The Micromanager

Nearly every sales rep has experienced it. Times get tough, sales tank and suddenly your sales manager becomes an obsessive micromanager. A manager who demands detailed sales reports, requires reams of customer documentation, requests forecast after forecast, and checks up on every move the sales reps make is simply trying to save the situation. In reality, such managers make a bad time worse. No crisis ever resolved itself because of detail mania. And no team hates being micromanaged more than a sales team. When the manager begins to micromanage, the sales reps start finding ingenious ways around the incessant demands, or worse, downshift their sales activities to accommodate the paranoia, with the end result that sales drop even further.

It doesn’t have to be this way, though. While the desire to micromanage can sprout up in even the most talented manager, there are ways to keep the beast at bay. In short, it is definitely possible to manage a sales force to get the best work and the most sales – without driving them crazy.

Forecasting Micromanagement

Sales forecasts are obviously important because they help the rest of the company prepare and plan for the future. However, the perfectly reasonable desire for accurate forecasting can lapse into irrational micromanagement when it begins to dominate the sales environment.

For example, Mike Bosworth and John Holland, co-authors of CustomerCentric Selling (McGraw-Hill, 2003), once worked with a major computer company that had transformed forecasting into a obsessive nightmare. During the final month of every quarter, sales reps were subjected to weekly conference calls during which they were supposed to commit personally to what they were going to sell that week. This behavior was micromanagement because this company’s products had a long sales cycle, so that it was unlikely that the last-minute management attention could have any impact on actual sales.

What’s worse, the sales reps quickly became aware that having nothing to close was not an acceptable answer, so they began promising closings that weren’t going to take place. “Fabrication was the order of the day for people in this situation,” says Bosworth. “Salespeople became quite adept at getting their managers off their backs for another week.”

As with other types of micromanagement, fear was the root of the dysfunctional behaviors. The primary reason for weekly forecasting was the desire of senior management to feel they had some level of control (even if it was delusional) over the pipeline and revenue-generating process. “Their hysteria rose as they approached the end of the quarter,” explains Holland. That management fear then trickled down into the sales teams, who began to lie in order to avoid criticism.

THE CURE: Set up a better system to track progress throughout the entire sales cycle. “The answer was to have salespeople document in letters to their prospects where they were in a buying cycle,” explains Bosworth. “This allowed managers to assess progress against standard milestones, determine if opportunities were qualified and determine when they could be closed.” Sales managers were no longer thrown into a state of fear, because they could do their own forecasts based upon the pipeline database. The sales reps, in turn, didn’t have to spend time in useless conference calls, thereby allowing them to increase sales.

Data-Gathering Micromanagement

Sales managers naturally expect to be informed about customer accounts, so that the manager can help the sales rep strengthen customer relationships and ultimately close business. However, when salespeople are spending hours a week filling out reports and recording details, micromanagement rears its ugly head.

Sam Reese, CEO of the sales-training firm Miller Heiman in Reno, NV, tells of a telecommunications company that required their sales reps to record every single prospect call and customer call, and even to list out exactly what was accomplished in each customer meeting. The penalties for noncompliance with these paperwork demands were severe. Any sales representative who did not record a certain minimum level of activity for the week was subjected to a humiliating conference call with the sales director. “He lambasted them and then made them sign their forecast for the next week ‘in blood,’” says Reese.

The culprit, in this case, was the sales director, who had defined himself as a “turbo-charged sales manager.” The sales managers working under the director had essentially been turned into “baby-sitters” (in Reese’s words) with very little input into the sales process. The result of this micromanagement from the top was predictable. “It was a huge waste of time and really did not drive any performance,” says Reese.

The situation was not that unusual, though. Many executives, especially those whose background is outside of sales, tend to be highly analytical and thus feel uncomfortable with the ambiguous nature of sales activities and customer relationships. As a result, they mistakenly believe they can make the selling process more “scientific” by quantifying and measuring the activities that are supposed to generate sales.

Another motivation for obsessive data gathering may be the desire to avoid management decisions. The author of this article, for example, once worked for a marketing and sales executive who insisted on signing off on every decision, no matter how trivial, and would only make that decision after being presented with reams of data. Needless to say, few sales were generated, and the entire organization was subsequently targeted for layoffs.

THE CURE: Redistribute the responsibility for decision making. In the case of the telecommunications company mentioned by Reese, Miller Heiman helped the company put more responsibility for sales performance on the sales managers, rather than on the sales director. “The managers began to develop their own plans to hit these objectives,” explains Reese. “This forced the sales director to become more strategic in his approach.”

Customer Visit Micromanagement

Sales reps often call upon their sales managers to help with difficult customer situations. However, some sales managers find it difficult to keep from meddling in customer accounts in a manner that, at best, damages the sales reps’ credibility and, at worst, results in lost sales.

For example, Marnie Thomas, a former sales rep for Clairol, was assigned to a sales manager who was convinced that she knew exactly how to handle customers, especially when it came to the all-important issue of shelf placement. “I had developed deep rapport with one large drug store chain and had been gradually moving our products to more advantageous positions,” explains Thomas. “Then this new sales manager came on a customer call and demanded that our products be moved forward.” The customer was so ticked off that the sales manager was barred from ever entering any of the chain’s outlets. “The account was never the same after that,” she says. “From then on I had to fight for every inch of shelf space.”

While that sales manager was clearly inept, the situation wouldn’t have been much better if the sales manager’s intervention had been successful. “Some managers feel an overwhelming urge to do the sales rep’s job, rather than to help the sales rep do a better job,” says Linda Richardson, CEO of the sales training firm Richardson, located in Philadelphia, PA.

The reason that some sales managers micromanage customer relations is that they often feel more comfortable in the role of an individual contributor, rather than in a management role. “Chances are that the sales manager became a manager because he or she was good at sales,” says Richardson. Because of this, some sales managers gravitate to the behaviors that made them successful, rather than develop new skills that would make the entire team successful. “Managers fall into the trap of telling sales reps what they do wrong and then showing them how to do it right,” says Richardson. But this kind of micromanagement doesn’t allow the sales rep to gain experience or develop additional sales skills.

THE CURE: Change the definition of the sales manager’s job, according to Randall Murphy, president of the sales-training firm Acclivus Corporation, located in Dallas, TX. As an example of what’s required, he tells the story of a sales manager hired on a trial basis by a large computer firm. “He struggled for a while trying to close business for his reps, but then he figured out that his job wasn’t to sell, but to make his sales reps better at sales than he had ever been,” says Murphy. As a result of this mind shift, the sales manager, whose career had been stalled, climbed four management levels in two years.

Computer-Enhanced Micromanagement

It’s a truism that technology can make a sales group more effective. However, while micromanagers can be annoying to sales teams, micromanagers with computers can be positively toxic.

One of the biggest abuses of CRM technology, for example, is using its built-in reporting mechanisms to micromanage every stage of the sales process, creating an oppressive “big brother” environment that kills sales productivity. According to Erin Kinikin, a vice president of CRM for Forrester Research, a consulting firm headquartered in Cambridge, MA, “Many sales force automation tools are unsuccessful precisely because the sales staff perceives the software as a monitoring tool instead of as a useful assistant,” she explains.

Micromanagement by computer fights against the self-image of most sales reps, who tend to think of themselves as “cowpokes riding the range” (in the words of one sales pundit) with all the freedom from oversight that the image implies. Because of this, sales reps who feel their CRM system is intrusive will work ceaselessly to subvert it. This is especially true of top performers who are quite aware that the ability to deliver big sales always trumps any attempt to micromanage. “There has never been a sales metric that the sales reps don’t find some way to ‘fix,’ especially if it impacts compensation,” says Kinikin.

This conflict between technology and the self-image of the sales rep clobbers productivity in three ways. First, it wastes the time of the sales reps, who are now spending time subverting the system rather than making sales. Second, it wastes the time of sales management, as they struggle to make the system work in the face of a wealth of passive aggression from the top performers. Finally, when the CRM system fails (as the “big brother” variety inevitably does), the expense and effort of installing the system and training the sales team goes entirely to waste.

To make matter worse, the combination of micromanagement and technology is about to become even more toxic. Many new cell phones have a Global Positioning System (GPS) capability that tracks the exact location of cell phones anywhere in the world. This means that micromanagers will soon be able to look at their computer screens and check whether sales reps are where they’re supposed to be during every minute of every workday. And that’s going to be a complete disaster for sales productivity, because it will create massive employee morale problems, says Kinikin. “Companies who want to get the value of GPS in terms of helping sales should abandon any thought of using the technology to monitor who goes where,” she says.

THE CURE: Make motivation for installing the technology to help salespeople sell, not to help managers control the behavior of the sales reps. Avoiding technology-enabled micromanagement means taking a “bottoms-up” approach that asks salespeople where they are encountering difficulties and then implementing technology that eases those bottlenecks. “The participation of the sales force in the design and direction of the application is absolutely critical,” says Kinikin.

In short, while micromanagement is common, it isn’t inevitable. Even companies that have a history of micromanagement have the opportunity to realign the priorities and needs of sales managers and sales reps alike. Ultimately, management must overcome the fear that’s at the root of micromanagement and learn to trust their sales teams to do the right thing.<