Blame It on the Weather

In the early nineties I also ran sales workshops for MATI, Israel's network of small-business development centers. During one of the courses, a participant who sold scooters came up to me and asked: "Something strange is happening to me. I used to sell one or two scooters a month on average. For the past two weeks I've been selling at least three a week... How do you explain that?"

Although it was perfectly clear to me where the change was coming from, I answered as a joke: "It's probably warmer lately, and people have started buying scooters"... Amazingly, the guy answered me in all seriousness: "Could be. Makes sense"...

Since then I've come across countless cases like this, and in every one of them I've found myself explaining to the person in front of me that the change is probably down to the weather warming up...

Many managers in Israel find it hard to believe that bringing in an outside professional to work on their sales team's methods could double their sales (or a lot more than double them).

The chance of doubling or tripling sales is especially high in companies where a serious mistake has taken root, in the thinking or in the way the work is done, and in organizations that never got around to training their people in this vital area. That's where you find salespeople running on pure intuition, or simply copying their colleagues and their bosses.

One case that illustrates this perfectly happened at a high-tech company with more than 1,000 employees.

In August 2005 I was called in to meet the company's new marketing manager, who had only recently been moved from a senior technical role into marketing. I found a serious man, determined to succeed, who was willing to admit he had no knowledge of or feel for marketing and sales. He'd probably been appointed because of the failures of the people before him, who had brought the plant to the edge of the cliff. He didn't hide from me that his team didn't know the field either, since most of them had also come over from technical jobs and had never had any sales or marketing training.

That starting point (typical of many high-tech companies) only gave me great hope.

When I signed on, I knew, like most of the Israeli public (from the business press), that the plant was in terrible shape, and I figured there might be some difficulty paying my fee (which is exactly what happened...).

While preparing the program, I found people who were discouraged, deeply skeptical, and didn't believe for a second that anything could be improved.

The solution was a very intensive sales workshop, tailored to the complexity of large, long-term projects. Besides the fundamentals of selling, it included a heavy, very professional and very manipulative module in which we built a model for winning against the competition. The process ended with studying and practicing negotiation, using simulations recorded on closed-circuit TV.

Within about two and a half months, the technical team had turned into a skilled, professional sales team that knew how to generate business opportunities, handle them well and turn them into orders, even against tough competition.

I got to see the company's CEO for about a minute, when he walked into the classroom in the middle of one of the sessions and asked us to "turn down the volume and the enthusiasm" because it was disturbing a meeting he was holding in the next room... I very much doubt he was aware of what his sales team was going through, or of the dramatic change it brought to their thinking and their methods.

About six months after the workshop ended, I came across some very happy news in the business press: the plant's sales had gone up by more than 50%!

Through a hobby we shared, I ran into one of the plant's salespeople (as talented and intelligent as the rest of his colleagues) and asked him how things were going at their production plants. He told me the plants were running at almost full capacity. The same figure appeared in the business press at the time.

"How do you explain the transformation?" I asked. "A global boom," he told me...

That same day I hurried to check with friends who know that industry well, and found out, as I expected, that there was no "boom". It never happened.

I kept following the business pages, and in the last months of 2006 I found article after article reporting that the company's revenue had doubled in 2006 compared with 2005. I also learned that the number of customers had tripled, and that the order backlog was using up the plant's entire production capacity and even required expansion. At the same time, the plant was continuing its move from the unbearable losses that had followed it all its life to the beginnings of a profit (despite a big investment in infrastructure).

Knowing the sales team and its skills (before and after), I wasn't the least bit surprised by these results, and I was full of pride in my modest part in them. Until, in September 2006, I came across a piece in the business supplement of one of the leading newspapers, featuring a photo of the plant's CEO getting a loving hug from one of the plant's owners, a businessman every Israeli knows.

Overnight, the successful CEO had become the protégé of one of the biggest names in the Israeli economy. In the interview, the reporter keeps asking him to explain the huge turnaround. Was there an increase in demand, she asks, and the CEO honestly answers: no. Then what brought about the change, the interviewer presses, and the CEO agrees to reveal the secret: "A change in the way management treats the employees. We greatly improved the cafeteria, redesigned the plant's lobby, and in general we showed an interest in the employees and their well-being"...

I still have that article. I was sorry that it didn't mention, not even by a hint, the ten talented salespeople for whom "the penny had dropped". But I was just as sorry that I couldn't jump into the interview and answer on the CEO's behalf.

There's no doubt I would have repeated, for the umpteenth time, that climate change was the one and only explanation for the success...