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Would it help to test the sales force for pay?
By Mike Ma
Next week, I am taking my Level III exam. No, not my CFA, but rather my Level III certification from the American Association of Snowboard Instructors. Like many who take the Level III of the CFA variety, I fully intend to fail my first time. It is a grueling experience -- for 3 days, my teaching technique, knowledge and personal riding will be under an unforgiving microscope. I have been so worried about this exam that I have been using all my time on the snow (whether I am teaching or not) as practice for the exam.
Why do I bring this up? Well, for the management benefits. As far as my supervisors at the mountain are concerned, there generally is little need to measure my output or performance (guest satisfaction, professionalism, technical knowledge, upsell conversion rates), since I have been training for this level. They also never have to worry if I will do the right thing with a guest, since the exam is far more difficult than the most frustrating guest or most challenging lesson.
Wouldn't this be nice if this same were true for sales managers? You wouldn't need to manage salespeople to their goals, rather you could coach them past it.
As I continue to riff of my last post about mastery and perfection, I was thinking, what if we did the same thing with our sales forces (or any function for that matter)? What if we were to make an in-house practical exam or test the basis for bonus or other compensation methods? What if the test was so difficult and grueling that a wholesaler would be at her best all the time in the field only to get practice for the test which would determine a significant part of her compensation?
I've been thinking about this since one kasina position on compensation has been to offer activity-based metrics as the primary way of reducing dependence on gross sales. I was challenged on this by Mary Anne Doggett of Interactive Communications during a breakfast. She said, "If you pay on activities, you will get bad activities." I don't entirely agree with this; however, I do think she has a point -- we ought to incent behaviors, not results. The idealist part of me agrees, but until now I didn't know how to structure it.
I think that this exam concept has some mileage. Perhaps even a national certification of some sort that is geared just for the wholesaler. As I wrote in my last post, you could attract, retain and certify the hardcore wholesaling geeks and nerds, those who are passionate pursuers of their craft's perfection. When you find them, I bet that we too would be able to rely far less on managing goals, and we could focus on coaching past goals, toward mastery.