importance of ensuring that every customer’s experience is exceptional.

Possibly your organization is struggling with similar ideas, that the inability to achieve sales and revenue growth targets are a direct correlation to a specific function, role, or area within the business. If this is the case, I would first recommend sharing a copy of this book with them. Don’t try to convince them that growth in isolation is a path to nowhere, but rather help them see and hear how unstoppable organizations are growing leaps and bounds by focusing on the various strategies and tactics we’ve discussed. Next, I would recommend interviewing the customers directly.

To confirm that your organization isn’t pursuing activities to grow in isolation, let’s complete a simple exercise to confirm such. Feel free to engage in any of these activities individually or collectively to assess your organization’s current state:

1. Visit with the leaders of your sales team, your marketing team, and your customer service team, and ask them what training is planned for employees this year, and in what areas of discipline. If training is being delivered with a specific department or segment in the organization, then this is an example of growth in isolation.
2. Check in with executives across the organization and ask with whom they plan to engage this year, as a consultant, contractor, or advisor, and what the objectives of the engagement look like. Once again, engaging someone in this way to focus on typically a single area of the business is an example of seeking growth or improvement in isolation.
3. Poke your head into different departments and determine to what extent each department is investing time in cross-training, helping individuals from other departments understand how their team functions and its specific goals and objectives.
4. Drop by some team meetings and see who is there that belongs on another team. Are sales people sitting in your customer service team meetings? Are marketing people spending time in the sales meetings? The degree of interface of various departments in a meeting is a means to measure the extent of isolation that is occurring in your organization.

Whether you decide to complete this activity or simply reflect upon it, I’m sure you’ll conclude that, at least to some degree, there are activities occurring within your organization right now that attempt growth in isolation. Some of the more common examples of what you might find include:

• Meetings and communications shared only amongst a select group or employees.
• Training applied to only a cross-section of employees.
• Misaligned departmental goals and objectives.
• Lack of cross-training amongst departments.
• Limited access by internal working groups to connect with customers.
• Limited access by external facing working groups to understand business operations.

Unfortunately, it’s these activities and the silos they create that result in various working groups, departments, and leaders chasing new solutions, opportunities, and ideas that, in turn, spark the very activities and focus toward growth in isolation. The key to achieving growth and becoming unstoppable, as we’ve identified throughout this book, is to do so through collaboration.

Collaborative Selling: The Best Sales Strategy Involves Those Outside Sales

The other consideration that you must not only understand but agree upon, aligned with the concept that doing anything in isolation within an organization is detrimental to growth, is that collaboration is absolutely crucial to success. From our earlier discussions, particularly in Part 3, we discussed how growth results from collaboration both within the organization and, externally, in engaging with key stakeholders. When it comes to sales and selling, then, taking a collaborative approach means that individuals who work in or support sales or selling are not the only ones responsible for sales. In addition, to ensure sales of products or services, the individuals in these departments never work, train, or meet in isolation of other departments or groups to identify strategies and tactics to achieve sales targets, but rather collaborate with various departments, individuals, and stakeholders from across the organization in order to support growth.

Last year, I was asked to speak to a leadership team of a distributor of household products. The organization sold their manufacturers’ products directly to retailers on behalf of manufacturers. When I met with the CEO and vice president of sales, they identified the need to grow their sales revenue, and in turn wanted me to “pump up” the sales team. “Not a problem,” I responded, “who will be joining us in this session?”

The response was, “Our sales department, of course.” Wrong answer. Sales and selling are not isolated events. Remember my earlier example of the industrial hose distributor who was trying to sell hoses, but doing so at a loss? Their view was that service (who installed the hoses) was a separate group from sales (who sold the hoses), and the result of this view and approach was a loss of profits from sales being made on account of misquoting, rework, and delays. I advised the CEO and his vice president that the only way we were going to achieve their objectives of gaining commitment from their team for pursuing and achieving higher sales and revenue growth was to bring in not only the sales department, but representatives from all departments that supported sales. In their situation, this included employees from marketing, customer service, distribution, and business development. With this broader team together, we went about getting the group engaged in sharing ideas and strategies that would result in not only more sales, but higher revenue and increased profitability. This is the key to collaborative selling. A company can always sell more by focusing in isolation on better sales techniques or stronger marketing campaigns, but the resulting revenue is often lower than the desired targets, mainly because the strategies identified and deployed are disconnected from the key areas that deliver on sales commitments.

The CEOs of the various unstoppable organizations whom I’ve discussed throughout this book have all built a foundation around collaborative selling, which is the idea that every employee has a role to play to make sure customers know about the brand and buy the products. In turn, this ensures that the customers’ experience is exceptional so they return again and again. They recognize that making sales to a customer is a team sport and best achieved through organizational collaboration.

The concepts behind collaborative selling that these CEOs employ include the following:

• Employees that are hired into the organization are first and foremost a cultural fit for the organization, its customers, and specifically the team they will be working with. Skills needed to do a job are something that can be learned, but cultural fit is crucial to success, no excuses.
• Every employee must understand how their roles directly and indirectly influence a customer’s experience of the organization’s products or services. In this way, every employee guarantees that their customer has a great experience.
• Employees are educated continuously on what customers value, how this value is shifting, and how living the organizational values and purpose support consistently delivering it.
• Ongoing cross-training of employees in various roles and departments outside of their own to learn and stay abreast of how other employees impact the customer’s experience, and how both roles working more effectively together supports the collaborative approach and reduces the tendency for gaps in perceptions.
• Employee meetings and various other communications with and amongst employees are held cross-functionally, blending meetings and discussions amongst various departments and teams to ensure a continuous understanding of the challenges, issues, and value each department brings.

What’s important to point out as well is that applying and practicing these concepts in building a collaborative approach to selling costs virtually nothing. That’s right, there is no cost to collaboration, yet the outcomes and value both the organization and its customers receive are priceless.

Here’s another example on how important a collaborative approach is and how little it can cost. A few years ago, I was asked by a mid-sized manufacturer to look at their sales processes and approach to identify what improvements might be necessary. After initially speaking with several customers, sales reps, and employees in sales, customer service, marketing, production, and distribution the issue became clear. Everyone, from the internal sales team, the external sales reps, and customer service were working their butts off to improve sales, but they were doing so in isolation. This was creating competing priorities, wasting time, and ultimately having a negative impact on the customer’s experience.

Sales was working hard to grow and close deals, but in doing so they were isolating the sales reps who were often calling on the same customers. This created a mixed message and led to a lack of trust on behalf of customers, as they felt like everyone was trying to sell them something.

Customer service was working diligently to deal with customer issues and concerns while processing orders, but found that sales was often making promises the organization couldn’t deliver, meaning they were in the role of advising both the customer and the internal sales rep that what the customer wanted simply wasn’t possible. The customer felt lied to, and in some instances, chose never to connect with their sales agent again.

Sales reps were effectively doing their best to find and track down new leads, but were isolated from staff in the office, often misrepresenting what the company could reasonably achieve in the way of lead-times, product quality, and customization. The internal sales team thought the reps were doing this just to make a sale, but in reality they were misinformed. The customer, of course, suffered once again as a result.

The more you instill and support collaboration amongst employees and other stakeholders around the sales and revenue growth objectives of your organization, the better chance you’ll have of achieving them. This is not a new idea, I realize, but one that I find is rarely adopted. In my view, it’s essentially selling for dummies. You don’t need to be a sales guru to understand that by helping everyone in the organization understand the role they have in influencing the customer’s experience and then support them in creating an environment in which they can work together, the better chance you’ll have of not only higher sales, but higher profitability with each sale.

Building Your Secret Sales Force

Interestingly, the concept of collaborative selling is so straightforward, yet so underpracticed and underappreciated by so many organizations that I’ve encountered, that I like to tell those who actually adopt the approaches we’ve discussed they are building a “secret sales force.” I coined this term for a few reasons:

1. All employees have the opportunity to make or break a customer relationship based on what they do and how they do it.
2. The most successful sales are those that meet the customer’s needs in a way that ensures not only does the customer want to engage with the organization’s products or service again, but is willing and enthused about telling others how great your organization is.
3. There is no sense in selling anything if you can’t do so profitably. When employees are clear on how their roles influence not only the customer’s experience, but also the ability of an organization to sell and deliver a product or service cost effectively, they are empowered to ensure every transaction is profitable. To do otherwise, regardless of reasoning, is simply a willingness to step into the short line toward going broke.

In summary, when every employee in an organization is clear on what customers need and want, they understand how their role can add to and support a positive customer experience; they have the ability to make decisions without hesitation about supporting the customer and doing their job as effectively as possible; and they are constantly involved in and enticed to collaborate with others both inside and outside the organization to make the customer’s experience progressively better. Thus, the only possible outcome is a group of employees committed to sales and selling.

For additional resources and bonus materials to help you build your secret sales force, make sure you visit www.unstoppableorganization.com.

There is more to becoming an unstoppable organization than building a secret sales force, and with these foundational concepts now fully explained, let’s identify specifically how your organization, regardless of its size or maturity, can fully adopt and integrate empowerment and collaborative selling in order to join the list of unstoppable organizations.

Unstoppable Growth: Empowering Your Organization to Grow

As I mentioned at the start of this chapter, the idea that what a smaller or mid-market organization needs to do to take a more collaborative approach to growth and in turn build their secret sales force is often very different than what a large publicly traded company needs to do. For the purposes of our discussions, I’ve outlined the action steps for each of these organizations in the following and created definitions for each differently sized organization. Feel free to make your own assessment as to which category you fit in based on the brief description below each. It’s less important to consider where to start than it is to actually start. In addition, recognizing that some of these steps may already be employed within your organization to varying degrees, I’ve outlined the top five priorities that should be focused on and fully adopted, rather than specific steps to take.

Small Business: 3 to 50 Employees

These are businesses where the owner(s) are working and building up their teams while growing their business. Often, there is very little capital available to support employee training, as it needs to be reinvested in the business itself. On the positive side, small businesses have the ability to make decisions and shifts quickly on account of their nimbleness and youth in their space.

Priority 1: Ensure all employees fit well within the team environment. Be willing to train the right person in developing the necessary skills.

Priority 2: Ensure cross-training is adopted so you have a few employees as specialists and the majority as generalists. Not only does this create variety for employees, it also protects the owners in the event an employee leaves or becomes ill.

Priority 3: Share openly with employees on a quarterly basis the opportunities and objectives for growth, and help them understand how they can contribute. Make the discussion less focused on revenue and more heavily focused around growth of the business, providing sustained employment for the employees and an opportunity to continue to learn and shift into new roles.

Priority 4: Avoid hiring “managers” to oversee employees, but rather identify team-leads, those people who have the greatest experience amongst employees and who invariably get along with and are respected by others.

Priority 5: Introduce daily meetings or “huddles” with employees to discuss the priorities for the day and to allow employees a chance to raise questions and concerns. Seek to build collaboration amongst the team in resolving issues; don’t jump in and try to fix everything yourself.

Mid-Sized Organizations: 50 to 1000 Employees

These are organizations that often have one or two facilities and contain multiple departments centered on operations, sales, customer service, and finance to name a few. The organization has both managers and some frontline leaders (either supervisors or team leaders) in place to lead teams, and has some infrastructure in the way of documented procedures and processes for employees to follow. In addition, it’s likely that software platforms such as ERP and CRM (customer relationship management) exist.

Priority 1: As employees grow in number, leaders are increasingly important in order to ensure that employees and departments are working collaboratively. It’s at this point that there is a risk that leaders begin to “manage” employees versus support their development and growth. As a result, leaders, be they managers, supervisors, or otherwise, need to fully understand their own personal behaviors and communication, and understand how these have influence (good or bad) on others. This can be achieved through completion and understanding of tools such as incorporating a DiSC or Myers-Briggs assessment. The key is to increase awareness.

Priority 2: As mid-sized organizations grow, more layers of management are often introduced. As a result, senior executives become disconnected from how the business actually runs. To counteract this, ensure frequent interactions between executive leaders within the organization and frontline employees. Increase awareness of how employee roles influence customers directly and indirectly while also making sure executive leaders understand the challenges and frustrations experienced by employees on the frontlines.

Priority 3: Growth to this level also often results in communications becoming more isolated. As a result, it’s necessary to increase communications across the organization by creating more frequent collaborative meetings amongst all departments. Openly share priorities and issues, and determine how collective actions across departments can resolve issues and improve the customer’s experience.

Priority 4: Create connections between departments by frequently rotating employees from one department into another. For example, have someone from accounting spend 30 days working with the sales department, understanding the various roles and ensuring they are exposed to customers in various ways. Spread out the 30-day increments through a period of several months and make sure that all employees have this experience.

Priority 5: As organizations grow, they often become increasingly disconnected with customers. For this reason, regularly solicit customer feedback on various products, services, and ideas to identify what changes or improvements are necessary as the organization grows.

Large Sized Organizations: Greater Than 1000 Employees

These are organizations with multiple locations, often spread out globally. Their breadth and depth of customers are highly diverse, as are their employees. They have highly complex software and technology in place to support sharing of information.

Priority 1: Customer needs are so broad and diverse it’s often difficult for employees to connect with what customers need or want. It’s critical to help employees understand the general influence their roles play in supporting current customers and bringing on new ones. Leaders must continuously focus on helping to make this connection.

Priority 2: Leaders are often focused heavily on corporate objectives versus employee developmental objectives. To make sure employees remain engaged, leaders at all levels need to remain aware of their influence on employees (using tools such as DiSC or Myers-Briggs) and, in turn, use this awareness to stay connected with them.

Priority 3: When an organization grows to this size, engagement becomes difficult to manage on account of so many employees working with so many different leaders. It’s crucial that senior leaders invest time working in various departments, connecting with employees, asking about how the environment could be improved, and taking rapid action to support such.

Priority 4: Further to the previous priority, in order for employees to remain engaged, it’s crucial that leaders focus on employee empowerment, building employee confidence with the ability to make decisions in isolation, and ensuring the continued effectiveness in their roles.

Priority 5: Attracting and retaining employees at this size can be as much of a challenge as attracting and retaining customers, guaranteeing that time and effort is invested in capturing employees’ commitment to the organization and allowing them to support building the brand.

As I’ve outlined several times in this book, if you’re finding it difficult to assess which category your organization fits into, or which priorities to begin with, don’t worry about it. What’s important is that you start introducing the concepts of empowerment now, making adjustments and improvements as you go, rather than get caught up in what to do or when to start. This is a journey, so there will be plenty of ups and downs; however, starting now will mean you are already ahead of your competition who is still considering what they should do next.