Episode #98: Busy Bosses You Need To Go With Your Salespeople To See Clients

Many of us are player/managers. We run the sales team and we also do our own sales. This means we are pretty busy bees, buzzing around trying to cook up some deals for ourselves, as well as keep the various sales team noses to their respective grindstones. One of the dangers though is we start to leave the business of sales to the salespeople entirely. Especially so when they are seasoned regulars and highly experienced. We feel we don’t have to do much for them and we can concentrate on our own sales. The folly of this approach was drawn to my attention recently when my boss visited town.

Because he is based in New York he is in no danger of wearing out his welcome in Tokyo. We only see him every few years, as he tours his 100 plus country global empire. He was in town recently to celebrate our 55thanniversary of being established in Japan, which is a pretty big deal. In the course of his visit we took him to see some clients. This is when the penny dropped.

We were sitting there having green tea and chit chatting with this medium sized Japanese company, when one of the Japanese executives said something that really grabbed my attention. We have been delivering training for this company for the last four years as regular as clockwork and have built a really strong relationship with their HR team though the efforts of one of our sales guys. The thing is though, that we only deliver one solution for them and it is always the same solution. You don’t have to be a genius to work out what is wrong with this picture.

At some point we will have worked our way through the entire staff with this solution and will run out of things to do for them. This is when the money stops flowing in and life gets harder. So there I was sitting next to my boss, safely sipping my green tea, when I heard the senior Japanese executive talk about the fact the company needed to make some major shifts around employee mindsets. That is just what we do and we have an awesome solution for that problem. This course is known as the Dale Carnegie Course: Effective Communications and Human Relations.

Here was one of the leaders of the company talking about an issue and we have been training them for years without ever managing to introduce this solution for them. Well that is not quite true, because we recently had one of the HR team do the course with a view to having them test it, to see if we could roll it out throughout the rest of the company. Nothing had happened since then, even though the HR person was impressed with the programme.

This is where we get stuck. We are talking to the HR people and they don’t have the knowledge of what the senior ranks are thinking or they have no authority to bring these types of suggestions to the leaders. The occasion of my boss visiting meant we had him, me and our sales guy there in the room with the top brass. Usually our sales guy wouldn’t get past the HR team but this time we had leverage in the shape of the big shot visit.

I did a follow approach to one of the executives who made that remark about mindset change and it looks like we might get to start doing some testing of the programme next financial year. I was reflecting on how the meeting unveiled with my boss and noted to myself that we didn't require him to fly out from New York, to be there, to get access to the top people. I am the President in Japan and I can also get access to the higher ups. But I don’t do that so often. Why? Because I am too busy doing my own sales calls to my own clients and leave the rest of the team to get on with it.

Japan is a place where we can get trapped in the lower echelons of the organisation, where the power is limited and leverage even less so. As the boss, we have to use our vice-regal prestige, status and power to get in front of the senior executives and find out what is on their minds, about advancing their business. When we do this, we can uncover some hidden gems and can make our potential sales solutions come to reality. So bosses, let’s allocate some regular client visit time for our sales staff high potential clients and see if we can flush out some great additional business.