Quantity, quality and frequency are critical factors at Network Communications
Inc., says Daniel R. McCarthy.
As chairman and CEO of the
$203 million publisher of printed and online magazines for the
real estate market, McCarthy
has to make sure that all of his
45,000 monthly advertisers are
getting the right amount of traffic from the ads they place and
that it’s high-quality traffic. It’s
a lot to manage, especially
when he also has to ensure that
his sales force is happy and can
effectively continue bringing in
advertising customers. Despite
the challenges of this balancing
act, McCarthy knows it’s his job
to create alignment and direction and to ensure everyone is
moving steadily forward.
Smart Business spoke with
McCarthy about how he creates
alignment and about the business lesson he learned from
packing his kids’ lunches.
Follow through. When I’m making lunch in the morning for my
kids to take to school, and I put
it in their lunchbox and hand it
to them to put it in their school-bag, they trust the sandwich is
in there. They don’t open it up.
If I give them the lunchbox
once without the sandwich, they
may laugh at me and then ask
me for a couple days, ‘Hey Dad,
is the sandwich in there?’ but
they’re going to trust me when I
say, ‘Yeah, I did it this time.’
But if they get a lunchbox
three or four days in the space
of two weeks where there’s no
sandwich, they’re going to start
opening that lunchbox, and they
won’t trust me.
That’s why delivering on a
product-promise is absolutely
critical. You can make one mistake, and as long as you correct and acknowledge it, the
people you’re delivering the
service to will trust you, but if
you make a handful, they’re
going to doubt you.
Business is no different than
any part of life — it’s structure
with a set of rules, but at the
core of (those) rules are
accountability, trust, credibility
and consistency.
Trust your salespeople. If your
salespeople aren’t doing anything, then more often than not
it’s because you’ve put the
wrong incentive in front of them.
The sales organization is a lot
like water. When you pour
water, it seeks the easiest path
— it doesn’t try to go through a
rock — it goes around a rock. A
sales organization will do the
same thing. They want it to be
as simple and as quick to make
money off of it.
Engage the sales organization
in conversations constantly
because you can’t let the sales
organization feel they don’t have
accountability. If the organization
says, ‘Oh, management will trust
us no matter what,’ and they
want to find the easiest way to
make money, and if they know
all they have to do is push in one
direction and their compensation
will get changed, so it’s easier to
make money at the expense of
the company, that’s a mistake.
But if you’re saying, ‘My promise to you is I’m going to give
you something to sell, and I’m
going to come out to the market
to see if it works or not, and if it
doesn’t work and I see you doing the things you need to, I’m
going to trust you,’ then you have
a powerful sales organization.
