Letters from Fred - Bosshole® Zero

A dusty box in the basement turns into a full-on leadership time machine. I stumble onto a stack of handwritten memos from my old manager “Fred,” the same boss from our early “Don’t Bring Him Back” story, and reading them instantly brings back the stress of being managed by metrics instead of being led by insight.

• Don't Bring Him Back

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Transcript

Back To The First Boss Story

John Broer 0:09

Welcome back to all of our friends out there in The Boss hole Transformation Nation. This is your host, John Broer, welcoming you to what I believe is going to be, well, it's it's a first. Uh we've never done this before. I've never done this before. This episode is going to take us into the Wayback Machine, to the very beginning of The Boss hole Chronicles. And we did an episode entitled Don't Bring Him Back, which was all about a boss hole for whom I worked named Fred. Of course, his real name wasn't Fred, but that's what we're gonna call him. And you got to learn about some really incredibly awkward scenarios that I experienced with Fred when he came to travel with me to visit with clients. And something that we did all the time, and it was just clear evidence that when you're a manager and you're out there working with your folks, you want to be an asset and not a liability. Fred didn't realize that. Well, guess what? A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were clearing things out of the basement, came across a box, and I found memos from him going all the way back to the early 90s. And I'm gonna share them with you today because I think this will give you some context about my experience with Fred, one of our original Bossholes. So let's listen.

Sponsor Message And Quick Setup

John Broer 1:34

The Bosshole Chronicles are brought to you by Real Good Ventures, the talent optimization firm helping organizations diagnose their most critical people and execution issues with world-class analytics. Make sure to check out all the resources in the show notes and be sure to follow us and share your feedback. Enjoy today's episode.

A Basement Box And A Flashback

John Broer 1:56

So a few weeks ago, my wife and I were clearing out some things in the basement, you know, something you do during the springtime. And she came across a box of, well, really, most of it was really old artwork from our sons. I mean, that we've held on to, you know, those sort of things you just can't get rid of. And um she was digging around in there, and all of a sudden she pulled out this stack of letters, handwritten notes. And this stack of notes was from one of my managers, and actually he was the topic of one of our very first, actually our inaugural episode, and that was entitled Don't Bring Him Back. By the way, that episode is in the show notes. Go in and listen to it, and you'll get a little bit of a sense of what Fred was like. Now, of course, his name wasn't Fred. Well, we found these notes, and first of all, have you ever had like a really, I don't know, I guess you'd call it a flashback, where you are transported to a time in your life that perhaps wasn't quite as favorable or great, and you break out in a little bit of a cold sweat. That's kind of what happened when I started to read these notes, and then it went away quickly because I realized just how beneficial these notes were and sort of my relationship with Fred, because it helped to shape the manager I became because I didn't want to be like Fred. And I, as I said in the episode, Fred would have been a great neighbor. I mean, somebody who would be helpful and bring over a cold beverage, help you with a project, but he was lacking considerably when it came to being a manager of people. Well, during that tenure, during the time that Fred was my manager, he would send me these handwritten notes. Now, most of these, I'm gonna read a couple to you, just because it will give you some great context. This is like a voice out of the past, some great context about how Fred managed me. And again, for further context, let me just let you know.

Remote Territory Success Versus Old Thinking

John Broer 4:06

I was in a territory, I was opening a new territory for a company. I was up in Wisconsin, absolutely loved Wisconsin. Our sons were born up there, wonderful place to live. Very cold, is the further north you get. Uh, we were in Appleton, and so it's uh it's a little chilly up there for a good portion of the year, but absolutely great place to live and very nice people. And so I was remote, opening up a new territory, and in a very short period of time, I had the most sales of anybody in our company. And I was consistently growing sales, expanding the territory, actually selling one of our newest products, and by all accounts, things were going very well. Now, as I read these, you will find out that Fred had a very what I consider to be old and antiquated view or methodology for selling, because he went on the premise that the more sales calls you make, the more quotations you send out to prospective customers, the more sales you will make by law of averages. Just if you flood the market with quotations and you go out there and call on anybody and everybody that are that are potential prospects or that are potential customers, any kind of prospect, the law of averages will work in your favor. Well, I never came close to the metrics of calls per day, calls per month, whatever, or quotations, and yet I continued to grow the territory, have highest, have the highest sales. And essentially I figured out with a little bit of homework and doing your preparation up front and being more precise in your targeting of prospective customers, you actually had a higher close rate. So you could have a lower number of sales calls, but actually close more because you're actually calling on customers that have a higher probability of needing what you can offer. You know, and we always had a consultative approach to selling. So this is the little story between Fred and me. And I wanted to I wanted to read some of these for you because they're funny now, but um I remember receiving them, and it was like, you know, you you see a note or something from somebody, and you don't even have to start reading it, and you go, oh, this is going to be unpleasant. So this started in gosh, 1991. I have something from September of 1991. Here we go.

Reading Fred’s Memos About Call Counts

John Broer 6:32

Handwritten note. Now some of these are on eight and a half by eleven sheets, and then others are little like memo pads, and then one is an actual memo, typewritten or typed out. So here it is, John. It is ridiculous for your name to appear on this list only once. I I don't know what the list was, but it must have been based on calls or whatever. Get off your butt and make more calls per day. If Mike can quote our core products up in northern Michigan, you can quote it in Wisconsin. Now, by the way, Mike was another guy on our team, nice young guy, and just never, never quite hit his stride in terms of revenue or dollars, but by golly, he was quoting a lot of business and making a lot of sales calls. Back to the letter. I know you won't generate 10 quotes a month like Mike, but I do expect you to generate four or five just because you were out there making the sales calls. Okay, so once again, I mean, I think you're getting a sense of just how Fred approached things. First of all, I just don't think it's healthy to pit your people against one another. You know, if there was something that Mike was doing and I could learn from Mike, I would think Fred would want to facilitate that kind of working relationship. But instead, he's saying, you need to be more like Mike. Well, that sounds like an old commercial, I think it was for Michael Jordan. But anyway, holding up another person and saying you're not as good as this person, all the while knowing that my revenue, my sales, were exceedingly higher than Mike's. And this is nothing against Mike. He was just in a different territory. He he was just a different individual. Okay, let's get to let's get to another one. All right, here's one. This is on a little memo pad. John, the other salespeople average 34% more calls per month than you do. Make more calls. Okay, there you go. That was from Fred. Another one. Now we're we've moved from 1991 into 1992. So this is a little bit of a chronology. A little walk down memory lane with my boss Fred. John, your call frequency for May shows a lackluster 41 sales calls. That gives you two calls per day in a 20-day period. This is completely unacceptable. Fred. Okay, now we're into June of 92. All right, that was that was a little bit earlier. And now this is a memo. This is a type a typed memo, memorandum from Fred to me. Subject, active accounts. Presently you have 59 active accounts on your customer list. I would like you to set a goal on new active accounts we can get this year. You really need to sell more of our core products to customers. Mike Smith added one new account a month since his hire. You have to sell our full product line to find new customers. Okay. So that was an official memo. Once again, Mike, the superstar. Uh just calling out Mike there. All right. Then I get one. Gosh, it must have been a really he must have been really focused on me in June of 92. So he talks to me, he sent me a little note about uh a customer that I already had named Ralph, and I had been working with him, I knew him, and he moved to a different company. And I guess this was to make sure that I'm on top of that. And it's like, okay, yeah, this guy and his wife came to visit us at our home. I think I'm on top of things. So that's okay, Fred. Sorry, I'm I'm going a little bit below the line here. Sarah would be most disappointed. Okay, here we go. Here's another one. More of a lengthy letter. John, as I review the May marketing report, there is no change in ranking of sales calls per day. You are still last. And then in parentheses, 41 calls in May. Your customers are farther apart because they are so few in number. Let's fill in the spaces where you can with our core products or anything else we market. Very last thing. How many quotes did you send in May? There's a couple more, a couple more. I'll just leave you with this one as the final one. John, as you are aware, we need more sales calls in your area. To raise the sales volume, I feel you need to raise your sales profile by increased sales calls on known consumers of our core products outside of your standard customers. Is there potential in Madison, Milwaukee, or Chicago we should look at again? And of course, those were markets that I was covering anyway. What about big industrial plants and resin manufacturers and meat processors? Anyway, I think you're getting a sense of the kind of relationship I had with Fred. Now, I wanted to share those with the Bosshole

Why Quota Pressure Can Backfire

John Broer 11:32

Transformation Nation before I threw them away. And I'm going to. I I don't know why I held on to them. You know, God gives you the answer before you know the question. It's like, hey, I held on to these for the purposes of sharing them with the Boss Hole Transformation Nation, which never existed up until six years ago. Again, Fred was a really, I mean, I think he was a good person. I think he had just learned really, really poor and ineffective management practices. Um, I do know for a fact Mike, the other guy on the team, I do remember because Mike ultimately reported to me, because I took Fred's job, Fred was fired, and I was promoted into Fred's position. And I remember working with Mike and he was just twisting himself in knots trying to just make more calls and send out a bunch of quotes. And that never made sense to me because one, if you are sending out a bunch of quotes arbitrarily, and if they're not strong and they're not backed by just good value in terms of what you can deliver and offer behind the product that you're selling, well, you're you're automatically setting a bar, perhaps a low bar in terms of being competitive. And you may also be softening the market because one of the things I do remember about Fred, he was not afraid to send out some low ball numbers. Well, think about what that does to the marketplace. I mean, that just starts to soften. I mean, you have just given a lowball competitive number to a customer who has no intention of working with you, and they're going to use that against their current supplier. In looking at it now, I can give him a pass, realizing that he didn't know any better. He was working as a manager with a very limited set of tools. And that's all he knew how to deploy. I mean, you've heard the saying if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And you'll use the hammer the way a hammer is supposed to be used. So his repertoire for helping to develop and coach and guide salespeople was exceedingly limited. And then I can reflect back and I do remember, you know, very specifically, I completely changed the way the sales team was managed. And we really started to get more strategic about how we identified prospective customers and use our time wisely and not artificially soften the marketplace by shoving a bunch of quotes out there or going to make sales calls on customers that have it had a very low probability of coming on board. Now, now there's other ways of keeping your name in front of them, but the the cost associated with a salesperson going and making a face-to-face call is pretty high, and you want to make sure you're making that investment in the best possible way. I will

Coaching Better With Strategy And Targeting

John Broer 14:32

admit, the one thing that I never understood is why Fred didn't just stop for a moment and think, well, wait a minute, what is John doing? I mean, he is clearly not making a ton of calls per day or per week or per month, or sending out a bunch of quotes, yet his sales continue to climb and he's outperforming everybody else. It never dawned on him to think that maybe there's a different way, maybe there's a better way that we could pull in and share with the rest of the salespeople. Now, once again, I had the advantage of working remotely. Uh, most of our salespeople were in or around the central home office. I didn't have to worry about that because I can assure you, if he was looking over my shoulder and breathing down my neck, I probably wouldn't have been there very long. But in all that time, he never, at least to my knowledge, said, man, maybe, maybe John's onto something, and we should figure out how to adopt that for the rest of the salespeople. And so that's a little bit more context about my world with Fred. And, you know, I don't know if Fred is still alive. You know, I hope that whatever he ended up doing after he left our organization or was encouraged to leave our organization, uh, I hope it was very fulfilling. I really do. I just sense that there are managers and supervisors out there that still hold on to these really, really limiting practices when

The Two Questions Every Manager Should Ask

John Broer 16:10

it comes to developing and growing your people. And I would encourage you to think, okay, hold on a second. Am I starting to drift into the bosshole zone, very much like Fred did? The most important question you need to ask yourself is am I an asset to my team and its members, or am I a liability? And by the way, ask them. Don't be afraid to go to them. Have those one-on-one conversations, those informal discussions, and say, listen, two questions. What are the things that I'm doing that are helping you the most? And what are the things that I'm doing that are holding you back? And then sit back, shut your mouth, and listen. Put on those good active listening ears. Start to adopt that, those really strong active listening traits and listen to what your people have to say. And once again, I want to be really clear. This is not an indictment of Fred. Fred was using all he knew, and it served as a great lesson for me to make sure that as I stepped into management, I wasn't making the same mistakes, and I was considering a broader, more complete approach to helping to develop and grow my team. So I really appreciate your willingness to let me walk down memory lane and share some of these little notes and memos from Fred, which at the time, yes, were very frustrating and not very, well, not very encouraging, also not very constructive. And hopefully they will serve as a reminder to you to make sure that whatever you're doing as a manager or supervisor with your team, you are building, you are growing, you are helping your people move forward in positive and effective ways. So thanks for listening in. Check out next week's episode of the Boss Hole Chronicles. We'll see you then.com. Again, mystory at the Bosshole Chronicles.com. We'll see you next time.