'The Enablers'. We develop humans into winners

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Location: Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India

We Develop Human Capital "Not to unlearn what you have learned is the most necessary kind of learning" said Antisthenes. Our passion at 'The Enablers' is to develop people. Developing human resources is more important to 'The Enablers' than getting clients. We want to make sure that people take way something valuable and useful for their lives. In our workshops, we create an environment which is conducive to learning. We encourage participants to: • Un-learn what is obsolete. • Learn what is contemporary to become futuristic. • Un-learn and re-learn, un-learn and re-learn again! When people follow these three steps, the miracle process begins - the process of excelling. With this mission, 'The Enablers' was established in January 2004 by Prof. Vivek Hattangadi. ‘The Enablers’ unlock the concealed potential in people and leverage their latent talent so they emerge as winners. In our learning sessions, the participants learn the way an excellent surgeon learns - practicing what has been learned through purposeful activities rather than merely from instructions. Our sessions are pragmatic; learning’s are doable. We have a large clientele even outside India.

Saturday, September 06, 2008

7 Myths of a Sales Managers Job

I came across a very interesting article by Ray Wiiliams from B-Net and thought I must share this with you since I agree with every word in it! When we accept underperformance, we are conveying our low standards, and this will affect every one in the organization, right from the lowest to the top employee, the vendors and all others associated with the organization. Managers, who accept non-performance, should be the ones to be given the pink slip immediately! They are the ones who can damage an organization.
– Vivek Hattangadi, 3rd September 2008

The Truth about Sales Manager’s Job

Myth #1: Managers should put the customer first. When managers preach and practice this longstanding axiom, they overlook their employees, who are responsible for creating and nurturing the customer relationship. Customers quickly learn they can bypass the rep and get what they want by appealing to the manager, resulting in lousy morale, high turnover, and customer dissatisfaction.
Truth #1: Manager must put their employees first. Managers should communicate regularly and comprehensively with employees, and work through them when communicating with the customer. Managers should never undercut their employee’s authority to deal with customer issues.

Myth #2: Morale will improve when sales go up. Managers often believe that increased sale will result in higher morale, ignoring the fact that low morale makes it difficult, and even impossible, to increase sales. What results is a classic “chicken or egg” situation where everyone’s waiting for things to improve, with decreasing hope that they actually will.
Truth #2: Morale improves when employees believe sales will improve. To create this belief manager must: 1) present a clear vision of the future, 2) have the sales team makes the reality check that the vision will work and will benefit each team member, and 3) refine the vision into a practical set of steps that everyone agrees are achievable.
Note: this initiative must have an upper management champion or it will die on the vine.

Myth #3: Management’s first responsibility is to make the numbers. While numbers are important, they are always the history of what’s happened in the past. Treating the numbers as the top priority leads to jiggling the revenue stream, pushing revenue into different quarters, and (worst case) cooking the books to make the numbers look good.
Truth #3: Management’s first responsibility is to manage activities. While a manager cannot (honestly) manage the numbers, a manager can always manage the activities that lead to the numbers. If you focus on what the sales team is doing, and measuring the effectiveness of each activity, each day the numbers become a foregone conclusion that needs little attention.

Myth #4: Quota (targets) is an employee management tool. Quota defines the minimum performance standard of an organization and the minimum performance of the individual inside that organization. When it is used as a management tool, managers are placing maximum emphasis on minimum performance. The result is entirely predictable: the entire sales team aims at the minimum standard and seldom exceeds it.
Truth #4: Quota is a corporate measurement tool. Quota is simply what the organization needs to achieve in order to fulfill its goals. Quota has nothing to do with what the employee wants from his or her employment with the organization. It does not motivate, even when managers uses it as a club to beat employees about the head and shoulders at the end of the month.

Myth #5: The manager’s job is to have the answers. Each time a manager answers an employee’s question, he or she becomes a thief. The manager has robbed that person of the opportunity to think and the opportunity to grow. While experience has value, people don’t learn when that hard-won wisdom is handed over on a platter, much less forced down their throat.
Truth #5: The manager’s job is to ask the right questions. The trick to managing effectively is being able to spark, in the employee’s own mind, the thought processes and ideas that will make the employee successful. Great managers know the “magic questions” that help employees discover where they need to improve and how, and which get the commitment necessary to make the improvement.

Myth #6: The top performers define management ability. Managers often point to their top performers as an indicator of how successful they are as sales managers. However, while the manager may have hired that top performer or grown him or her into that role, the success of that individual is more likely to reflect that person’s drive and ability, rather than anything the manager brought to the table.
Truth #6: The worst performers define management ability. The worst performing sales person on the team illustrates exactly what the manager will accept, because that person remains employed. What’s more, the worst performer acts as a drag upon the rest of the team, who are well aware that they must work harder in order to cover for the manager’s willingness to tolerate poor performance.

Myth #7: Management is mostly common sense. When we view the solution to anything as being common sense, we tend not to pay much attention to it, thinking that our common sense will get us through. The result is that the same problems keep coming up month after month, year after year, because managers are relying upon “common sense” to fix them.
Truth #7: Good management requires a complex and multiplex skill set. To get the best from employees, managers must know their employees and their interests, and manage according to those interests. That requires applied psychology. To make sure that sales activities result in profitable revenue, managers must define and track a productive sales process. That requires system analysis. And so forth. If you’re serious about being a great sales manager, you’ll constantly upgrade your skills and knowledge.

From: Ray Williams

Posted by
Vivek Hattangadi
theenablers@gmail.com
6th September 2008