Chapter 5

Understand the Politics

In a large, open office in Manhattan, my team and I stood in the lobby waiting for Cindy. We were on the second story of a former warehouse, facing a wall of floor to ceiling windows. Light flooded in and created a silhouette as she strode toward us, a dark shape with loudly clicking heels. “Cindy,” she said, thrusting out her hand. Her grip was painful, and I tried to rub feeling back into my palm as she led us to the conference room. She opened the door, greeted Kevin, the head of sales, who was already seated at the table, and briskly left.

Cindy was the head of the account management group at a large technology services company. We were hired to help create an account planning program, but, as we discovered on that first day, our job was really to mediate between sales and account management.

We had already met Kevin, a portly, astute, good-humored sales executive. As we waited for others to arrive, he offered his perspective on the company and the conflict between account management and sales. “We’re a service-oriented, rather than sales-oriented, company,” he began. The account managers—the people in Cindy’s group—controlled the accounts. Many had worked with the same clients for years, and in some cases decades. Cindy herself had been there for almost 40 years. Her group had huge amounts of recurring revenue, but as sales began to decline, the CEO hired Kevin and a strategic sales team. They brought in new high-tech offers and launched new marketing and social media programs. “These guys know how to sell,” said Kevin.

Early on, however, sales started running into opposition from account management, who wouldn’t let them do their jobs. “Account management is blocking us out of the accounts,” he told us. The account management team argued that they uniquely understood the needs of the account and that servicing the accounts well was the key to growing them. Sales was allowed into the account only if the current manager didn’t feel threatened.

But account management didn’t really sell; they were too busy servicing. Sales was a five-letter word to them. “We’re trying to sell new business,” said Kevin, “and create new accounts. But the account managers are not penetrating the accounts they currently have. They’re just babysitting. There’s so much opportunity, but we’re not allowed in.”

Cindy, it turned out, was the chief barrier. She inherently didn’t understand sales. Because this was essentially the only company she had ever worked in, she didn’t appreciate the way sales organizations operate. In fact, she told the CEO point-blank that she didn’t know why they needed a sales organization at all. Cindy controlled a lot of revenue and when she talked, the CEO usually listened. From her perspective, the account management team worked with the clients and that was the only type of sales they needed.

“My people are pretty advanced,” said Kevin. “They understand our industries and offers better than the account management people; they are better at recognizing opportunities. And they can get to C-level people at the customer. The account managers are stuck at the middle buyer level and don’t have the gravitas to have meaningful conversations with leadership.”

It wasn’t good for business. A week before I arrived, the sales organization was fighting with account management over control of a large financial services client. Sales saw opportunities to expand the account. But the account manager had told sales, “We’ll let you know when it’s time to come in. We’ll let you know if any new opportunities come up.” In the meantime, a competitor came in, proposed a deal, and stole the business. We discovered that this feud had been raging for years. It was a slow poison drip into the company’s culture.

The next day we met separately with Cindy, whose perspective was that Kevin’s people were disruptive and trying to edge their way into the accounts. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I don’t mind a salesperson coming in to the account. But I don’t want them sounding like a salesperson.” She feared the salespeople would scare the client and ruin the relationship. She had a misperception of salespeople, and she couldn’t make a distinction between a stereotypical salesperson and a seasoned sales professional, which is what Kevin had.

When we got into the account planning conversation, I asked Cindy a foundational question: “Who owns the account plan?”

She lurched across the desk. “Did Kevin tell you to ask me that?” It was obviously a point of contention. As tough and competitive as Cindy was, she knew her people were not skilled to sell. They considered their own sales organization their competitors and were protecting accounts from them, which instead helped the real competitors steal business.

It was one of the most politically charged environments I had ever witnessed, and I’ve seen many. These were seemingly normal people, until they began interacting with one another. But this level of misconduct hadn’t appeared overnight. It had built up over the years because leadership tolerated bad behavior. People were clamoring for what they perceived to be scarce opportunities, and a culture of paranoia thrived.

What Creates Politics?

Why do companies have these types of politics? Clearly, some organizations are more political than others, resulting in rampant conflict. In an open market we call it competition. Companies compete with one another, and that’s usually healthy. But politics is the ugly stepsibling to competition. When people within the same company get political, it’s detrimental to the company’s success. Four conditions contribute to a political environment: scarcity, lack of leadership, culture, and hyper-accountability.

Scarcity

If the company doesn’t have a strong sales strategy, methodology, or sellers, then it operates in an environment of perceived scarcity rather than abundance. One of the main problems the technology services company at the beginning of the chapter dealt with was a perceived scarcity of accounts. While they had a lot of recurring revenue, they didn’t have many new accounts coming in, so each account manager held tightly to what she had, protecting it from the sales organization. It was an absurd notion, but many account managers believed that if they allowed a salesperson access to their account, they would lose control of the business and therefore their job.

In fact, just the opposite was true. One of the days we were working there, we saw a woman frantically walking through the sales offices, looking for someone to help her. She had managed a $30 million account for years, and unbeknownst to her, the customer had put the business out to bid. She learned that her account was in jeopardy not through the relationships she thought she had, but when she received a general RFP sent by email. She had been so deep in servicing the account that she hadn’t considered business development. She had assumed the future would look just like the past, and she had obviously missed something somewhere.

She didn’t have the skills to respond to the RFP, nor had she bothered to cultivate relationships with any salespeople at her own company. On the contrary, she had spent years shutting them out. So she was in a pickle. She eventually found a salesperson, but he was in the wrong vertical—high tech, rather than insurance. He was able to help her at a high level, but between the two of them, the business was at risk. If she lost the account, chances were good that she would lose her job.

Many of the people in account management shared her beliefs: opportunities were scarce and needed to be protected.

Lack of Clear Leadership

Another driver of infighting is a lack of clear leadership. If a company is left to its own devices and has groups that are relatively equal in power, you’ll probably see more politics and bickering. A strong leader will set the agenda, make clear decisions, and not tolerate deviance from those decisions. Strong leadership reduces politics.

When I began working with this company, Kevin and Cindy were each working separately with the CEO trying to implement their own strategies. Kevin wanted to define roles and ownership of opportunities, and clearly spell out how sales, account management, and the client worked together. Cindy wanted sales to stay out of account management and focus only on bringing new deals in, and then hand them over to account management.

To my utter amazement, both were fully confident that the CEO, Frank, was implementing their plan without consulting their rival. When Kevin spoke to us, he presumed the new organization structure he had proposed to the CEO was a done deal. “I already spoke with Frank. We’re ready to move ahead with the new structure,” he said. There was no mention of Cindy. What had she said? “I have no idea,” Kevin said. “Frank said he would take care of her reaction.”

This level of misconduct came from the top. Frank, a soft-spoken intellectual man, was making a bad situation worse. He was unwilling to make clear decisions about account ownership because he didn’t like conflict. Frank agreed with Kevin when he talked to Kevin and agreed with Cindy when he talked to Cindy. It was a ridiculous situation.

Culture

Culture can be an enabler of politics. If you have an environment of scarcity or weak leadership, a strong culture can counter that to some degree. A culture centered on values including respect, open communication, and humility will not tolerate overly political behavior. A Machiavellian culture, however, will encourage politics and survivor-like allegiances. Where people see opportunities to take advantage of the system, their actions can feed the politics.

Hyper-Accountability

Extreme accountability—and its opposite, avoidance of accountability—can lead to political behavior. In an environment that seeks out causes for everything that happens, good or bad, extreme accountability can lead to witch hunts. “We didn’t hit our numbers. Who missed their quotas, and how far off were they? We lost the ACME opportunity. What happened? Who was on the pursuit team? We invested a ton of money in developing that new idea. Why didn’t it work? Who was on the development team?” An organization that seeks blame drives politics. In today’s environment of fast-cycle experimentation and fast-fail development, a culture of blame can suck the life out of creativity and productivity.

The technology company in the example is not alone with its conflicts. “We see that a lot in Lexmark with our hardware management services offerings,” says Sue Holub, vice president of enterprise software marketing. “The salespeople tend to align toward IT and procurement as their primary point of contact, whereas in the enterprise software realm, we see a concentration around finance and the different lines of business. So, the same account has very different entry points to move the business forward.”

The account plans require multiple groups to provide input, and because of the political nature, sales is forced to reposition the offer before asking a particular group for input, says Holub. “How do we want to position the offering? How do we want to position our capability? How do we want to differentiate from competition?”

Lexmark’s solution is increased communication. “We connect sales and marketing together. They have important conversations during the account plan development. There have to be a number of touch-points between different groups—sales leaders, senior management, solutions, operations—that would inform a thoughtful account plan. Each group has to ask, ‘What do I want to accomplish in the account this year? What am I building toward?’” she says. The more the groups communicate, the less political the conversations become.

Effective account plans eliminate the scarcity, scrambling, and overlapping roles. Account plans create a clarity of action and mitigate the dynamics that contribute to politics and squabbling.

Understanding Roles

One of my first recommendations to defuse political situations is to understand other perspectives and priorities, and where the work of others might intersect with yours. You might not agree with everyone all the time, but understanding helps people reach across lines and work together toward a larger common goal. Wherever possible in your organization, clearly define roles, keep people in their own lanes, and establish rules of engagement with other functions. Here are the roles most vital to the account planning process and their priorities.

CSO

The CSO’s main concern is always the revenue number he has to hit. It’s almost always bigger than last year’s number, and it usually feels unattainable. Secondarily, he’s concerned with hiring and retaining the right people. Account plans help him with both.

The CSO takes requirements and feedback from rest of the C-level about where the business needs to go. He gets input from the CEO and the board of directors, who determine where the company is headed long term and near term. The CSO also gets insight from finance, led by the chief financial officer, about revenue and profitability goals, and from the chief marketing officer (CMO) about priorities for the company’s products, services, and overall value proposition. For example, are there strategic products that need to be sold? Are there new products that are going to be introduced? Does the company need to change the way it’s positioning to the market? The CMO and marketing also determine what market segments the organization will target. Finally, the chief people officer may have input into how the organization is building out talent and how it can support the overall account planning process.

Ultimately, the CSO’s role is to give the mandate for account planning and maintain accountability. He provides insight, challenges the validity of the account plan, and confirms that the plan meets the strategy and the quota requirements.

Account Leader

At the account level, the account leader owns the account vision, objectives, and strategy to achieve those objectives. The account leader is the person who is ultimately responsible for achieving the sales goal in the account. She may be a global account manager, a national account manager, a strategic account manager, or similar. The account leader takes the account planning process and applies it to her customers. She is the owner of the process, which means she has to round up and organize the account planning team in sales and other related functions like operations, marketing, and finance, which can be a challenge. Whether the account plan succeeds or fails is determined by the account leader.

Sales Team

The sales team comprises the people who work on the account and who have responsibility for executing the account plan. These may be salespeople who cover certain business units in the account, certain product or service offers, or certain geographies. When the account goal is set, the sales team will own the entire goal, and some individual reps may own specific parts of the goal as well. For example, the account may have a $32 million goal for the year, and a regional account manager may personally carry $10 million of that goal. But because she will also get credit for the attainment of the overall $32 million, she must collaborate with the whole team, beyond her region.

Sales Enablement

Sales operations, trainers, and coaches play critical roles in the account planning process. Sales enablement may have a role in coaching, talent selection, training, incentive compensation design, and sales tool design. Sales enablement should be involved in the account planning process to ensure that the organization can fulfill the value proposition and meet the customer’s budget and timing requirements.

For large strategic accounts or accounts with highly specific needs, the company may enlist the help of the product organization to develop solutions for the customer. Sometimes these specialized products and services can be spun off to other accounts in the organization.

Two important areas of marketing support include product marketing, which can help with the development or customization of the value proposition, and field marketing support, which can enable the sales team with marketing tools and special offers. Marketing can also provide somethings of value, or SOVs, including research that would be helpful to the customer, or admission to an event like a conference or industry forum, where the customer can engage with other organizations or learn about important topics.

“At Lexmark, sales and marketing coordinate around the concept of segmentation, message, and offer,” says Holub. “Both at the macro level and within the account, figuring out what the right messages are to each buyer and orienting offers or content to those various roles for awareness and engagement—that’s where marketing can play the strongest role. Segmentation looks at the makeup of accounts based on geography, departments, or roles. That allows you to really home in on where your sweetest spot is. And, depending on your company’s enterprise account planning approach, there could be multiple sweet spots. That’s where marketing has to get kind of microtactical, because you’re essentially creating campaigns and programs to target one specific person with a set of messages and an offer to try and drive a specific solution forward. But that might be completely inappropriate for another person.”

As in the case with Lexmark, increased communication can defuse political behavior. David Long, vice president of strategic sales at LexisNexis, describes a three-legged stool of sales, market planning, and product development. “Those three areas have to be completely aligned with not only maintaining the existing business, but also creating solutions that will drive that relationship forward. Those are really the three primary areas that construct the plan.” If these three groups don’t communicate successfully with one another, not only will they fail to create effective account plans, they won’t be in position to respond to rapidly changing market conditions.

“The market is moving so quickly, and while our product pipeline is good and is appropriate, things change,” says Long. “And when the market changes, we all have to be aligned, so our product development teams can shift swiftly to be more effective, to provide more effective solutions to the market. They get locked-in on development efforts, and, understandably, they like to know at the beginning of the year what they have to accomplish. They have road maps in place to deliver certain products or enhancements. So when the market shifts, sales has to go to them and say, ‘Here’s a functionality with a given solution that’s really critical for a client.’ That can really break their stride. And stepping into a different path, while at the same time trying to accomplish the things that they were already set to accomplish, is very challenging.” The communication and relationships between sales, market planning, and product development have to be healthy for all three groups to be successful.

“It’s critical to get past that inflection point where everybody is comfortable, and say, ‘I don’t have the answers. Let’s start really thinking.’ We’re using our account planning sessions as real workshops to do that,” he continues. “And that energizes salespeople like nothing else when others start contributing in that way.”

These massive accounts require people who understand not only the features and benefits of the products and how they fit within the account, but also the operational requirements and resources the team needs to fulfill the offer. Respect for one another’s role, priorities, and limits can help keep lanes clear of conflict. When leadership can clearly communicate these roles, and prevent poaching or blame, it’s setting the stage for healthy account planning and collaborative teams.

Getting Over the Hurdles

For all the time wasted on political fighting, you’d think company leadership would never let this behavior continue past several hours. Unfortunately, most of us have been in environments where political behavior goes on for years, slowing progress and dragging down morale. If your sales organization is one where leadership appears content to keep the status quo, fear not. With the help of one or two reasonable colleagues, you might be able to work around those who are unable to compromise. I’ve seen the following four tactics help sales teams succeed when conventional interactions have failed.

Take a Perspective of Abundance Rather Than Scarcity

Help the sales team develop a mindset around the opportunities in the account rather than the limits of what it has now. Consider ways it can grow the account rather than protecting it from others in the organization. A great account planning process can help sales teams see and plan for abundance rather than squabble over scarcity. The process gives you the capability and tools to chart your destiny rather than react to the fearful attitude of others.

Recognize That You Have More Control Than You Think

At the technology services company described earlier in this chapter, despite the fact that they had organizational problems with the leaders above them, the teams found ways to make it work. For example, in the pharmaceuticals vertical they found common ground and set up collaborative teams. They didn’t rely on leadership in the organization to give them cues on how they should act; they decided to be proactive. They grew their accounts and their incentive pay. While some were sucked into the vortex of politics, often using it as an excuse, others figured out how to work together and crossed organizational lines. Set up a ring of collaboration outside of politics and take control.

Increase Communication With the People You Can

A lack of communication and withholding information are currencies of politics. Information is power, and when sales teams open up communications with the people they work with, they will see the politics melt away. For example, communicate the objectives of the account team and share those openly. Seek input from all members of the account team and acknowledge their contributions. Publish the proceedings and decisions from key account planning meetings. Communicate the benefits of working together to hit your goals as a team.

Show Leadership if You’re in the Position; Otherwise, Don’t Get Involved

If you are a leader within the sales organization, decide what type of culture you want and take actions to drive it. Culture has four major pressure points.

1. Culture starts with the message from leadership. Too many organizations communicate a message from leadership like “we’re a collaborative organization” or “we’re innovators” that receives little follow-through.

2. Culture is driven by what the organization practices and demonstrates. If you want a collaborative culture, leaders and teams within the organization have to demonstrate those behaviors. If those behaviors are new to the organization, demonstrating them allows others to watch and emulate those behaviors.

3. Culture is driven by what you measure and reward. If collaboration is important to the culture, find ways to measure it and then reward or recognize people for demonstrating those cultural attributes.

4. Culture is driven by courage. The leader has to have the courage to push the organization toward its cultural goals. She also has to have the courage to act and remove detractors from the culture. Sometimes this has to be done visibly to the organization to demonstrate the culture’s importance.

If you’re not a leader, don’t try to extend your authority beyond its limits. While it might be tempting to step up and fill the silence left by a sales leader with his head in the sand, chances are you’ll create additional conflict.

While my team and I eventually established an account planning process at the aforementioned technology services company, the political culture made the process longer and more complex. We watched the sales organization lose opportunities, we watched talented salespeople leave for healthier environments, and eventually we saw the CEO get fired. Politics do no favors for anyone. While bad behavior may seem tempting in the near term, I’ve never seen positive long-term results. Steer clear of political people, respect the priorities of others within your company, and keep what’s best for your account at the center of your account plan.

1. What role does leadership in your organization play in setting the cultural direction, and how can you support that?

2. Have you defined clear roles and responsibilities for the account planing process?

3. How is political behavior being addressed in your organization by leadership and by team members?

4. If you’re a leader, how can you move more decisively to address your culture and politics?

5. How can you collaborate with your peers to address political challenges by identifying abundance, taking control, communicating, and leading?