Smart Lemming Diary: Don’t Avoid Performance Measurement with Your Boss

magnifying-glass-individualJanuary 24, 2006

What happens when you don’t want to conform to your boss’s job requirements? Your boss starts monitoring  performance.

Here’s the challenge facing my CEO: our Sales team needs to close their projected sales in their pipelines and adopt to his Sales standards. He wants two things from this team:

  1. Implement his expectations into their daily, weekly, and monthly workflow
  2. Identify and create an X amount of opportunities each month to fill the Sales pipeline

They did neither so he’s uptight and intense about the lack of sales for January. He’s having an offline meeting with Sales separate from my Marketing team.

Four Stress Drivers for our Startup

My CEO’s stress came out during our one-on-one meeting after the weekly Sales and Marketing meeting. He’s deciding whether to hire someone to take these problems off his plate. He’s holding himself accountable for being spread too thin to effectively manage and lead Sales (we don’t have a VP in charge of the Sales function).

He’s also concerned about the Management team’s performance:

  1. Primary Value Added Reseller (VAR): the progress with our VAR that still isn’t an effective distribution channel for us. We’ve been promised a leadership change over the next 30 days. This VAR is also sitting on a pile of cash and want to go on an acquisition-spending spree this year and my CEO’s company is near the top of the list.
  2. Selling the core service: the company that wants to buy our core service offering met yesterday to decide if they will buy us or not. My CEO is uncertain about what the decision will be. If they don’t buy our core service, then we’ll have to go to Mr. Investor for more funding in February.
  3. Sales team issues: individuals aren’t filling their pipeline with new sales opportunities for one reason or another. Our sales cycle is long and this is not good for us.
  4. Wedgies to Management team members: a sidebar comment on how he’s giving two members “wedgies” for not stepping up.

Talking through the Issues

“I hope this doesn’t stress you out,” my CEO said. “Of course not. I’m sorry to hear these things are making you stressed.” I replied. “I value what you think, am I too over the top?” He asked. “You’re understatedly raging, but raging for you is only intense for others. It’s the right amount of intensity to motivate others.” I said.

“While I’m concerned with everyone else, I’m happy with you. I don’t want you to think you have to decode what I’m saying. You’re doing everything I expect with the resources you have. In fact, I want you to share your views on any issue you can contribute to, but I know that you’re focused and are accountable for your department’s performance, but I want you to add value wherever you can.” He said with sincerity.

Immediately, I thought, “I don’t have to use my secret decoder ring to read between the lines or take my secret Underdog pill in my ring to develop superhero powers to do my job.”

Performance Measurement Solution

I listened to my CEO and then told him that Sales and Marketing have a symbiotic relationship. If Sales isn’t meeting your expectations in doing cold calls, my team will make lead generation a top priority for the next 90 days.

“I can tweak the Board and Management Team monthly report to track each Sales person’s performance. It will give you the performance management tool that you’ll need to track their daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly progress towards their new Sales quotas.” I said, hoping he would see light at the end of the tunnel.

“Good, can you do everything you just said so we can start?” He asked. “Today,” I said as we ended our meeting.

If the Sale team bought into his Sales standards, would my CEO have approved this new report? Probably not.

If you’re worried about the workload created by adopting new standards, then voice your concerns. But earn why your boss is requesting it and get on board with your boss’s mandate.

The Smart Lemming Diary is a series that chronicles a journey of laid-off worker, who becomes a Vice President of Sales Operations & Marketing for a small entrepreneurial healthcare technology company. For previous entries in this series, click here. For the first diary entry, click here. For the highlighted Smart Lemming Diary entries, click here.

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