Pop quiz, hotshots: What if your team does great?

Yeah, that’s right. What if you’re sales & marketing effort is a huge hit? What if you beat your goals & targets? Cigars and champagne and a nice holiday in Phuket for you this Christmas. Clear sailing, blue skies and the wind at your back forever, right?

We at ChinaSolved are never content to leave well enough alone, and we’re not about to let you do it either.

Managers in China have gotten so used to crisis management and firefighting that we are sometimes unprepared for good news. Complacency kills. For many of you, the end of December and January are going to be relatively slow, so use this time to review 2006 and plan for big things in the new year.

Move the goalposts. Yes, you are great and talented and wonderful. With you at the helm of your department or organization, your team has achieved tremendous success and met its goals. But there are two general reasons organizations hit their targets. One is that you are really doing everything exceptionally well. The other is that the target was too low. Give yourself and your team an aggressive but reasonable objective for 2007. That includes more than just sales figures – make sure you are also building a stronger, smarter, tougher organization that can compete with the flood of new overseas and Chinese entrants.

Share the wealth – and the credit. If sales are great it is most likely all because of YOUR individual efforts, right? Well, the 15 salesmen breaking down doors all over China may have helped a little. The bonus and commission checks are nice – but make sure they know that you and the whole company appreciate their effort. You have to be very sensitive to the realities of the China market. A winning sales team makes a very attractive target for headhunters and competitors. Do your people feel like winners – or exploited beasts of burden? As the year winds down and we head into the holiday season, take time to discuss the future career path of your heavy lifters. You know that they have a big future with your company, but they may not. Make your career planning explicit and transparent.

Analyze the data. You wanted to sell 100,000 widgets, and you sold 101,000 widgets. Booyah! Congratulations! But hold on? Who bought what, and why? Was the composition of your sales what you thought it would be? Did you execute your plan extraordinarily well, or did your competitor’s factory blow up? Maybe the sages are right and it is better to be lucky than smart – but it’s even better to be both. Before you hurt your arm patting yourself on the back, run the numbers again and find out EXACTLY what you sold, who you sold it to, and why they bought.

Competitive Analysis. A big, effective sales & promotion effort means that you have been educating a whole new class of buyers. As markets change and develop, new competitors enter and old players improve. If you are working in a niche market, make sure the competitive environment hasn’t changed. This is a great time to take another look at existing competitors, new entrants, and potential substitutes. Make sure you are not developing the market for your low cost competitors.

Expansion plans. Sharks die if they don’t keep moving forward. Use your 2006 experience and data to plot a new course for next year. Re-check your assumptions and re-analyze the market environment. I know of a few managers who plan on expanding into little-known, over-looked backwaters like Suzhou, Wuxi and Hangzhou. Well, guess what – those once quaint little towns are now bustling commercial centers that can match (or surpass) Shanghai and Beijing for services, infrastructure and market access. If you are working off a “2nd City” expansion plan drawn up in the US 18 months ago (and many of you are, whether you know it or not), then you need to seriously re-evaluate your road map.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 at 9:36 am and is filed under Sales Management, Managing in China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.