Sales Management Tiger 2011

A couple of hours ago I returned from the final event of the Sales Management Tiger 2011 competition, organised for the 7th year running by Dienas Bizness in collaboration with business consultancy Mercuri International Latvia, held at the Business School Turība. This is one of the few well-organised national-scale events that I try to attend every year, as it provides plenty of inspiration for work and positive emotions from watching and listening to stories of sales success.

The competition evaluates the growth of the entrant's company, the role of the specific sales manager within it, and their personality. After the selection rounds, 4 finalists were nominated this year - 3 female sales managers and 1 male. If memory serves, this is the first competition with such a majority of women. All four finalists came with entirely different stories about organising sales work and achieving results during Latvia's difficult period of economic recession.

My sympathies - and those of the many event sponsors - were particularly captured by Anda Savļenko (BTA) and Silvija Jeromanova-Maura (Silja). The latter won over the audience with her charm, wisdom, years of experience, and the many valuable insights that you could not help wanting to note down for yourself. Here are a few of them:

·         In life there are no limits - only those we create ourselves in our own minds.

·         We don't earn as much as we could because we are not in harmony with ourselves.

·         You may have the greatest idea in the world, but if you cannot convince others of it, it has no value whatsoever.

·         If you think you are too small to make a difference, remember how you felt on a summer night when there was just one tiny mosquito in the room...

You could sense that Silvija was no stranger to standing before an audience (her experience as a teacher, lecturer, and psychologist helped) and that she can successfully hold the listeners' attention and create an enjoyable narrative. In her view, the key to success lies in two essential aspects - persistent, hard daily work and knowledge that is the fresher, the better. Silvija shared her experience of how, in recent years - when many lost the motivation to stay active - she maintained team morale by encouraging, supporting, and providing opportunities to learn, rather than cutting salaries or headcount.

It is no wonder that Silvija won the audience's sympathies - when 59 participants were polled, 68% of them voted for her. Silvija also received the Kristīne Mālniece (Ādažu Čipsi) award from the previous year's Sales Tiger 2010 - a rather weighty bronze potato statuette.

The second favourite - and also this year's Sales Management Tiger 2011, Anda Savļenko - demonstrated in her presentation what I thought was an enormous amount of coordination and call-centre organisational work, with several practical, illustrative examples: employee instruction diagrams, conversation guides, call evaluation tables, reporting forms, weekly sales results summary tables. I also found it interesting to hear how outbound callers are selected during the job interview, and to compare it with my own experience of building a sales team.

I liked the fact that Anda is herself actively involved in the work, and when a difficult client comes along, she calls them herself to resolve the situation - thereby motivating the other employees by her own example. I don't know whether anyone else noticed, but in the middle of her presentation there were two slides whose heading read "Anda Savļenko - Sales Management Tiger 2011". She is successfully programming herself for success - and achieving it!

It was also interesting to listen to Dāvis Skulte's (Latvenergo) presentation, as it was a personal revelation for me that since 2008 Latvenergo has been carrying out active sales to attract clients to its offered service (to be fair, this was about Lithuania and Estonia, where electricity suppliers operate in fierce competition).

The first speaker, Daiga Rožkalne (Tele2), placed greater emphasis on the company's successes, with her personality being somewhat less visible behind it all - even though there was no doubt that she has put a great deal of work into overseeing the regional branches under her remit.

In the second part of the event, a guest from America, Mr. Robert Box, spoke on the topic of how to successfully build business communication with clients in foreign companies and with employees in overseas branches.

The second Mercuri representative and head of the Latvian branch, Dzintars Koknēvičs, presented the results of a study carried out just at the beginning of June, looking at sales from the client's perspective. 285 respondents (which already seems far too few to draw conclusions about customer service culture and sales skills in the country) completed the survey and rated Latvian salespeople's work at 63 points out of 100. Not exactly dazzling, is it?! The highest scores went to contact-building skills, accurate information provision, and responsible service - while the lowest went to salespeople's attitude towards the buyer and their mood.

Moreover, buyers - like each of us - want an individual approach, undivided attention, and to have their needs understood and addressed, not only in the process of buying goods or services but in general. Very human, isn't it?! This special approach was rated most highly in the financial and insurance services sector (where the bigger money circulates) and lowest in the electronics and household appliance retail sector. A few people in the audience cited Elkor as an example - which turned into quite a piece of negative publicity for them.

Interesting was the four-type salesperson characterisation proposed by Dzintars: the poison tooth, the go-getter, the slacker, and the star. The first type must be "pulled out" - i.e., removed from clients and possibly from the company altogether; the second type should be trained, given the tools they need, and set to work; the slacker needs to be persuaded and motivated, pushed to go to the client, because they are knowledgeable enough in substance but just won't move; and the stars - the good salespeople - must be given ever newer challenges and opportunities to grow so that they can prove themselves and don't come down with the star sickness.