It is said that Albert Einstein had hung in his office a poster that mentioned: “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts”. Although this seems rather easy to understand it is often overlooked by business managers in their quest to prove soundness of their decisions. This comes as a consequence of business tendency to promote in management employees with quantitative and analytical skills rather than the intuitive more qualitatively inclined ones.

Below I will show just two supportive arguments coming from real life experience.

In pharmaceutical industry the biggest selling effort is done by an army of medical representatives who are visiting specific doctors with various prescription potential with an agreed frequency determined by the marketing effort. In order to measure more efficiently the compliance of the sales force with given strategy some technological devices of different looks called ETMSs (Electronic Team Management Systems) have been employed during the last decade. Such tool requires the medical representative to fill in records of activity with a level of detail agreed by the management. Based on data provided by such tool, management can easily spot deviations from what has been agreed by using KPIs (such as doctors’ coverage, average number of calls per day in field, percentage of customers covered with the right frequency and so on). These KPIs are then integrated at the level of team, line or entire sales force. Then management looks for deviations from what is being planned and sends the message that deviations will no longer be tolerated. Pretty often, in its travelling throughout the whole sales team the message get distorted to something like “we need to provide management with the right KPIs”. Unfortunately, such distortion tends to become even more important than the “we need to bring the expected results” especially in organizations where target setting process is not well built and executed. Consequently, medical reps will be tempted to make less effective calls but to report as requested or even to report fake activity just to please management. Management fails to understand the following two things. First, by putting too much weight on reported activities they will get just that (very well reported activities). Second, the biggest effort shall be spent at the smallest unit level (medical representative) by their first line sales managers in order to understand patterns of behavior and work out how to correct them or prevent the undesirable ones in the future. FLSMs shall use ETMSs as clue givers and not as a control tool. They shall seldom mention the source for their clues but relentlessly use them.

Let’s not consider a feedback survey to direct manager. Usually we ask for some qualitative comments but pretty frequently we also include some numerical evaluation like the Likert scale. Having a number of managers assessed on the same questionnaire and dimensions it comes natural and handy to top management to compare results and establish winners or category winners. We have after all some numerical averages to be compared. However, communicating such winners can be detrimental to the process. First of all those averages may not be as relevant for comparison as we wished to due to the diversity of responding groups. Secondly, if such practice is being discovered would trigger the quest for popularity and future surveys will be more and more biased/ irrelevant. Even worse than making such comparisons is using such surveys with an important weight for performance management purposes for the same above reasons. Such surveys shall be used to find out perception of employees about some of the manager’s strengths and developing areas and not for calculating bonuses or salary rise. For performance management reasons shall be used actual results and specific STAR behaviors. But this requires commitment and serious work!

 

 

Filed under: Field Force Managers, First Line Managers, Sales Force Effectiveness, Training & Development, Uncategorized by admin