By Jeff Pett, Fleetwood Group
I had an old lesson, learned long ago, and brought home again to me recently that I’d like to share with you.
Last week our entire sales team was back at the home office in Holland, Michigan for the first time in several months. We have been trying to reduce our travel costs, so rather than meet here every month, as we have in the past, we opted this year to go to an every other month, or even a quarterly schedule. It felt like the right thing to do when we set it up last spring, and we increased the use of online tools like Skype to help feel like we were together. But I think we may have lost more than we gained in the process.
Not because our day here was sub par. In fact we had a good day of working through the details of selling into our education market. It’s amazing how many things there are to cover when you haven’t been meeting regularly. While we did not agree about everything (when does a room full of sales people ever fully agree on anything?!), the discussions/debates were good and we came out of the day with a much better sense of unity on who needs to do what by when.
What did we lose by not meeting more often? The sense of “team” gets strained, for one thing, when people are not face-to-face as often. And sales people who are in different regions of the country can start to feel like they are out there all on their own before too long. Being back in the office allows for both the hard work of sales “nitty-gritty” along with the informal exchange of stories and laughs that strengthens the bonds of a team. And the interface with the engineering and manufacturing sides of the business do not happen as well or as efficiently as they do when the interchange happens face-to-face.
The day we had here last week was a very good day of work with a lot of catching up and following up, but the lesson that really came home to me was that we need to be in the same room more often than we have been recently. We just haven’t had enough of this kind of focus on the job at hand this year. The money that can be saved by not traveling is easy to account for and may feel good in the short term, but the longer term hidden costs of lower team effectiveness might be costing you more than you think. There is a lot of value in “huddling” together on a regular basis. It is good for our sales team, and it is good for our business. And that is a good lesson to remember.
