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Fly by Night, Sell by Day
By JACK FALVEY

Managing sales is different from any other kind of management--and thus sometimes difficult for outsiders to understand. For one thing, it is an external management function, focused on bringing in orders and revenue from outside the company. But it also requires coordination and cooperation with almost every internal department, including marketing, finance, traffic and distribution. Everyone must have at least an idea of how sales management works. These examples may illuminate some of the things the sales manager must do:

Traverse the field.

Jay Romasco is vice president of sales for Bell Sports, a bicycle-helmet maker. He is based in San Jose, Calif.--but he's never there. I get notes from Jay written at 30,000 feet, or on some distant hotel's stationery. For him, sales management is literally a fly-by-night job. He spends eight- to ten-hour days in the field with his regional managers and his sales representatives. He makes the key account calls with his people, not to sell for them or to give away some discount from headquarters, but to give them support and recognition in front of the customer, see firsthand how they're doing and learn exactly what is happening in the marketplace.

His experienced eyes and ears can sort out what Bell's cutomers--independent bicycle store owners and managers--see as their problems and opportunities. What is building traffic? What merchandising, pricing and even color and style will move product? As Mr. Romasco says, sales management is much more than making the numbers--he also must know what the numbers mean.

Search for talent.

Janice Bell, who works for Paychex, the Rochester, N.Y.-based payroll services company, stresses the importance of finding the best sales talent. Her approach: Never stop looking. "You can't hire to fill vacancies," she says. "The best selection decisions are made when you have a full staff." Superstars are few and far between; if she interviewed candidates only when she had openings to fill, she would limit the prospective talent pool. Nor can she find good salespeople by screening résumés or picking the best of three candidates sent up by personnel. Instead, she has a network of people who pass along prospective sales professionals. In return, if she runs across someone who would fit better with another organization, she will make a referral.

Lead the troops.

For Pat Hughes, a senior vice president at Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Massachusetts, sales management is a matter of leadership. A physically powerful man--once a linebacker in the National Football League--he exudes self-confidence. "If you're not afraid to die, you cannot be killed," he says. Mr. Hughes has as strong a following as any sales manager I've ever met, and his aplomb serves him especially well when he needs to rally his troops. Once, at a previous job, a big account--25% of his company's business--was threatening to go to a competitor. Mr. Hughes pulled his team together, working around the clock to document why the customer should stay. They produced a massive presentation book, and the day after it went out Mr. Hughes wrote a memo to all 200 of his employees, telling them how much he appreciated their effort. He ended with the thought: "Light a candle." The next morning when he came to work, his office was filled with hundreds of candles. His company kept the account.

Present a message.

In the face of sometimes daunting circumstances, a sales manager has to be able to convince others that the task can be done. When Steve White was vice president for sales of Gillette Co.'s Paper Mate division, he had an unusual technique. After summing up his programs at his national sales meetings, he would go onstage in front of his 100-plus managers and account people and sit on a high stool. Speaking into a hand-held mike, he would describe in detail what had to be done, why and how. For 35 to 40 minutes he would speak, without notes or visual aids. He then would open the meeting to any questions, using them as an opportunity to build an even stronger case for his strategy.

Mr. White didn't learn his stagecraft in business school, but it was essential for his success. You can now begin to understand why sales management is such a challenging discipline. Sales managers need to find people who have the courage to ask the tough closing questions when the quarterly results, and their own well-being, depend on it. They have to find people who can take no for an answer time after time and keep coming back with a rationale for one more sales call, one more presentation. They have to be with their people on a regular basis while they succeed, or sometimes fail; and they have to assure talented performers that "you can't win 'em all" and that when they do win it is sincerely appreciated. Add on top of all that the ability to get ideas across clearly--one-on-one or one-to-100--and it is little wonder that many CEOs come from the ranks of sales management.

The discipline is so different and its practitioners are such a breed apart that they can easily be isunderstood in organizations. Few realize the price they pay for the red-eye flights, the endless candidate interviews and the long hours spent entertaining customers. It all looks like fun and games, until you do it for a while. When the hours add up, it's not quite a minimum wage job, but it is physically, emotionally and mentally grueling. As Pat Hughes says, results make it all worth the effort.