Treace’s Tricks to High Velocity Sales

Here’s a great medical product sales management book by John R. Treace. It’s called Nuts and Bolts of Sales Management: How to Build a High-Velocity Sales Organization. After I read it I called John up on his cell phone and said: “Now I know all of your secrets!”

John, his brother Jim Treace and Barry Bays were the core group of a team of especially successful managers who, collectively, built Xomed Surgical Products, Inc. up for eventual sale to Medtronic, Inc. Later, when private equity firm Warburg Pincus needed a team to take over near-bankrupt Wright Medical Group, Inc., these guys rolled up their sleeves and pulled that company back from the brink. So outstanding is the track record of these three guys that they are on speed dial for handling some of the most important or difficult business deals in orthopedics. Jim Treace, for example, was part of the team that provided early guidance to Kyphon Inc.

Nuts and Bolts by John Treace should be in every manager’s top desk drawer. It’s 30 years of sales management experience distilled to a practical, quick read.

What are John Treace’s secrets for turning around or building a high velocity sales force?

Well…here are five of his best tips and tricks. But you’ll have to buy the entire 194 page book to get the rest. Trust us—it’ll be the best $20 you ever spent.

Sales Tip

Lou Holtz, famed college and NFL football coach wrote in his book Wins, Losses and Lessons that there are three questions that people mentally ask about you. These are the questions customers must answer about each sales person or company before they buy:

“Can I trust you?”
“Do you care about me?”
“Are you committed to excellence?”

Those three questions frame up Treace’s chapter on sales tips. For example, when you’re a new rep in a new territory the customer has no frame of reference with which to judge you. And you’re under pressure to rapidly establish a relationship with a busy, potentially antagonistic physician. It’s a rough assignment. What do you do? Treace delivers with eight solid tips.

And, like all great coaches, Treace starts with the basics. Stuff your mother told you.

1. Make a good impression. Look sharp and speak intelligently and succinctly. For good or ill, people make snap judgments so those first impressions are not only critical but entirely under your control. Don’t waste it.
2. Take notes. With good notes every sales rep won’t forget a promise, a direction or critical piece of information and in, effect, make good on the promises of excellence and trust.

Show you care by remembering the little stuff. Study after study of customer buying habits show that four sales rep attributes rank higher than product price or quality—they are knowledge, helpfulness, speed and loyalty to the customer (“Do you care about me?”).

Sales Meetings

Sales people go to sales meetings to make money. Period. You might argue that they also want to have fun, hang out, tell stories. But says Treace, when they go home they must have new, solid information or skills that will put more dollars in their pockets. Or they wasted valuable selling time and wasted your company’s money.

There is a right way and a wrong way, says Treace, to structure sales meetings. What does the master of ceremonies do? Here’s the Treace battle tested checklist.

First. How should the corporate officer’s presentation be organized? Treace provides a theme, an overview and an outline.

Second.What key morale issues should the meeting’s organizer address from the podium? Treace offers three basic issues that are critical to any organization.

Third. What should the VP of Sales or Marketing present? Treace has the answer.

Finally, here is what Treace says about the VP of R&D’s presentation:

“Focus on strength, power and depth of the R&D groups. We probably have the largest specialty R&D group of any of our competitors; we need to tell them that, and let them know that it is going to be tough for any of the larger companies to catch us. This will help them understand why their time spent selling our products today is not wasted. Share with them the efforts we make to have a proprietary position (patents) in our new products; again, this tells them the business they develop with us is secure.”

In fact, the VP of R&D may well be the secret weapon of every successful sales meeting.

Awards Programs

Ever been to a sales award program where the end result was a deflated sales force? It happens more than you might think. Awards programs for sales people are difficult and nuanced—probably more than most executives realize.

Fact is, the awards program is one of the best indicators of your sales force’s morale and motivation.

Treace devotes an entire chapter to the awards program and dissects the issues well. “No one wants to work for an award that they feel will be given out based on even the smallest hint of favoritism.”

This chapter is a blueprint for using awards programs to create a culture of achievement within the sales team. He describes how to build award consistency, set long-term goals and formulate the metrics that motivate, not deflate, a sales force.

Finally, he addresses the types of awards that work well and how to use them.

Here, for example, is Treace’s “Product Champion’s Award”:

Description:  The top sales producer in each of the seven target products

Eligibility Requirements:  Minimum of six months tenure

Performance Requirement:  Highest combined rank of total annual sales dollars and total annual dollar growth for each target product (factors given equal weight)

Award:  $500 available for purchase of company stock

Number of Possible Winners:  7

In total, Treace describes nine awards in Nuts and Bolts along with the presenter’s script.

Hiring and Firing

“If you start with a ‘meatball’ and train it, all you end up with is a trained ‘meatball.’”  In other words, says Treace, invest in hiring well (which is fun anyway) and you’ll minimize firing poorly (which can haunt a company for years).

This chapter, as much as any other, springs from Treace’s experience fixing bad decisions at companies who had not only hired poorly, but squandered valuable sales people and were virtually bankrupt. Having seen sales people over the years at their worst and their best, Treace has developed some tests (see “The Ultimate Golf Ball Test”) and signs to looks for (“The Cadillac Salesman”) when judging, hiring or, if absolutely necessary, firing sales people.

Given his 30 years in sales, it’s perhaps not surprising that Treace thinks about sales management in terms of the different types of sales people. So much of his advice focuses on how to winnow “baggage handlers” from the high performers and how to sniff out a track record of customer success.

This chapter, in fact, may be his strongest since it comes from lessons learned in the heat of battle. Bottom line, says Treace, is that avoiding a problem is much, much cheaper than fixing it later.

Compensation

You’ve hired like a champ, set up a great awards program and sales meetings but your compensation program neither motivates your sales force nor keeps your expenses manageable.

John has some advice for you.

“Powerful companies have sales teams that are compensated well and management that is sincerely joyous—and not at all envious—of the reps high pay.” – John Treace.

Building a compensation program that motivates sales people and attracts and retains high performers takes an intelligent blending of the three basic forms of compensation: straight commission, salary, and a combination of the two. A key framework to keep in mind as you build your program, says Treace, is the current industry standard.

But wait, there’s still more.

In total, Nuts and Bolts has 21 practical chapters on such key issues as:

• Morale, Execution and Teamwork
• Direct and Independent Sales Forces
• Who Should I Put My Money On?
• Practices to Avoid
• Managing the Expense Budget
• Metrics, What They Are and Why We Need Them
• Sales Forecasting
• Managing the Quarter
• When Sales Budgets Are Not Being Made
• Consultants
• Environment and Strategies for High-Velocity Organizations

After reading John’s book, we called him and thanked him for giving us all of his hard-earned secrets. He laughed and said, “Well, frankly I could have written a book for each chapter. So I kept a few secrets.”

Maybe so, but there are plenty of golden nuggets here for busy sales and management executives.

For more information and to contact John, go to www.nutsandboltsofsalesmanagement.com or see the book on Amazon.