I just got back from another trip to EMEA where I helped 2 of my F500 clients embrace the 1+1+1=4!® ”Lion taming techniques”. I must say that I am getting more and more excited every time I do these trips because it not only helps me reconnect with my past (before I turned my life upside down to move to the land of opportunity…) and spend some precious time in Paris with my Dad and family but also because the learnings I get from delivering my coaching and training programs with new people and different cultures are always invaluable and feeds back immediately into my sales manager “R&D” and accelerates my “new products” development. This time, I spent a couple of days in Prague with one of my coaching clients and by working with him and his team during a full day, going very deep during back to back pipeline reviews, I realized that they were making a simple mistake that has huge consequences on the performance of the team. The mistake of looking at the sales productivity reports together with the sales reps during the review (which completely kills accountability from the sales rep). I am pretty sure that plenty of sales managers who have tons of reports make that same mistake and I will now create a specific module to address that problem, its impact and how to correct it.
Then after delivering 2 full days of sales management training in Brussels to a very diverse population of “rookie sales managers” from Turkey, Germany, Greece, France, Holland, Ireland and Italy, I developed new sales managers role plays that hit home every time and confirmed to me AGAIN that processes are the best way to overcome cultural differences : Processes are neutral, scientific and work whatever environment you are coming from. Not only that but the warmest feedbacks I received from this event came from 2 sales managers who did not even have sales reps !…One was from a channel manager dealing with resellers and one was from a Key account manager dealing with a global virtual team and who needed to lead sales reps in different countries to produce for the global account…Those sales reps were not reporting to him directly but he had to influence them still.
This made me realize AGAIN (this is not the first time it happens) that 1+1+1=4!® has other huge potential as a Leadership program for Global account managers for instance and for Indirect sales forces as well: here’s a new positioning for me to work on now for my new brand…
