The Three Little Pigs

Behaviorism is the study of human behavior. It's also the baseline for your associates' performance and the focus of coaching.

The study of behaviorism has one universal law: For every human action, a positive or negative consequence occurs. Consequences control our every behavior. A story from Michael LeBoeuf, author of How to Win Customers and Keep Them for Life, illustrates what I mean.

Once upon a time a farmer wanted to breed his three female pigs. He loaded them on the back of his pickup truck and drove them to visit some male pigs at a nearby farm. While the pigs were getting to know each other, he asked the other farmer, "How will I know if my pigs are pregnant?"

"That's easy," said the second farmer. "They wallow in the grass if it takes, and they wallow in the mud if it doesn't."

The next morning the farmer awoke, looked out the window and saw his female pigs wallowing in the mud. So he loaded them back in the truck and took them back to the boars. The next morning his pigs were still wallowing in the mud. Undaunted, the farmer again loaded his three female pigs into the truck and took them back to the boars for a third visit.

The next morning the farmer had to be away from the farm, so he phoned his wife and asked, "Are they wallowing in the mud, or are they wallowing in the grass?"

"Neither," replied the wife. "Two are in the back of the pickup truck, and the other one's up front blowing the horn."

It's a cute story, but it's important to think about how it affects you and your sales associates. There two basic lessons:

1) Every behavior has consequences. The female pigs visited the boars (the behavior) and liked it (the consequences).

2) Future behavior depends largely on the consequences of past and present behavior. If consequences are rewarding, it's a good bet that the same behavior will be repeated. The female pigs' visit to the boars was rewarding (the consequence), and they wanted to do it again (the behavior).

What does all this mean to you? Ask yourself these questions:

If your sales associates' behavior is responsible for the results they produce, shouldn't you manage behavior to get the results you want?

What are you doing to reinforce successful behavior and correct not-so-successful behavior?

Isn't coaching the most effective tool to make all this happen?

When you hire salespeople, you're renting their behavior. It's up to you to increase behavior you do want and quit wasting time trying to decrease behavior you don't want.

Ferdinand Fournies, former professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business, studied coaching techniques in 35 companies across the country. The smallest employed 100 people and the largest 265,000. Each company told Fournies that the most important part of its coaching program was face-to-face meetings between manager and employee. When the same companies were asked to describe the weakest part of their coaching program, they answered, without hesitation, the face-to-face meetings between manager and employee.

Fournies discovered something else by chance - managers admitted they didn’t feel effective during these face-to-face meetings, especially if the purpose was to solve or improve performance problems. In other words, they were awful coaches.

"Most managers are promoted from within and haven't had any formal management training," says management guru Martin Freedland, president of Organizational Development Associates in Atlanta. "It's not surprising that they have trouble developing people."

Do you hire only experienced sales associates so you don't have to coach and train? Maybe you think that coaching is watching a shopping video, making a few informed comments and waiting until the next shop. If this is your idea of coaching, you've missed the point. Coaching is an everyday job.

Coaching revolves around expectations, behavior and results. These elements are responsible for your associates' performance, good or bad. Expectations are responsible for your associates' behavior. Their behavior produces the results they achieve. Their results define their future behavior. It's your job as a coach to define expectations, monitor behavior and react to results.

Setting expectations: It's impossible to coach without setting expectations. The lack of expectations is one of the biggest reasons managers have trouble being good coaches.

Ever wonder why some sales associates never seem to get on track? Maybe it's not their fault. The reasons are easy to identify: They don't know what their job is; they don't know how to do it; they don’t know why they should do it; they think they already are doing it.

In each case, expectations are the cause and the solution. You'll never be able to monitor your associates' behavior and coach for improvement unless you set proper expectations. And unless you have written expectations, you might as well not waste your time. A training workshop doesn't set expectations; it's just the beginning of the process.

Expectations manifest themselves in many areas, but we'll limit our focus to training and performance descriptions. Your training program needs to evolve into a document called a performance description. A performance description is like a job description except it describes the behavior you expect when your associates interact with customers.

A performance description automatically sets expectations and puts you in position to be a sales coach. You can't be a coach without one.

Monitoring behavior: Behavior is what your associates say and do. What they say and do produce the results they achieve. If the purpose of coaching is to get someone to stop what he or she is doing and focus on what the job requires, you first must identify what work is being done. To accomplish this, you have to monitor the gap between the expectations you set and the performance your associates exhibit. This exercise puts you in an excellent position to influence your associates' future behavior.

There are all kinds of ways to monitor behavior, but I recommend the diary method. A performance diary breaks your associates' performance description into point-by-point objectives. This easily allows them to monitor results from a set number of customers per week.

Monitoring on your part occurs when you facilitate a discussion of a particular customer with an associate. This process puts you in position to compare your expectations with your associate's behavior and move to the next step, reacting to results.

Reacting to results: This is the nitty-gritty of coaching. You react to behavior that meets or exceeds your expectations and behavior that falls below them.

Psychologists agree that people respond much better to positive reinforcement than to negative consequences. That means you need to quit saying, "If you don't, I'm going to ..." and start saying, "Here's what we need to work on." It's focusing on what you want instead of wasting time on what you don't want. A subtle difference, but very effective.

Correcting behavior, or coaching for improved performance, can be simplified into a three-step process:
1) Tell them what you want.
2) Show them how to do it.
3) Have them do it for you.

This process puts tremendous pressure on you as a sales manager. Not only must you be able to explain what you want, but you also must be able to show your associates how to do it. I believe that this alone causes most managers to move coaching down a few notches on their priority lists.

"Most sales managers don't know how to model," Freedland says. Their answer is 'go do this' or 'go do that.' It just doesn't work."

If you accomplish steps 1-3, you still have one more objective - to work with your associates to create a practice plan immediately. A practice plan is a written outline that describes what they will practice until your next visit. Think of it as an action contract between you and them.