VISABILITY – Being seen in the right way, by the right people, at the right time.

I was fortunate to work with many very visible and successful salespeople. None were better at earning VISABILITY than Jennifer and Ann with whom I worked during my Microsoft years. Their customer was a large device manufacturer that had a large phone salesforce. Their job was two-fold: (1) Convince customer executives to design products that featured Microsoft products and (2) to motivate the customer’s salespeople to focus their selling on products that featured Microsoft software.

1. Right Way – Jennifer and Ann made regular visits to the phone sales center to train and motivate salespeople on Microsoft’s products. They took time, on each visit, to talk with key decision-makers thus learning the personal motivations that drove each of them. This helped to shape their presentations ensuring they were not only correctly educating salespeople but also emphasizing things important to their managers. They were seen in the right way by those sales managers.
2. Right People – Beyond the managers there were always top salespeople who earned informal leadership roles by being the best performers. They became key influencers who Jennifer and Ann quickly identified allowing them to get advice on how to excite the whole team. They started by doing lunchtime training, in the cafeteria, but found that the key influencers never attended. A check-in with a few key influencers taught them that people only attended to get the free lunch and that the top performers didn’t take the full break because it took away from their selling time.Jennifer and Ann adapted their actions to expand their relationships with both managers and key influencers. They focused more on the phone salespeople by opening a help station, serving snacks, and distributed prizes for achieving sales milestones. With their adapted actions, the right people were now excited about selling Microsoft products and, not surprisingly, they sold more. 
3. Right Time – The right time to be seen was not in the cafeteria. The right time to be seen was while the salespeople were selling. Jennifer and Ann adjusted to the customer’s time rather than taking them out of their element for training. Salespeople generally learn best by doing and the new actions accommodated that. Being seen at the right time garnered better results for the customer and Microsoft.

VISABILITY – Being seen in the right way, by the right people, at the right time

©Rick Wong, The Five Abilities® LLC

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