Anyone who knows me, knows that I am passionate about building
teams of top performing consultants. On a personal note, in our home, we have
made it a family tradition to watch television shows together like: American
Ninja Warrior, The Voice, and Dancing with the Stars. All of these shows have
one thing in common, the celebration of people perfecting their skills and talents,
striving to be their best.
As a leader, there is no greater feeling than watching your team
excel and maximize their potential. I’ve given this a great deal of thought in
my personal development, too. So, I thought it would be good to share my vision
and passion for developing Solutions Consulting organizations in this post. Here
is my Top 10 list for creating high performance teams:
The Right Culture
There is a lot of material published about
creating optimal corporate cultures. Corporate culture plays an important role
in how professionals operate and interact with other departments, and even customers.
The healthiest corporate cultures foster creativity and permit calculated
risks. It has been said that Thomas Edison discovered over 1,000 ways to not
make an incandescent lightbulb by experimenting with different materials. While
we should strive for perfection, it’s important that professionals be given the
latitude to take calculated risks inspired by their own creativity. “If you’re
not making mistakes, you’re not taking enough risks.” -Unknown
The Right Development
I recall my first entry into the consulting
world. I remember telling the hiring manager during my interview that while “I
know a lot about telecommunications technology and contact centers, I know
nothing about your products.” He promised the first three months of my job
would involve taking every training class available on their technology. I took
the job and that made all of the difference in my career to follow. Not every
organization can afford that kind of development plan… but many companies hire someone
who’s never even seen their software before, and expecting them to be credible “experts”
to represent them.
The Right Recognition
Even the most self-assured professionals
need validation from time to time. It’s critical that people understand what
the company values, and then to be rewarded when they help the company meet
those goals. I was creating and promoting “gamification” among SC Teams long
before it became trendy or a buzzword. For the uninitiated, gamification is “the
application of typical elements of game playing (e.g., point scoring,
competition with others, rules of play) to other areas of activity, typically
as an online marketing technique to encourage engagement with a product or
service.” I have successfully applied the same concept to rewarding alignment with
corporate goals such as: quota attainment, product mix, capturing new logos, CRM
utilization, and more.
The Right People
Consultants often view themselves as the
smartest people in the room. However egocentric that might sound, it often
rings true. Even so, smart people value association with other smart people.
So, assembling a team of like-minded, similarly competent professionals is an
important part of building a top performing Solutions Consulting team. We need
only look to organizations like Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte, IBM and others
to find this is true. However, it’s not just about hiring people with high IQs
or product knowledge. Equally important is character, which includes finding people
with a heart for helping/serving others, a solid work ethic, and personal
integrity.
The Right Ratio
At least in the world of software sales, Solutions
Consultants are typically paired with multiple Sales Representatives to pursue many
books of business. There is a certain kind of magic that we see in enterprise
software sales, where customers tend to respond more favorably to the Solution
Consultant or “technical guy”, and view anything a Sales Representative says
with skepticism. As a result, great SCs are in high demand. Everyone wants to
work with the top SCs, the ones who are the most competent and most creative
problem solvers. Therefore, to prevent burnout, it’s important to have the
right ratio of Sales Reps to SCs. At least in the contact center enterprise
software marketplace, this tends to be around a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio (meaning that for
every 2 or 3 Sales Reps, you should have one Solutions Consultant).
The Right Focus (Specialists Vs. Generalists)
Consolidation within the Contact Center software
industry, over the past 15 years, has evolved once very specialized organizations
into one-stop-shops with very diverse offerings. For example, take a company that
was once known for selling ACDs (automatic call distributors). Today, they sell
Omni-channel contact center solutions spanning inbound and outbound call
routing, email response management, customer facing web chat, interactive voice
response (IVRs), advanced list management, recording and quality management,
workforce management (for forecasting, scheduling and tracking real-time adherence),
performance analytics, and more! The temptation of management is to leverage
the same number of Solution Consultants they had selling their original ACD
product line. However, the depth of product knowledge carried by the Generalist
SC is far diluted from the SCs who once staffed the separate companies. If this
represents your organization, it’s important to find the right balance of Generalists
who know a little about everything you sell (to identify the right solution mix
for any given customer), and the Specialists who are the deep experts in
specific product lines.
The Right Challenges
Aligning teams with corporate goals is
critical to the execution of any strategy. As I mention above, gamification is
a great tool for motivating people to align with the strategy. So, it’s imperative
to ensure you’ve laid out the right challenges. We’ve all heard that SMART goals
are: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic
and Time-bound (or some variation of this acronym). I’d only add that
for professional solutions consultants, goals also need to be intellectually challenging.
This concept plays well into creating the right development plan that improves
and deepens your SC’s technical expertise.
The Right Tools
Any hope that you have in creating a high
velocity sales team will hinge on equipping your Solutions Consultants with the
right tools. Since there is some variability in SC responsibilities from one company
to another, consider leveraging your own SC’s to create these tools. Tools of
the SC trade take on many forms, from: quoting engines, statement of work
boilerplate language, demonstration systems, presentation templates, product
documentation, knowledge-bases, and much more. SC’s are the best equipped to
identify their needs, and are often the best qualified to create the solutions.
Engaging your own experts to create the very solutions that will improve their
work efficiency is both intellectually stimulating and rewarding. Consider
creating “Tiger Teams” to gain buy-in and contributions from your ranks. If you’re
staffing ratio is optimized, your SCs will have the time to contribute to the continuous
improvement needs of the organization.
The Right Processes
The right tools will mitigate the need to
have complicated processes. I’ve seen organizations build processes aimed at
quality assurance. Their intent is to catch problems with a design, or proposed
integration, or other issues. The fallacy with this approach is that it builds
inspection into the end of the process. Properly designed systems build quality
into the tools and process, such that it’s increasingly difficult to design a problematic
solution (system, quote, statement of work, etc.). It shouldn’t be lost on us
that investing in the right development plan, and the right balance of
generalists Vs. specialists, all contribute to building quality into the
process.
The Right Compensation
Compensation for Solutions Consultants is
important, but is often times not the most important factor in top
performing teams. In other words, if you’ve hired the right people who have a
heart for service, who are motivated by intellectually challenging work, and
who are receiving continuing education and professional development, then
compensation is not the highest priority. Nevertheless, your compensation plan
needs to be competitive with the marketplace. Top performers whose contributions
are not being recognized, or who are not being intellectually stimulated, or who
are starved for effective tools, will eventually depart for organizations who
at least pay more. The saying goes, “If I have to be miserable, I’d rather be
rich and miserable.” Creating a culture that cultivates and rewards top performers
will help you to retain your very best talent, and will lead to higher
performance in every measurement.
