When we interview sales managers as a part of our client engagements, we often ask them to tell us their biggest management challenges. The responses we’ve heard recently are fairly consistent: high spans of control, lack of administrative support, and too little time to coach their reps, just to name a few.

But there’s one challenge they never mention that I believe is as troublesome as any of these: The lack of a common language with which to manage their salespeople.

As I write this, I’m flying home from London where I attended one of our public sales management workshops. As with any major international hub, the variety of languages spoken in London is quite wide. Just walking down the sidewalk, I was able to identify Russian, German, French, and Spanish, in addition to my own distinct form of Southern American (that’s Virginia, not Brazil).

But when a wrong turn or the need to coordinate logistics necessitates cross-cultural communication, the lack of a common language can really get in the way. For example, take my interactions with some of my colleagues who live in London.

On the first day of the workshop, I asked a Londoner for directions to the meeting space. “Just take the lift down to the ground level,” he responded, “and then bang a left.” As he noticed by the look on my face that I was slowly processing his words, he pointed to the elevator only a few feet away… with a huge sign beside it reading “LIFT.” Ahhh yes… the lift. I’ll use that. Then bang a left.

And this is how it is in sales. We speak the same words, but they often lead to just-miss communications. For instance, we were once working with a very large sales force where we were investigating their call planning practices. “Do you make call plans?” we asked one salesperson. “Sure,” he answered, “Before every prospecting call, I sit down and map out a call objective, some key questions, their potential objections, etc.” Okay, sounds good. Call planning.

Then we asked the same call planning question to one of his counterparts, to which she responded, “Yes, I sit down every Friday afternoon and plan which customers and prospects I’m going to visit the following week. That way I can make the best use of my time.” Hmmm. Same words – different interpretations. This could be a problem. (For the record, we would call this seller’s activity territory planning)

Or take another common example – the term ‘sales pipeline.’ That one sounds pretty straight-forward, right? Not so fast. Within another company’s sales force, we noticed a wide disparity in the sizes of the pipelines between two sales managers. After some exploration, we uncovered the source of the discrepancy… Two different definitions of the sales ‘pipeline.’ The manager with the bigger pipelines commented that he wanted his sellers to put anything into the pipeline that they were pursuing (no matter how preliminary), because he wanted to know everything that was going on in the field. Consequently: big pipelines.

Yet the second manager had instructed his salespeople to only put deals into their pipelines that were very highly qualified. He used their sales pipelines to forecast revenue, and he didn’t want any “junk in numbers” to distort his forecasts. So how could two sales managers in the same company use the sales pipeline in such different ways? Because there was no clear definition to which they were adhering. Again, same words – different interpretations.

It might seem a small thing to argue definitions, but it really is not. Without a common language, practices get distorted. And when practices get distorted, execution is inconsistent. And when execution is inconsistent, sales management is more difficult. A LOT more difficult, in fact.

This is one of the reasons that Vantage Point Performance is so passionate about demystifying and codifying good sales management. It makes management a lot easier and more consistent. Call planning should mean call planning. And the sales pipeline should be the sales pipeline. Without a common language that enables consistent execution, sales management will remain a soft science. Therefore, we continue to research and define the sales management best practices that will hopefully enable us to tighten up our science. That way, we’ll know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing when a sales pipeline is half five million.

See more at vantagepointperformance.com.

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