How to Combat Employee Turnover

One unfortunate aspect of management is turnover.  Many of your hires simply won’t work out.  A new worker may develop personality clashes with coworkers, turn out to be incompatible in temperament or values, or may not fit in with the rest of the staff.  Or they may not develop the required skill set rapidly enough.

You want to counsel out any employee who is a poor fit culturally to achieve a smooth running organization. Even the geniuses must go if they aren't team players. Like Netflix asserts: No brilliant jerks! But what do you do if an otherwise acculturated employee doesn’t ramp up quickly enough? Do you show them the door or continue to try and train them?

Cherish Your Acculturated Employees

I’ve written in a previous article that you want to do everything you can to retain your employees who are a cultural fit. Even those who cannot perform their job at present, you want to find a way to keep. But how do you accomplish this and still achieve the organization's objectives?  You want your people to be competent, even expert, at their jobs.  So how can you handle under-performers and lessen turnover?

Be open to change their role within the organization.  Maybe they can perform most of their duties but there are specific areas in which they are deficient.  If so, explore changing the job description and can hand off the weak areas to other individuals.  Return something else to their plate to compensate.

Good personnel managers ensure they overlap people’s skills to ensure several people are available to complete mission critical tasks.  Creative managers adjust responsibilities to assign the best person to each job.

As long as you can accomplish your objectives does it matter who does each task?  If you are willing to move people around to best suit their individual needs and the needs of the company, you will develop stronger, happier subordinates.

Also, you will be giving your staff the ability to stretch their comfort zone within the company.  If you get a reputation for stretching workers’ professional development, you may find your people taking initiative and accepting responsibility outside their own niches.

Next week we’ll discuss how to use METRICS to train your people.  And I’ll delve into another Ingenious Sales Technique called “Follow the Leader.”  It’s a terrific way to pack convention halls and ensure your seminars and presentations are standing room only.  Later I’ll talk about how to turn costly fees for things like credit card transactions into a profit center.  Look for it starting next week.  Until then,

profitable business All!

Identify and Train SuperStar Salespeople

Determining which of your salespeople are top performers is simple, right?  Add up their sales and the highest consistent earners are your stars.

But how do you gauge the productivity of new reps?  How do you account for the inevitable ramp up with hires who are still learning the ropes?  At best they're marginally productive during their probationary period.   How long do you allow them to struggle before pulling the plug?

And what about a struggling salesperson making minimal progress that you believe is going to break through any minute?  How can you be certain you're right, that you aren't just throwing away good money after bad?  And how do you assess and assist long time employees who have started to slip?  Is their drop in volume the beginning of a trend?  Or are they just going through a slump?  How do you help them?

What are Metrics?

The answer lies in formulating and applying metrics.  These are performance measurement statistics that identify skill levels for various tasks for each salesperson.  Highlighting areas of strength and weakness, I  have seen very few companies use metrics to their fullest potential.

That's a waste because properly applied metrics make the job of a sales manager much easier.  If sales management has a silver bullet, it’s knowing how to create and apply metrics.  Correctly applied, metrics provide:

✔    An objective scorecard of performance
✔    Areas of individual strength and weakness
✔    Transparency of the sales process

Metrics can also provide a mechanism for deadly accurate sales forecasting, something we’ll discuss in a future column.

Here is how you can use metrics in your company to supercharge productivity:

•    Develop individual, not team performance measurements
•    Share your reps' stats to empower them to own their progress
•    Provide individual training for weak areas and disregard all others

Assess Manager Performance using Metrics

In larger organizations, upper management can compare departmental and regional metrics to determine specialties and deficiencies of the managers.  A properly applied program of metrics can be a huge reporting and training benefit to a sales organization.

Consult Expert Help in Devising Metrics

To learn more, consult Alexander's Making the Number. Although the concept of metrics may seem simple, developing appropriate metrics for your company is an involved and specialized discipline. To achieve the best results, you need an expert in your corner. Feel free to contact us to help you develop high performance-based measurements for your company.

In the next article in this series, we'll derive a set of metrics for a hypothetical company.  Then we’ll use these to illustrate how you can improve the skill level of each of your reps to vault your department’s sales productivity.  Until then,

profitable business All! 

High-Performance Compensation to Create Superstar Salespeople

In the last columns I shared a few Ingenious Sales Techniques to reach extremely difficult contacts, to breeze past the gatekeeper straight to the decision maker, and to coax the receptionist or administrative person to help you.

I want to turn our attention now to a different direction: sales management, the bane of many business leaders. This is the first of a series of articles on managing top sales talent. In this column we will discuss how to design a sales compensation plan for your company that powerfully motivates salespeople and supercharges results.

How to Motivate (or Create) Top Performers

After decades of designing and reviewing various sales compensation plans, I've discovered a few principles that hold true for salespeople universally. Here they are:

1. Commissioned salespeople will perform to maximize their pay. This sounds simple but salespeople are creative problem solvers. These people can be quite inventive and sneaky. Ensure you are incenting the correct behaviors or your reps will game the system.

2. Provide a living wage base salary that allows them to survive, and pay a handsome performance bonus. During the probation period, add a "non-recoverable" draw to their salary as necessary.

3. Incrementally revise their compensation plan so as the rep grows her sales volume, her commission percentage rises while her base lowers. Ultimately you want to wean all your people off of salary. Being 100% commission increases their confidence, empowers them, and makes them feel self-sufficient. It has several other benefits for the employer too.

Consult an expert to determine baseline levels for wage and commission percentages for your industry.  The best plans can not only help you pay reps appropriately. Properly designed plans can also help you interview and retain better reps and identify top talent.

How valuable would it be to identify future superstars? You can do it with a customized compensation schedule.

In the next column I'll discuss how to create an effective working environment for your sales reps. And in a later post I'll share how to create a metric-oriented process that helps you manage your people effortlessly. You'll learn how to engage your reps constructively and help them identify their problem areas. Then you'll help them get better without resistance. You'll also be able to use this Ingenious Sales Metrics technique to create an incredibly accurate Ingenious Sales Forecast.

Regardless if you're a new sales manager or an old pro, you'll want to learn this! Stay tuned. Until then,

profitable business All!

How to Keep Key Employees - an Ingenious Turn-key Organization pt iv

This is the last of a four-part series of articles on Developing a Self-Running Organization.  In the last post we discussed how to develop the leadership skills of your mid-managers.  By involving them in strategic planning, you can prepare your company to run in your absence even during a crisis.

Turn Line Workers into Managers

Okay, you're regularly involving your senior execs in planning and confident they're participants in your company succession plan. But how do you provide for succession of your line workers?  These may be senior people without any formal managerial responsibility but they know the ins and the outs of the organization.  Tenured employees who might be topped out in pay and marginally challenged, they are highly at risk for leaving.  They may have special skills that would be difficult, if not impossible, to replace. If they see themselves in a dead end position the threat of departure can be great.

You realize you could fix this if you could offer them upward mobility.  Unfortunately because of the structure of the organization or their particular role, while you recognize their value, they're unpromotable.  So what can you do to prevent losing these key employees?

There is a way to provide your line employees leadership responsibility in a manner that achieves a number of benefits to the organization:

• increased productivity
• cheap labor 
• clone irreplaceable employees 
• an extended interview of new employees to determine cultural and skills fit within the organization

Can you guess what it is?  It's offering internships!

Work with the local University

By working with the career center of your local college, you can offer internships to students in undergraduate and graduate programs.  Done properly, you can achieve all these benefits and more.

Assign a new intern to a senior line employee you think may need a new challenge.  Your seasoned vet gets an additional role and becomes a manager by virtue of their supervisory role over the intern.

The company benefits from the productivity of an additional employee at a fraction of the cost of a regular worker and this intern gets to learn your business during this time.   Your labor output increases and you can assess how well a potential employee would fit your organization and perform their assigned job.

Most interns won't prove a fit, but that's fine.  Most employees don't either and end up leaving.  But by utilizing interns in your employee screening program, you won't have the expenses of a new employee.

Executed properly, an intern program can relieve you of many costly burdens.  Think of the typical expense and upheaval when an employee- even a brand new one - departs:  initial training costs, training salary, benefits, incidental issues.  Often you worry about the impact on sympathetic coworkers.  Rarely, you may have legal issues based on discrimination or other matters.

With interns, you won't have all these expenses and you don't have to worry about the affect on coworkers.  Interns are typically temporary so if they don't work out you just don't invite them back.  And done properly, you invest only time.  Regardless of the outcome, your senior employee will still have reaped the valuable experience of managing and training the intern.

Extend a Job Offer to a Promising Intern

When one of your interns proves a good candidate, you can offer them a position upon graduation.  Since they'll already know the job, they'll hit the ground running and require less supervision.  Their retention probability will be much higher than if you had hired someone without a trial period.  After all, you already know they're a cultural fit.  They'll probably get to know their direct supervisor. Since a poor relationship with the boss is the top reason an employee leaves you'll have a better chance of holding onto them.

Bonus: since your new hire interned under a seasoned employee with a valuable and possibly critical skill set, you'll have taken a giant step forward to shoring up that gap.  If you had the foresight to instruct your grizzled vet to train the intern to do their job, you have another employee on their way to adding that skill to their toolkit.

There's a lot more to structuring a successful internship program - how to supervise, how to manage the project, what to stress to all parties, how to ensure your line workers are enthusiastic and competent to manage interns, how to measure results, etc. etc.   It's way too much for this short article.  If you are interested, the author is available for consulting on how to best implement this strategic advantage.  The benefit far outweighs the cost.  For additional help, feel free to contact the author.

This is the final article of this series.  You now have the tools necessary to set up your company to become self-running.  You can add any number of staff for free by using interns; your line employees will view the upward mobility and you'll lock in retention of your key employees; your senior and line managers are practicing strategic planning and delegation which lowers the costs of the company; and you and every other leader can be content the organization will run smoothly in your absence.

And isn't that what every business leader wants?  To set up a business that throws off cash without demanding a lot of time?  Now you can take that trip around the world, right?  Write in the comments and tell me what you think.  Have you used interns?  What was your experience?

Next I'll share another Ingenious Sales Technique.  Have you ever tried to reach a top executive at a company but you were simply unable to reach them?  I used this technique to reach Warren Buffet's administrator at Berkshire-Hathaway Corporation.  It's a fantastic skill from a book that I tweaked.  Stay glued.  I'll share it in the next column.  Until then,

profitable business All!

Instituting a Learning Culture - an Ingenious Turn-key Organization pt iii

Act Strategically by Training Tactically

In the last post I wrote about delegation. Teaching your executives this one skill can increase their effectiveness measurably. I also asserted that to be a great leader you should train your employees to replace you. We'll continue talking about what it takes to develop a turnkey organization: a business or department that you run, not a job that runs you.

To achieve your ultimate goal - that of creating a self-running entity that doesn’t require your constant supervision - requires you to implement long-term strategies, not rely solely on short-term tactics.  To define the two: a tactic is giving a man a fish; a strategy is teaching him how to fish. The tactical approach requires you to perform the task yourself each time you need it done. The strategic one allows you to leave and it will continue to happen without your involvement.  Your objective is to set up as many tasks as possible so they will happen without your direct involvement.

Delegation is a tactic. Instructing your managers how to train their people in delegation is a strategy. By leading your people in top-down delegation and instructing them to copy your training methods, you encourage them to think and act strategically. This is the essence of creating a turnkey organization, one that functions in your absence.

What’s the #1 Reason an Employee Leaves?

Many research firms have studied why employees stay or leave a company. In fact, pay isn’t even in the top three reasons and often not even in the top five. The number one reason surprises most leaders. Do you know what it is?

Poor management.  

It's well known among human resource professionals that Employees leave managers, not companies. For further reading on this topic, pick up a copy of The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave by Leigh Branham.

So what’s the implication? Can you keep your best people if you provide good leadership, upward mobility, challenging work, and praise? The data suggests it. Guess what? These are all things you can provide your people without added expense to your organization.
As a recent McKinsey white paper shows, larger companies are also adopting more non-monetary strategies to attract and retain the best employees.

How to Cultivate Employee Loyalty?

At the consulting firm when starting a job, we routinely surveyed the senior management of our clients. One series of questions that always drew similar answers had to do with employees.When we asked why employees departed, almost all managers listed inadequate compensation, poor or inappropriate benefits, and lack of upward mobility. When asked how they were able to retain those employees that remained, these same managers reported: good pay and benefits, good company culture, and challenging work. The managers were always very confident in the accuracy of these answers.

Why Involve Subordinates in Strategic Planning?

Here's a way to forge intense bonds of loyalty in your subordinates even if the company is small, pays below market salary rates, has high turnover, and the job and industry are very difficult.  You can continue building your direct reports’ critical thinking skills by having them practice strategic planning.

Give each subordinate a copy of your business plan and have them read it thoroughly.  Then brainstorm What If? scenarios with your people and have them devise solutions.  Write down all the scenarios and their proposed solutions in your business plan. Institutionalize critical thinking in your organization to develop action plans that your team can instantly implement in a crisis.

There’s a natural gravitas, an air of stuffiness that arises when a company starts to practice strategic planning. Many executives think that only the highest ranking employees should be let in on the future view, that the whole process should be approached ultra-seriously, ultra-secretively, that everyone should walk on eggshells, and all that failure to design the right plan equals corporate death.
Balderdash! Make it fun. Be as outrageous and childlike as you can. Encourage your people to devise their own what if? scenarios and make a game of it. Give cute prizes for creativity. The best way to cement knowledge it to play with it.

By enabling your subordinates to brainstorm and solve scenario problems, you're giving them the absolute best leadership training you could.  They'll be ready to think and act on their feet when they encounter real-world problems. They won't act paralyzed as do so many managers when confronted with a problem they haven't encountered before.

A manager confronted with a crisis is a more effective leader when s/he has a plan.  And either they'll already have solved a similar problem and have a ready action plan which they can apply or modify.  In the rare event they confront an entirely new problem, they'll be so accustomed to brainstorming because of your scenario training that they'll proceed to solve it.  Eventually you won't even need to manage the process!

If your direct reports are themselves managers, encourage them to run strategic planning groups with their people. By doing this you get everybody on the same page and start to develop a turnkey organization.

Compile all the contingent scenarios and their respective solutions into an annex of your business plan to develop a truly comprehensive strategy that can serve as a future action plan - or a great starting point during crisis.  Imagine having the wealth of brainstorming when you most need it, codified into your business plan.

Having your teams brainstorm What If? scenario planning can be a terrifically valuable and enjoyable aspect of a corporate retreat.  Employees become distant when they’re disengaged and out of the loop. By having them participate in future planning, you invite your people to see the longterm objectives of the company and encourage them to help plan its future. They’ll feel they belong to the company and their work will take on renewed meaning.  What is your most prized management technique to develop subordinates?  Comment and let me know.

In the next article, the fourth and last in this series, I’ll share a way to offer upward mobility to anyone within your organization, even your line workers who might be stagnating. This Ingenious TechniqueTM will increase your productivity while saving money.  It will also develop management skills in these workers giving them leadership responsibility. Do you have a guess what it is? Stay tuned next week to find out. Until then,

profitable business All!

Time Management for Managers- an Ingenious Turn-key Organization pt ii

Developing Leadership Ability Within a Company

Just as you need to acculturate your entry-level hires, you must also train new managers.  If you hire a seasoned manager from outside the firm (a practice I strongly discourage) you will need to acculturate your new hire too.

Your strongest practice is almost always to promote from within.  The reasons for this are numerous.  Most importantly, you'll sap employee loyalty and dull the edge of your most ambitious leaders if you give a senior role to an outsider.  But your newer managers are already acculturated to your organization; why would you want to throw away that training?  Your current employees already know your current policies and the way to do things within the company.  And they already have existing relationships that will help them do their job.  Further, an insider is always more loyal to the company than an outsider.

The only reason to hire outside the firm is if your culture is weak and needs to be shaken up badly.  Occasionally a large company board will hire from outside the company.  It weakens morale but sometimes a board feels desperate.  The strategy is tremendously risky and most outside hires leave after a short time.

Best Methods of Training Subordinate Leaders

As a manager, it's my job to train each of my subordinate managers to perform my job.  Similarly, my instructions to my direct reports is to train each of their subordinates to take over their job.

Too many managers prefer to perform a task because they claim it's easier than handing it off.  But this deprives subordinate leaders of learning and growing within the company.  The first thing I drill into my subordinates is that they must delegate.  I want them to give their subordinates the opportunity to learn as well.

A leader quick to delegate is an effective time manager.  And an effective time manager effectively manages their workload so rarely experiences burnout.  As a result they can remain calm and unfrazzled in a crisis.  This is a benefit of good leadership.

To teach delegation I issue my subordinates one instruction. For every piece of paper that arrives on their desk, or every task they're handed, I insist they ask themselves: "Who of my direct reports can I hand this off to?  Who has responsibility for or is affected by this?" 
How do I do this?   By modeling this desired behavior.

Grooming a New Leader

Assume you're the CEO of your company.  You've just hired a new sales and marketing VP.   This role oversees a sales manager and a marketing director.  They both have direct reports as well.  You need to get your new hire up to speed quickly to lead their department.

Had you promoted from within, your new VP would already know and practice these techniques I'm explaining.  But let's assume you've hired outside the company.

To emphasize the need for rigorous delegation, I assign this new manager every task and swamp them with every piece of paper related to sales or marketing.  I scan a letter or email, or review a task only enough to determine the department head directly below me to whom I can send it.  Ultimately, I want each task to be delegated down to the lowest rung that can perform it, and for that procession to happen one rung at a time.  Only after I am unable to further subdivide a task, will I own it.  I instruct her to act the same way.

If my new hire tries to keep a job that a subordinate could handle, for instance a sales-only task, then I will reinforce my instructions.  She should have delegated that task to her sales manager who then further tries to subdivide it.  Similarly, she will delegate anything related solely to marketing directly to her marketing manager, bypassing sales entirely.  I will also tell her to immediately return an item back to me if I've erred and the item is broader than her department and is thereby my responsibility.

I will continue to deluge my new hire until she gets it.  Then I can start copying her on items I send to people farther down the chain of command obviously the responsibility of that billet.  For instance, I will send a question about a California sale directly to the Western Sales manager.  And she can then start leapfrogging too.

I guide my people to act rapidly on each task to prevent bottlenecks.  They will learn to speed read emails and make quick critical judgments, they learn to divorce emotion from content.

Handling assignments in this manner, the only thing on your new hire's calendar will be those items that directly affect both sales and marketing but not either one or the other.  This means the only thing on your list will be tasks that affect more than one division of the company but not a single division.

If you train yourself and your subordinates to act this way, you will discover your daily calendar freeing up tremendously.  Delegating in this manner will end up moving responsibility and activity down the chain of command.  Let's look at what this accomplishes:

• By training your people all the way down the line to delegate, they become effective time managers.  Ensuring everything runs through your new hire temporarily will also strengthen the chain of command allowing your leaders to forge stronger bonds with their people.
• For each task, the employee on the lowest rung possible will handle it.  This empowers everyone down the line, preventing information from being sequestered, and frees up the time of senior management.  This will make the organization efficient and everyone will be learning.
• If the lowest paid employees do each task, your cost of labor will decrease.
• You free up your senior people's time to react to and plan for unexpected challenges and crises.  You essentially take your managers out of crisis manager mode empowering them to become strategic planners.
• You create a company-wide delegating culture where nobody is irreplaceable.  This means anyone can get sick, take vacation, leave the company, telecommute as needed, or get promoted.  All without throwing the organization into chaos.

In the next article we'll discuss how to develop virtually bulletproof strategy while empowering your employees.  And later I'll disclose a way you can provide upward mobility to every employee in even the smallest organizations while sharpening your peoples' skills.  It's all coming your way in the next few weeks.  Until then,

profitable business All!

P.S. One of my favorite books on time management is Morgenstern's "Organizing from the Inside Out"

Acculturate your new hires- an Ingenious Turn-key Organization pt i

New employees must be acculturated

Last week I explained how to lead your customers.  This week we’ll explore how to lead your new employees and fold them quickly into your company culture. 

What is some of the scuttlebutt that employees grumble about their managers around the water cooler?   They’re overbearing, indecisive, lazy, oblivious, etc. If you sift through all the criticisms, you’ll likely discover the complaints fall into two piles: micromanagement and failure of leadership.  Both of these traits stem from fear: fear of losing control, or fear of appearing too militant.  And they're each sides of the same coin. 

Very few employees realize the difficulty involved in being a manager until they become one.  Management if often considered a thankless, arduous, and vilifying role within a company.  But approached the right way, it can be a motivating, energizing, satisfying responsibility.  With a few tools, any manager can become expert at unobtrusive supervision and grow their position into a highly respected billet within the company.

Recognizing the challenge of leadership, many companies have tried to banish the concept, flattening their organizations, or in a supreme pacifying effort, chosen to label each individual a manager… even if they manage equipment, resources, or just their own workload.  In this article we're concerned with personnel management.  Whether you manage a department of individuals or other managers, this article is for you.

You can usually determine a manager's satisfaction by gauging how they view their job.  Do they perceive the role as mainly keeping people in line, ensuring they do their darn job so they don’t have the chance to slack off?  If so, their corporate life will be bleak.  The best managers empower their subordinates – consisting primarily of getting out of the way – and ensuring they have the support necessary to do their job.

Great Managers

Do you want to be a great manager?  Then flip the hierarchical organization chart upside down and view the true essence of leadership: that you as a boss support your people; your boss supports you; his boss supports him; and so on.  You each empower your subordinates, not preside over them.

Surprising to most managers, your job is not to ensure that your employees do their job.  A boss is not a kindergarten teacher.  Your two tasks are making sure your employees have the tools and support (including training) necessary to accomplish their job; and ensuring each employee is a good fit for the company culture.

It’s more important for an employee to be a good fit culturally than be skilled at their job.  As a manager, your first priority is ascertaining whether your new hire will fit in with and preserve the company culture.  We're assuming you hire individuals with the best ability, especially in today's job employer-skewed market.  So assuming you did a decent job of hiring, if an individual is a good cultural fit for your organization, she can always be taught or, if necessary, be transferred to a more suitable billet within the organization.

Let’s take the example of a customer service rep.  He’s dynamite on the phones and gets results.   However, it turns out your new hire is a maverick, not a team player, and your organization embraces team culture.  You’ve just discovered the disconnect after hiring him.  What should you do?

If he doesn't fit in with your culture and you’re sure you can’t indoctrinate him, terminate.  Conversely, a customer service rep who is struggling with the skills of the job but has the right attitude you must continue to train and support until he progresses enough to do the job.  Will he become a star?  Maybe not, but the question is will he become better than your least competent employee?  If the answer is yes, then keep him and terminate the least competent or find another place for them.  If the answer remains no after a suitable ramp up time, then consider a related position within the company where he will be a better fit.  Do your best to retain an employee who is a cultural fit with your company.

A manager is like the captain of a ship.  It's easier and less chaotic when everyone's rowing the same direction.  You can individually upgrade each person's rowing skills over time.  But it would be bedlam to make a dramatic course correction because one guy's rowing the wrong way, no matter how strongly he rows.

Netflix has a hiring slogan: “No brilliant jerks!”  It’s more important to have the right attitudes in your people than the right skill sets.

Next week I’ll discuss how to correct an employee's behavior so neither the manager nor the employee wind up with hurt feelings.  And we’ll continue exploring the market plan.  Until then,

profitable business All!

An excellent tool that discusses cultural fit: "StrengthsFinder" by Gallup 

Salespeople Should Never Receive Payments

In the corporate world, sales managers often assign the responsibility of receiving payment to their salespeople.  One of our portfolio companies paid commissions out upon receipt.  They had no receivables support and they encouraged their reps to collect payments.

On its face the idea seems sound.  A salesperson gets paid for the sale, so why not have her collect payment?  When a rep collects payment, it even provides an excuse to stay connected.  However, this policy has unintended consequences and can result in huge customer service fallout.

Your reps act as client advocates.  By contrast, debt collectors are bearers of bad news.  By putting a rep in the roll of debt collector, the company has removed a valuable buffer.  A rep can play mediator to quickly resolve misunderstandings and settle frazzled nerves to ensure the business relationship endures.  If the rep must also act as bill collector, he cannot feign detachment; he must include delinquencies in the sphere of the relationship.

People want to keep their dignity so they'll often ignore sales calls if they are unsure whether a rep is calling as sales advocate or debt collector.  The cumulative effect?  Reps focused on billing divide their sales efforts and customers duck their calls.  This decreases sales department efficiency which lowers productivity and resulting commission.  This also increases bad debt which leads to even lower commissions.  And this can cause a drop in staff morale, crippling the company's profitability.

Case Study: Advertising Agency
We suggested our customer hire receivables clerks to encourage their reps to focus on selling.  Billing clerks could then handle receivables and note in the system any customers that were in default.   On average, a sales rep is better compensated than a billing agent.  So, we suggested it makes sense to delegate these tasks to a lower paid employe.  In a later column I’ll explain an easy way to optimize each employee's duties throughout the organization to achieve maximum efficiency.

The result?  Because the reps ignored billing issues they had more time to sell.  Reorders increased.  The extra revenue on additional sales that reps could make more than compensated the company for the salaries of the new billing personnel.

When a rep happened upon a client delinquency,  he ignored it until the client's credit line was restricted by the credit department.  If the client addressed it with the rep, he recommended the client call billing to resolve it as a prerequisite to reordering.  The rep deliberately feigned ignorance instead of addressing it directly with the customer.  In this way, he played the advocate and preserved the client’s dignity. 

Managers and organizations need to realize: the best sales reps are not mere order takers.  They’re client advocates, subject matter experts, and executive advisers.

Yesterday I explained how to eliminate those nasty typos from expensive commercial printing jobs and save on your printing expense.  Next week begins the first of a series of articles on a novel step-by-step approach to developing an integrated marketing strategy.  You can use this as a basis to plan your most cost-effective advertising methods.

This will take a little bit of time but you’ll find it’s worth it.  Upon completing the process, you’ll calculate your ideal cost-effective advertising and know exactly how to spend your budget.  You’ll never question whether you should spend money on a particular newspaper, coupon, flyer, or yellow page ad again.  Stay tuned.  Until then,

profitable business All!