A Few Good Lessons

You’re a sales manager: You lead a sales force. That’s right, a fighting force with a mission to close the sale, make quota, increase profits. You manage business at the front line. You are the leader. But where’s your leadership training? If you were ever a Marine, you can point to your training and say, “That’s where I learned leadership. That’s where I learned to lead troops into battle.”

Although recruiting brochures don’t mention sales management skills, the United States Marine Corps does train future leaders. When former Marines go into sales, they often move up to management in charge of a team of salespeople. A fighting force.

“When I was in the Marine Corps I never would have thought in a million years that later I would use the principles I learned there in business. Yet I have built a business around just those principles and ideas,” says Al Hoffman, founder and president of Sales Force Systems International, a sales training consulting firm in Miami, FL. Former career: United States Marine Corps, 1963–66.

Hoffman feels that nearly every aspect of his management skills stems from the leadership training he received in the Corps. “In the Marine Corps they say, ‘Never ask your people to do anything that you won’t do and can’t prove to them that you will do,'” he explains. “It’s Lead, don’t push. Many sales managers push rather than lead. The Marine officer is taught, ‘Be at the front. If you’re not at the front, don’t expect your people to be at the front.’

“With my team, I take a leadership role in developing the sales call plan first, then I coach people with it and help them understand the benefits of taking this particular approach. This is what I learned from my mentors, and it’s what they teach in the Marine Corps. They help you believe that you can accomplish the impossible. It creates a can-do attitude.”

Many of the principles and ideas Hoffman refers to are based on the five-paragraph operating order the military trains its recruits to use to assess any situation, develop a plan and then follow through with a course of action. Being a military creation, the operating order naturally has an easy-to-remember acronym – SMEAC – short for Situation, Mission, Execution, Administration and Logistics, and Command.

Ted Colvin, a Marine from 1970 to 1974 and now a district sales manager for Wall Data in Minnesota, explains how he applied SMEAC asa young sales rep with IBM. “The way SMEAC works is simple,” he says. “First, you look at the overall Situation – a major account penetration, for example. What is our particular Mission? We have to sell a specific disk drive to meet the client’s needs. These needs may be disk capacity, performance of end users and so forth. How are we going to Execute that? We’re going to have to pull in our corporate resources to review the client’s present environment and bring in our technical support to evaluate the competition. Next is Administration/Logistics. I’m going to need mainframe time to build a proposal. I’m going to have to useour archive resources on competitive proposals. Then the Command. When do we start? How are we going to forecast this? It’s very basic. When you break it down into those five items you’ve got a plan for anything.”

Hoffman says he began using SMEAC in the early days of his sales career when he realized that the reams of planning paperwork he had to fill out were more for management’s benefits than the sales reps’. He says SMEAC offered a quick and easy way to create a plan of action that today he has developed into a full-fledged sales training methodology.

In sales, Hoffman notes, the two critical aspects of SMEAC are mission and execution. “Mission is your plan,” he says. “In the Marine Corps we used to say about planning, ‘If you can’t write your plan on the palm of your hand in one sentence, it won’t happen.’ It’s about keeping it simple. And that still holds true today whether I’m developing a corporate business plan, a major account plan, an opportunity plan or an executive-level sales call.

“Then in the execution stage you look at the mission’s critical factors and create a detailed strategy for winning. If you can’t explain what your mission is in very brief terms, then you probably need to reevaluate exactly what you are trying to accomplish.”

Leon Pierhal, a Marine 1964 to 1968 who now heads the Rhode Island-based Pierhal and Associates consulting firm, compares doing business to going into battle: the first priority is to determine the logistics on the ground.

“If I’m going into a major corporation,” he says, “I first speak to everyone I can within the organization to find out what I have to do to get this order. I talk to management to get all the flexibility I need. Do I have the authority to give the client a 30 percent discount if I can get a multimillion-dollar order? I don’t want to, but if it’s necessary for a deal, can I do it? Whether in battle or in sales you always have to be prepared to act on your feet. Be ready to dodge and weave and take another course of action. Being prepared shows decisiveness. If you hesitate in front of a client you show you’re not sure you can follow through. In battle that will put you at serious risk, and in a sales situation it will destroy your credibility.”

Reflecting on his Marine Corps experience, Colvin emphasizes the absolutely critical lessons of credibility and trust he learned, lessons that have stayed with him and contributed to his success as a leader in civilian clothes.

“As a young platoon commander you have to gain the respect of your people,” he says. “You don’t earn respect just because you’ve got gold bars on your shoulder. But if they come to believe that you are concerned about their well-being – that you’ll make sure they have a warm bed and hot meals and you’ll look after them – then they’ll look after you too. When times get tough they’re going to back you up 100 percent.

“Even though the stakes are lower in the business world, the same principles apply. People buy from people they trust. Regardless of your product or service, selling is a people business. If the customer believes enough in your personal capabilities to deliver on your word, that means a lot in a sale. Clients have told me I’ve won deals based on my history of delivering the product to meet their needs, keeping them informed and being straight with them about product capabilities.

“The same is true when you’re managing a staff of salespeople. I learned early on as a platoon commander in the Marine Corps that you have to build credibility and trust. To create loyalty with salespeople you give them the good news and you give them the bad news; you don’t try to spin it or fine tune it – you’re straightforward and up front.”

Pierhal recognizes that not everyone can make it as a Marine. The same is true in selling. But when a young recruit does have ability, he says, sales managers should follow the example of the Marine Corps by nurturing those unique talents.

“The best salespeople in the world mentally adjust to a customer’s needs, wants, desires and even attributes,” he says. “By the middle of the conversation the salesperson is around on the other side of the desk and the customer just naturally starts to perk up, smile and move things forward. You can’t train that. As a manager you just have to spot it and bring people like that on board.

“Just as in the Marines, you need people in the field who can adapt rapidly to change and think on their feet. As a manager you try to harness and channel that ability, but not change it. Too often corporations force people to adapt to a corporate culture or to be team players, but that just produces robots. Once you’ve got that raw talent you want to mold it. But many times shortsighted managers just wind up extinguishing it.”

Colvin agrees that the Marine Corps training helped develop his ability to react and think at the same time, even in times of great stress. In sales, he says, this training helped set him apart from colleagues who seemed unable to act decisively.

“In the Marine Corps you are in situations where you have to make timely, accurate decisions whether to call in airstrikes or artillery missions, and we had to do that very quickly. You can’t dwell on decisions. That carried over into my business life. Not all my decisions have been right, but I can say that I made a decision. I’ve run into managers and worked for others whose inability to make a decision and ‘paralysis through analysis’ caused a deal to go south, cost us an opportunity or created a client satisfaction issue. You can second-guess yourself into oblivion, or you can make the decision and move on. That decisiveness is just one way the military training has served me well throughout my professional career.”

There is no question that both Marines and successful salespeople must be highly motivated. But once you assume leadership, whether of a platoon or a sales team, being a self-starter isn’t enough. You also have to generate an equal level of enthusiasm in the people under your command. Pierhal believes the key to motivating others lies in surveying salespeople to discover their dreams and ambitions and then using those hot buttons when the time is right.

“I get involved with my salespeople,” he says, “and ask what motivates them, what they want to do, so that I can understand what drives them. A lot of managers don’t take the time to do that. I spend time with them to find out. Is it a new car? Are you saving for a baby? Is it college? Then when I’m trying to get them to go the extra mile, I use those very motivators. I’ll say, ‘You’re saving for your daughter’s college. That’s $20,000. Now here’s the commission plan – let’s see how we can make this happen.’ I show them how to use the commission plan to their advantage so they will realize their goal.”

Contrary to the Hollywood drill instructor stereotype, Hoffman says, the most effective motivational techniques don’t involve reducing people tears and screaming “Maggot!” at them.

“As the coach you can say, ‘You screwed up. I want you to do things like this from now on,'” he suggests. “But that’s just telling other people what to do. On the other hand, you can ask, ‘How might we improve on this specific issue?’ That way you put the burden of a solution on them, and when they do come up with a solution they already have a stake in its success.

“In my world we frequently take very good technical people and convert them into salespeople,” says Hoffman. They always think selling is easy until they try it. They start on a real high but then it’s like watching someone jump off the high diving board and then realize they don’t know how to swim. I remember one person who said, ‘I don’t understand. No one’s calling.’ I replied, ‘That’s right, you have to do the calling.’

“For me it always comes back to the Marine Corps motivational methods, where you pump people up by saying, ‘Yeah, you have a tough job and that’s why 99 percent of the people in the world can’t do what you do.’ The first time I ever rappelled out of a helicopter I was terrified, but the gunnery sergeant said, ‘You can do that,’ and with a shove, all of a sudden I was doing it.

“When you show people you have faith in their abilities they will gain the confidence to attack any problem,” concludes Hoffman. “That’s something I learned in the Marine Corps that still helps me today, 30 years later.”