From first call through close, personality and MAP are major components of sales, but people change and customer contacts move on, often leaving a dormant account. Should you shift an account with potential, especially one that has bought before, to another salesperson?

I don’t believe any company can afford to lose business because of personality differences. So, when it’s the company’s financial health at stake, I really don’t think you have a choice.

Actually, how you do it is of far greater import than whether you do it. You want it to be a winning situation for everybody, not a censure of the “guilty party.”

The first action is to make it company policy that once an account has been dormant for X time it goes into a pool from which other salespeople can take it. The policy needs to apply equally to everybody—exceptions can only lead to bad feelings within your sales team. (If your true goal is to “encourage” someone to resign, there are better approaches that can minimize the detrimental side effects of turnover.)

The best way to make this work is to change the mindset of losing to one of winning, but, above all, the process must be fair, not just in perception, but, in fact.

Start by discussing it with your entire sales team, and use their input to determine metrics for what constitutes “dormant.” These metrics should be universal and apply to both the current account holder and for the new holder. For example, depending on how you define your pipeline, one approach would be to say that if it’s out of the pipeline for X months it’s dormant.

It also pays to incentivize the sales people to let go sooner and in a positive way. Positive, because even if the account isn’t actively producing revenue that salesperson is likely to have valuable intelligence on the three Ps—players, policies and politics—of the account that would benefit the new holder.

By far, the best way to achieve a truly positive handoff is through vested self-interest. Create a viable financial incentive, based on the first sale, to encourage the handoff. Strengthen their interest by adding a small accelerator if the account yields a sale in X time.

Be sure not to take that incentive money out of the usual sales commission. If you do, it will act as a disincentive to the new rep and slow down, or even defeat, your main purpose—to generate revenue from dormant (dead) accounts.

I typically avoid political articles and comments because that’s not what you’re here to read, but I think that you’ll appreciate the applicability to business of the two articles cited below.

“By corrupting the language, the people who wield power are able to fool the others about their activities and evade responsibility and accountability.” Timothy Lynch, Cato Institute

This is from an article on how marketing spin rules communications these days, whether for reasons of obfustication, an effort not to offend, or a bow to political correctness, with the result of clouding the picture, sometimes to the point of opacity.

Whether it’s the government’s recent decision that people have “very low food security,” as opposed to being hungry, or slimehead arriving on the menu as “orange roughy” (at least this one makes sense) clear communications are under fire and in retreat.

I’ve been saying for years, that power stems from the control of either information or money, and I’ve always believed that information actually tops money when it comes to generating and wielding power.

Your MAP determines whether you’ll choose to corrupt communications and hoard information to achieve power or clearly communicate and share all the information that assures that your people can do their job in the most productive, innovative ways possible.

Nobody can force you, nobody can stop you, either way—it’s your choice.

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Over the years I’ve found vested self-interest to be one of the most powerful people motivators available and have written several posts about it.

The idea must have merit when you consider that a Sudanese cellphone billionaire is incentivizing African heads of state to act responsibly.

In this case the incentive is money, but not always.

As a manager, it’s up to you to discover each of your people’s hot buttons, i.e., what really turns them on, and then find a way to satisfy it in return for what you want in performance, innovation, etc. It’s an error to always assume that dollars will do it, or that what turns on one, turns on all.

Hot buttons are as individual as your people and don’t always involve tangibles.

Taking the time to learn what they are allows you to power your team as never before, which, in turn, should give you the ability to satisfy your own.

In a follow-up to yesterday’s post, check out Accenture’s idea for aiding Native Americans—and themselves. An idea conceived by personal self-interest, driven by corporate self-interest, and enthusiastically received by group self-interest.

Sure, it’s an experiment, will require lots of hard work, and probably be refined along the way, but isn’t that the path of every ever discovery made?

I was never thrilled when Sun Tzu’s Art of War became the basis for much of management during the eighties and nineties, so I was delighted by a Business Week article on a new trend in management based on the Bhagavad Gita.

I found it interesting (and heartening) that one part of this philosophy expands on what a brilliant manager told me over 20 years ago. He said that the best managers make their decisions first for the sake of their company, second for the sake of their group and third for the sake of themselves—certainly not the attitude we’ve been seeing over nearly a decade of senior manager greed.

We [RampUp Solutions] have always maintained that business is akin to three legged stool, with employees, investors and customers being the legs, and that if one leg is longer, or more robust at the cost of another, the stool won’t be sturdy and is likely to tip over. The Bhagavad Gita goes a step further believing “that companies should take a holistic approach to business—one that takes into account the needs of shareholders, employees, customers, society, and the environment.”

Three cheers! I’m all for that. I’ve always believed that it would be business, and business-style approaches, not politicians (who never put anything before themselves) that would successfully attack serious problems, such as global warming, the environment, health, etc.

I’ve also always said that the motivation to make this happen would be vested corporate self-interest and, to me, that’s just fine. (I agree with Ann Rand on the subject of altruism.) And guess what? It’s working big-time at companies such as Caterpillar.

Today’s comment may seem a bit abrupt—rather, it’s short and sweet.

I get many queries from senior execs asking for detailed how-to’s and exotic approaches for implementing cultural and other intangible changes, as well as how to encourage (and at times, coerce) their managerial staff into actually doing them.

The most successful method is as simple as one, two, three.

1. Carefully define, in a quantifiable manner, what you want done (not “increase retention,” but “reduce turnover by X%”).
2. Include these well quantified goals in the managers’ annual objectives.
3. Make it clear to your managers that they will be evaluated on these goals and that the evaluation will impact their annual reviews and compensation.

Vested self-interest will do the rest.

I’ve been hearing more and more from a variety of people that they can’t believe what’s being worn in the workplace these days, the backlash that’s happening in some places, and what do I think about it.

My response is that while the White Queen could believe 6 impossible things before breakfast I, having worked with legions of companies and people over the last 30 years, can believe an infinite number of impossible things before, during and after breakfast—with clothing being the least of them!

I find only three impossible things even difficult to believe in the workplace/world today, and those are

• the astonishing lack of common sense in both dress and actions;
• an amazing lack of self-respect in both dress and actions; and, last but definitely not least,
• the incredible ease with which the dumbest/worst Gen Y attitudes flow up (against gravity) and are embraced by their seniors (who ought to know better).

Unfortunately, I have no brilliant, intuitive suggestions or savvy wisdom to offer you that will counter them. The best I can offer is what I tell my clients: Use your intelligence to identify what you’re dealing with and counter it by using some form of vested self-interest to ensure the change you want; use rules as a last resort.

Speaking of hiring and MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) (we weren’t, but we’re going to this week). A manager’s attitude towards hiring is, without question, the biggest single factor in hiring successfully, which, in turn, is the biggest factor in successful retention. (You can’t hire the wrong person today and still have her next year.)

In other words, it pays to hire wisely and well. Most managers I know agree with this statement, but the de facto performances I run into contradict their words. One director-level manager in a large high tech company privately told me that, “Interviewing is the biggest waste of my time. It consumes the most time for the least return of anything I do.” (I can’t repeat what I told him in a public blog.) Publicly, however, he extols the virtue of “quality hiring” and “staffing today for tomorrow.”

Headhunters and HR run directly into this contradictory public/private attitude all the time. Here’s on of my favorite examples. (Definitely no names!)

A controller needed to hire a financial analyst. The HR department kept running ads and forwarding resumes to him only to be told that none were a good fit. The HR manager finally went to the controller’s office personally to find out why none of more than 50 carefully prescreened resumes had been considered strong enough to bring in for an interview. She found all the resumes stacked on his desk, obviously untouched and unread. When she confronted him with this, he admitted that he had not looked at them but said that none fitted in order to have a constant stream of current candidates available “as soon as he got around to it.”

I love telling this story. No matter where, at least a dozen people stop to tell me that my example either (had) worked for them, was a peer, or was their boss, and that I must have changed the title from Controller to protect the anonymity—thus confirming my own view that this behavior is way too common!

Obviously, as with any MAP-related item, real change needs to be internally driven, but it can certainly be externally encouraged. And the best encourager is vested self-interest, which is easily activated by committing a viable percentage of the annual bonus to a combination of low turnover and filling openings with speed and accuracy (hiring the right person for the right position at the right time and for the right reasons).

Continuing from yesterday. Just as culture is created from the top, fear is killed from the top.

How do you kill the fear? Not by proclamation, that’s for sure, although the information that the messenger won’t be shot, that failure isn’t the end of the world, that intelligent risk will be rewarded, does need to be announced to the troops.

But first, you need to be sure that your senior staff believes you when you tell it to them; and you can count on its being a hard sell if it’s a major reversal of your current attitude or they recognize it as lip service to the idea du jour.

Since it’s unlikely that kill-the-messenger types are reading this blog, we can proceed with how to align your senior staff with your world view. Assuming there is trust between you and your staff, you need to create an understandable, stable environment within which it’s OK to fail—a little or a lot—but not in the same way over and over.

• Design a simple methodology provide that environment and encourage risk-taking. There are dozens of examples available on the Net. It’s rarely a good idea to adopt another company’s stratagem whole, but you can adapt ideas/approaches from the best to fit your situation, no matter the size of the source or of your company.

• The very best (I really believe that there is none better) way to move people in a specific direction, let alone get them to alter their MAP (you can’t force that, they have to want to change), is through the use of vested self-interest. Make it worth their while using innovation bonuses, kudos, etc.

• Since you know that not every effort is going to pay off revenue-wise, the innovation bonus must be partly for the effort (linked this story yesterday, but you may not have read it) and partly for not killing, or allowing others to kill, the messengers below them.

People are creatures of habit and conditioning. The speed with which the fear is killed is directly related to how much of a cultural change you are implementing. In other words, the greater the balance in your, and each manager’s, “trust” account the faster the fear will die.

One more thought that may be of use to you—my own definition of “failure” is death. I’ve always believed that as long as I could get up (no matter how slowly) and try again that I hadn’t failed, I’d just postponed success.