Bah Humbug!

I guess that I will be forced to address Christmas several times over the next couple of months. Today I am compelled to address it because I saw Scrooge yesterday. Yes Scrooge exists. I, like most of you, thought he was a fictional construct used as a thinly disguised metaphor representing the “de-humanizing” aspect of industrialization at the beginning of the Industrial Age.

After yesterday, I came to realize that he was real.

An explanation is in order here. I walked into a furniture store and had the pleasure (?) of witnessing the motivational session of a sales manager chastising a salesperson for arriving at the store twenty minutes late. This was a bad experience for the salesperson to be sure; but it was also a bad experience for the store on many levels.

The first level of bad was the fact there were witnesses. Unfortunately the sound acoustics in the store are very good, and the sales manager was passionate about what he had to say. So I and about seven other people got to listen to Scrooge tell the salesperson, a young woman in her mid-twenties, “Your baby sitter problem is yours. You being late is mine! I don’t give a f**k about your problem. But if you’re late again; even one second, you’re outta here!”

When something like this happens on a sales floor it poisons the buying mood of customers. Customers want shopping to be a fun and pleasant experience. What happened on the sales floor was the equivalent of a drive by shooting. All buying activity came to a halt. The seven customers in the store began browsing their way towards the door to leave. The “nervous energy” of those remaining contaminated the “buying attitudes” of the customers who came into the store after the motivational “drive by.”

I have seen this happen many times in many different stores and the results are always the same, buying slows dramatically until there has been a complete change over of customers on the floor.

The second level of bad was the effect on the salespeople. The morale of the rest of the salespeople plummeted. Being is sales is a hard job. It takes a lot for salespeople to get into that “happy place” mentally to be able to do their jobs effectively, and the sales manager just destroyed it.

The effects are salespeople are similar to an experiment I read about in a psychology class in college many years ago. It was a scientific experiment investigating the effects of motivation/de-motivation using plants.

In the experiment, there were three rooms: In the first room were two plants, the control group. These were just left alone. They were watered and fertilized automatically with no human contact. They just grew. In the second room, the two plants were watered and fertilized automatically, but each day one of the plants was talked to in a nice an encouraging way. They both thrived, but the plant talked to grew a little grew taller and a little bushier than it’s roommate. In the third room, the plants were watered and fertilized automatically, but each day one of the plants was verbally abused. Both were equally barren and stunted.

After spending years in sales management and more years watching sales management, I can say without fear of contradiction that the effects of most sales manager “motivational” conversations have the same effects on salespeople and they did on plants.

The third level of bad is the negative impact on the bottom line. For customers, the memory of their experience that day will last for years. This event caused a very visceral reaction that is now going to be incorporated into the subconscious memory of all the shoppers who witnessed it. They now have a negative feeling associated with this store anchored at the subconcious level. In the future, when given a choice to shop at this store again or another store, subconsciously they will go to the other store first.

The store will lose those customers for life. Unless this store creates a reason so compelling for them to come back it negates their subconscious feelings. That reason is usually a “very big discount” sale. And that is what is happening more and more. In this store, on this weekend, they are having 70% off sale.

After what happened yesterday I make the following prediction: The sale will be extended!

When I see retailers posting lower than expected earnings and blaming the housing market, I see a bunch of people in denial. Customers haven’t stopped buying; they just stopped buying from them. So as we enter the season of good cheer, I offer this word of advice to the Scrooges of sales management: Be nice to your salespeople!

My first sales manager mentor was a man all the salespeople would fight tigers for. He taught me well and as I moved up the food chain, I had the kind of sales management success he had by following his five simple rules.

1. Love your salespeople. Make them feel they are the most important people in the company because they are. They are the people who generate the revenue that feeds everyone else.

2. Commend in public. Reprimand in private. Seeing you come out onto the sales floor should be a good thing; not the feelings of dread felt by a cell of prisoners watching the executioner coming for his next victim.

3. Be a trainer, not a dictator. Salespeople are like thoroughbred racehorses; the are nervous, skittish, high strung and temperamental. They rarely respond well to the whip. Do everything in your power to help your people improve their talent, skills, abilities, and life; and they will win races for you.

4. Don’t post sales performance records for all to see. Everyone must believe they are winners, posting performance divides the team into winners and losers.

5. Do everything in your power to make the sales floor a fun and exciting place to work. Happy salespeople cause customers want to shop and return often to a place that is fun and exciting.

The holidays are here (already) and the difference between a good season and a bad season is going to be the happiness levels of your salespeople.