How To Manage Anyone Easily (Even Sales or the CEO)

You need help from other people to do your marketing.

But often those people don't do what you want or need.

Here's the easy way to manage anyone (even Sales or the CEO) to get them to do what you want.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is the Marketing Director Daily, and I'm Tim Parkin. Are there people in your company that you wish you could control who are not doing things that you want them to do, or who aren't doing things in a way that you want them to do? Today I want to talk about that. I want to give you some specific, actionable advice on how to get anybody in your company to do what you want. This has become a big topic that I've noticed inside the advisory board, my coaching group, and in the marketing directors that I talk with every day. There are people in the company, maybe it's your team, maybe it's leadership, maybe it's sales, who aren't doing the things that you think they should be doing, who aren't supporting you in the way they should be supporting you, or who simply have no clue about what they should be doing. And this can be really frustrating for a lot of reasons, right? Because you need their support, you need their input, maybe you need them to help out in certain areas. And maybe you just need them to know what to do or how to do their job and they're not doing it. Sometimes it's not their fault. Sometimes they just don't know what they don't know. Other times it is their fault and they're unqualified to be in their position. And I say this because it's true, not to be mean, but sometimes we have to acknowledge that it's our job to help people help us. And so sometimes you have to overstep the boundary for a moment to put the structure and process in place. It not only will make it easier for you, you'll get what you want and need, but it will help the company and it will help these people. So think of it that way. This is in their best interest and it's in your best interest. So if you're facing this right now, let's talk about some of the challenges and then how to address them. And I'll give you some context here. I've talked with a lot of people this week, and there's many different scenarios that this can come up. One of them is if you want your CEO or your president or your founder to be posting on social media, particularly LinkedIn, and they're not, founder-led marketing is extremely powerful and popular right now, which means it's working. And so if you want your leader to be posting on LinkedIn, but maybe they're hesitant, maybe they don't see the value of doing so, maybe they don't think they have the time to do so. That is a challenge. And we need to fix that so we can get what we want and need from them, which will help you. It'll help them, it'll help the company. Another scenario I talked about today in my coaching group is ABM, account-based marketing. If you need to be reaching these accounts, but the sales team and the people on that team are not putting in the activity or the effort, or they're not motivated or engaged in the process, then your ABM is going to fail because this is not just something that marketing does, it relies on sales. And so you need to make sure that they know what to do and how to do it and that they actually do it. So those are two specific examples. I could go on for an hour here about lots of examples, but think of an example that you're facing right now, where someone in the company is not giving you what you want or need, or they're not doing what they should be doing, that's conducive, that will help marketing achieve its goals. There's tons of examples. You just have to think for a minute about them. You probably have one in your mind right now. So let's talk about what happens if you get this right, and then we'll talk about how to do it. When you get this right, not only do you get what you want and need, which is essential to succeed in your role, to hit your goals, you need to have this support. You need to have the input and the activity from other people in the company. Marketing doesn't happen in isolation. Marketing is a part of a bigger whole. And so we need the company and the teams to work together. So this is essential. In addition, when you get this right, not only do you get what you want and need, but you help other people look good. This is a hidden benefit. When you help other people succeed in their role, when you help other people look good at what they're doing and look and feel like they know what they're doing and they're doing the right things, they get credit, but really they're gonna give that credit to you behind the scenes. They're gonna trust you more, they're gonna lean on you more, and they're gonna listen to what you have to say. So helping other people is always a good thing, but there is a selfish benefit to doing this as well, that when you help other people, they will help you. This is the law of reciprocity. Zig Ziegler has a famous quote that I absolutely love, where he says, You can have anything you want in life if you just help enough other people get what they want first. And that's how I want you, I think you should think about this. Let's help other people get what they want so we can get what we need so the company can be successful overall. In addition, there's a third benefit here, which is the process. We cannot rely on people. And in all of these scenarios, the problem, the issue is people. It's that we're relying on people. We have expectations of people that either they know or they don't, but regardless, they're not delivering on. They're not meeting those expectations. And so we need to move from managing people to managing process. If you're managing people and not getting what you want, then you're doing it wrong. You need to switch it to managing the process. So the process will manage the people and you will manage the process. This is a subtle but important shift. Let's talk the specifics now so you can see this in action. So today we were talking about ABM and how the sales team is not engaging, that the people on the sales team are not participating to the level that they should, that we don't see or know their activity. How many emails are they sending? How many phone calls are they making? How many touch points are we getting? Which accounts are we connecting with? Are we penetrating? And how do we know that this ABM thing is taking hold? Is it working? And until we have those metrics, those numbers, that transparency, we can't possibly evaluate, good or bad, what's happening. Because either we're doing a lot of outbound, a lot of touch points, a lot of outreach, and nothing's happening, or maybe things are happening, we're just not being told. We just don't have the visibility. So, in this scenario, one of the leaders in the coaching group was saying how they're trying to get this information from sales, but sales is not providing it. And to date, sales has not given that level of transparency. And so, what do you do? How do you force the sales team to sit up and to show up and to give the numbers and to be clear about what they're doing, what they're not doing? A lot of us, and maybe you as well, feel like it's hard to call people out. That you don't want to say, hey, you're not doing your job, or you're not doing the right thing, or you're not doing enough. And we want to be careful and mindful always in a professional environment about how we do that. One, is it true? Two, is it helpful? And three, how do we do that in a way that's kind, that gives them grace? But let's get back to the process here because in this scenario, they're meeting bi-weekly, every two weeks, fortnightly, for my European friends here. And what that means is they meet and they share an update on what the marketing's doing, but sales really is contributing nothing. And we don't see the engagement, the activity from sales. So, how do you get them to engage? And here's what I recommend in any scenario, but in specifically this scenario as well, is to change the process. Don't expect people to change because people have a hard time changing. And so rather than trying to fight the uphill battle of changing people, we need to focus on changing the process, on creating or changing the process to be more effective. And so in this case, what that looks like is having a very structured agenda for the meeting, slicing the meeting into two halves, the top half and the bottom half. And at the top half of the hour, saying, hey, here's marketing's side. Here's what we've done, here's what we're doing, here's what we see, and here's what we're gonna do next. And then having a sales section of the meeting to say, hey, sales leadership, tell us what's going on. Show us the numbers from your team. And this isn't leaving that section of the meeting up to the sales leadership. It's being very explicit up front and saying, here is our agenda. In the first half of this meeting, marketing's gonna share X, Y, and Z. In the second half of the meeting, we expect that sales leadership and the sales team will share A, B, and C. And we can outline the things that we want to see that we think we need to see from the sales team and from the sales leadership. And if we can get buy-in, if we can get agreement that this meeting makes sense, we're already having it, and that this change to the agenda will be conducive, will be useful, will be productive for everybody, that's all we need. Then we just need to show up to the meeting and hold them accountable to the agenda and let them demonstrate and bring the numbers to the table and show the activity. There are three things that can happen here. The first is that they're unwilling or unable to bring those numbers, that they agree to the agenda, they agree to the information to provide, but they don't bring it. They can't demonstrate it, they refuse to do so for some reason. Obviously, that would be an issue. But at least you would know that the issue starts at the top, that it's a leadership issue, and that we need to now escalate the issue and address that and speak with the sales leadership to say, what's going on here? Why is this a challenge? And how can I help support you in that? The second thing that could happen is that they bring the numbers and the numbers are bad, that there is no activity happening or not enough activity, that the ABM efforts on the sales side are not actually being executed on, that no one's really doing much of anything. And if that's the case, so be it. We can address that and we can point out gently and carefully we need more activity. And we can ask probing questions about why hasn't there been more activity? And is there anything we can do to assist with that, to provide the materials or the scripts or anything necessary to increase the amount of activity, because it will be essential for ABM to be successful. The third potential outcome is that there is a lot of activity, that they show up, they bring the numbers, and there's lots of activity happening. But we're not seeing that activity. We have not been told about that activity, and we don't see perhaps the results of that activity. And if that's the case, it's probably the best scenario out of the three because we can address that. Then we can have a productive conversation about why are we doing a lot of activity, but not seeing the results. And at least now we have the data, we have the visibility and the transparency of what's happening. Now all the matter is figuring out what do we do with that? How do we adjust going forward? How do we optimize and improve? And so this is key, again, to manage the process, not the people, and to set clear expectations and build a process that creates the accountability. It's challenging to hold people accountable, but it's much easier when you hold people accountable to a process, and then you make the process the thing that's managed, and you let people adhere to the process rather than being beholden to people or to yourself. This is especially true across the aisle between marketing and sales. If we can agree on a process for all of us, then it's a lot easier to get sales to play on our terms and to make sure we're providing the things necessary to sales for them to be successful and for us to be successful. Going back to the other example about the CEO not willing to post on LinkedIn, not willing to engage, the same thing is true here, that we need to create a process that makes it easy for them to do so, that lets them be accountable to the process, not to the people saying, hey, you need to do this. And so, how do we start to create a process around that where we can capture the CEO's comments, their insights, their observations, where we can take the recordings of their keynote speeches and things like that and turn it into content and create this as a process so we already get the content and the insights that we need, and then we can make it a process where they're just reviewing the content and approving the content. Whenever you encounter a people issue, and let me be clear, people are almost always the issue in most situations. Think about how we can translate this, transform this into a process instead. People are fickle and they're difficult to manage. And we need to be better at managing them. However, in most cases, what's really lacking is a process. And it's hard to manage people until you have a process. And creating a process not only is easier and more sustainable, but it also lets the people understand what's expected of them. It gives them the framework and the balance to operate within, and it makes something that we can actually measure and optimize and improve. So the next time you find someone who's not doing what you want, or you want to control what they're doing to get a better outcome for yourself and for the company, forget about the people for a minute and think process instead.