S&MM SoundOff

Blog and Win!

Comeback Cardinals: College basketball’s big turnaround story is S&MM’s cover story

It’s a good thing we got to Rick Pitino when we did. A few weeks ago, when I interviewed the head coach of the University of Louisville basketball team for our March issue, he wasn’t fielding many media calls. His team was having a decent year. But after a rough and injury-riddled start, they were still just one of dozens of “bubble” teams hoping to play their way into the NCAA championship tournament. The only people talking about Pitino were bloggers and the local media—some of whom declared him out of touch with “today’s players”, while others condemned his decision to take on the talented but notoriously lazy freshman Derrick Caracter.

The JetBlues

The snow has melted away here in New York, but Jet Blue's troubles haven't. The low-cost air carrier's struggles with flight cancellations during the winter storm have made headlines and led many to speculate whether the popular airline can recover from its blunders, which include leaving passengers on the runway for up to 11 hours. (A friend who was stranded on one JetBlue flight remarked that he overheard another passenger proclaim, “I can’t eat another Terra Blue chip!”)

While watching the local news, I saw an interview in which a marketing consultant said JetBlue could recover from the damage if it properly made amends with its customers, many of whom were loyal JetBlue flyers. The trick, however, would be how willing the airline is to go above and beyond to win
customers back. Instead of doing what’s expected, such as refunding or crediting the ticket prices, the consultant recommended JetBlue do something like provide a few hundred free miles equivalent to the number of hours a passenger had to wait.

On the First Day of Christmas, My Vendor Gave to Me....

It's that time of year, when cheese and sausage logs, popcorn tins and thank-you cards of all shapes and sizes start invading your mailroom. For every fruitcake that arrives in your inbox, there are a dozen gourmet chocolate boxes on its way to you from vendors, business partners and other associates, ready to be eaten—or left to clutter the office kitchen.

Sure, letting customers know how much you appreciate their business is great, if not expected, during the holiday season. But the art of giving customer gifts is tricky, as this New York Times article shows. The dregs of your gifts might end up in the conference room, with employees
wondering who gave the gift. Your budget may only allow for top customers to get gifts, which means your middle and bottom-tier clients get short shrift. Or your gift might just be something that your client downright hates. Who really eats those fruitcakes, anyway?

But gift giving is done not only to show appreciation, it's also to do some branding in the name of holiday spirit. Here are some tips to guide your corporate gifting this season, culled from the article and from the personal experiences of the S&MM staff:

Listen to Mother

This article in the Wall Street Journal perfectly exemplifies the correlation between employee satisfaction and profits. A small U.K. ad agency called Mother attributes much of its success to its egalitarian culture and employee perks. Its worker loyalty results in stable teams that have helped build solid customer relationships, to the point that clients arrive early for meetings just so they can hang out with the agency’s team members.

How can you boast the same type of relationships with your clients? When times are tight, many companies cut down on what they view as expendable spending on employees. Benefits are cut, holiday parties are scaled down, and bonuses fall by the wayside. Mother, on the other hand, has spared no expense to offer unusual perks like weekly massages, free hot lunches, a winter ski trip, three-month sabbaticals and days off for birthdays (and the day after Mother's Day, naturally). The result?

Brrrr, it's cold in here

Gossip is not the only chattering going on in offices these days. With temperatures nearing that of the North Pole, teeth are chattering louder and longer. Over the summer I interned at a local TV station near my hometown of Kansas City. The temperature made for a record breaking July and August and people were literally dying from the heat. But inside the studio, employees were using space heaters. In the promotions pod, there was toilet paper hanging from the ceiling to block the air vent. But single ply is no competition for central air. I experienced brain freeze, and not from an ice cream overload.

I have a friend who writes for another publishing house in the city, and she’s tempted to bring mittens to work. A coworker of mine stashes a blanket in her drawer. People are shivering and shaking. Not only is chattering teeth hard on your champers, it’s been proven that a cold cubicle lowers productivity. A study released by Cornell University linked low office temperatures with higher typing errors. The study showed that at 68 degrees Fahrenheit, employees were only keying 54 percent of the time, but at 77 degrees, they were keying 100 percent of the time. It makes sense. When you’re cold, your body is spending its energy trying to keep you warm. It has less energy to spend on brilliant ideas.

If you upped the thermostat a few degrees, you could have a bubbling think tank. And don’t forget about the savings. The same Cornell study suggested that warming things up could save about $2 per worker, per hour. With constant warnings about energy depletion, maybe turning up the heat could even help save the world.

--Jackie Hunzinger

Do You Hate Your Job?

I took this poll the other day which asked "Do you hate your job?" -- and the results of the 3,257 responses were unofficially:
   * 37 percent: yes
   * 22 percent: no
   * 30 percent: sometimes
   * 10 percent: I hate working in general
More than a third of all poll-takers hated their job--and nearly a third more aren’t far from it!

I have to admit I am one of the lucky ones who can’t complain--nice working environment, good company, reasonable flexibility, and something new every day. But unfortunately there are many people who hate their jobs--for many different reasons such as lack of autonomy and an incompatible company culture. But the number one reason workers hate their jobs is having a difficult boss, according to a recent article from Forbes.com on MSNBC. 

It’s not surprising to me that employee happiness runs from the top down.  If the management is motivating and encouraging, then the work gets done, employees feel accomplished and everyone is happy with the success.

It’s also not surprising to me that this is the number one reason for job hatred.  Good leaders can and do go bad.  Management runs our business, it makes sense that they also control whether employees are happy in their jobs. After all, there is a negative component to every good leadership characteristic, according to an article in our sister publication Training.  For example, a manager who is confident and straightforward can easily become narcissistic, overly critical, and treat others with contempt. 

Do you hate your job?  Here are some tips Forbes gives to change that:
- Articulate exactly what you don’t like to a supervisor.  Be specific and propose solutions.
- Ask for an intern if you are overwhelmed with work
- If you’re bored, ask your boss for some different responsibilities--it will be a change for you and make you look good for taking initiative
- Problem co-worker? Talk to your supervisor to see if you can avoid collaborating together on projects or if you can move your cube.
- Too little pay?  Discuss with your boss the expectations for your position and what you can do to exceed them, so you have a stellar review next time around.

For those managers out there, read Motivation Inspiration on ManageSmarter.com for some tips on keeping workers happy with incentives.

Scare Tactics as Motivational Strategy?

Last week I caught an episode of "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" in which one of the guests was Jim Cramer, the adrenaline-fueled host of “Mad Money.” On his CNBC show Cramer dispenses stock advice as if it were an extreme sport, yelling out buy or sell recommendations to callers with all the fervor of a bull in a china shop.

Knowing his persona, it came as no surprise to me when he revealed some of his past management tactics. When Cramer ran his own hedge fund, he doled out an interesting punishment: When one of his employees would lose a lot of money, he would force him to undergo a form of public humiliation. This could mean sticking an index card on his forehead that read “Loser” or wearing his shirt inside out for an entire day, whether he was inside or outside the office. Cramer said no one was immune to the punishment, not even himself.

Cramer didn’t mention whether these negative tactics worked. Some managers would consider the strategy crass and bad for morale. Others might consider it genius—hey, if it gets the job done, why shouldn’t it be a legitimate motivational tactic? These types of strategies might even work for the boiler room environments for which Wall Street is known. One recent study by German economists even concluded that punishment could be linked to profitability.

Their experiment had students play an investing game with tokens in which they could choose to participate in a group that doled out penalties or one that didn't. In the group with penalties, investors who made a lot of money for the group could choose to dock tokens from "free riders" at the cost of one of their own tokens. By the end of the game, almost every one chose to migrate to a group with penalties.

In the real world, however, most managers and experts would probably argue that motivational tactics meant to induce fear, rather than encourage positive reinforcement, are bad in the long run. They may bring about short-term results, but you should also expect high turnover and employee distrust if negative tactics remain your primary method of increasing sales. The notion here is that the price of losing good salespeople to bad management is far costlier than any immediate returns.

For more on best practices in incentive strategies, check out this month’s article, “Motivation Inspiration.”

What Would You Do?

Think you have all the answers? Prove it. Sales & Marketing Management magazine regularly poses a hypothetical management question to readers in our Closer section. Tell us what advice you'd give to solve this difficult—albeit fictitious—dilemma.

All responses must include a name, title, company, and location. The deadline is September 15, 2006. (Responses may be edited for length or clarity.) The winning response, as well as other contenders, will appear in our November/December issue of Sales & Marketing Management magazine. Good luck!

The scenario: Every year at the Morrison Corporation, top regional salespeople win a President's Club trip with the CEO to an international destination. The company is known for putting the winners and their spouses up in lavish hotels and paying for all expenses. In fact, Morrison has a reputation for treating their salespeople like royalty on these trips, and the travel incentive is a draw in recruiting new talent.

But there is a catch--upper management places a lot of conditions on the reward, which ends up making it demotivating. There are restrictions on the dates for travel, there are no alternative destinations for winners who prefer something closer to home, and if business matters arise, there is an unspoken understanding that work should be the top priority. As a result, only about 70 percent of the salespeople who win the trip end up going in a given year.

Regional sales manager Brian Lawrence often overhears criticism from his sales force about how the trip is not the carrot upper management intends it to be. Lawrence has voiced concerns, but executives brushed them off as complaints from a grumbling minority. Morrison regularly exceeds its sales goals, has long-standing relationships with vendors that give the company lavish excursions at a lower cost. Management does not feel the need to change its program.

Lawrence, however, is convinced that if different incentives or changes to the current program were introduced, sales would be even better. Morrison's salespeople get a higher percentage of base vs. variable pay, which means any noncash incentive they receive has the potential to be a great motivator.

Question: Should Lawrence continue to make a case to upper management for a new incentive program? How can he prove to them the value of changing up the rewards? Should he do more individually to keep motivation high within his sales force? Or is there another solution? What should Lawrence do to get management's attention? (Click here to submit your solution.)

Do you have a conundrum you would like presented in What Would You Do? Tell us about it.

I Hate My Boss, Customers, Job...Wait, Free iPod?

I worked as a hostess in an upscale steakhouse for three months just after graduating from college. The highlights from my stint in the hospitality industry: brownnosing managers who spat snide comments about guests as soon as they left our heavy, wood-paneled doors; a hostile, untrusting owner; constantly replaced busboys and runners, usually illegal immigrants who were too scared to report maltreatment from customers and managers; patronizing guests; customers and coworkers ogling me. In the three months I worked there, one manager, eight hosts, and a dozen or two servers and bussers quit or were fired.

No great business model here--a shrinking list of repeat guests, weekly employee turnover, a workforce who felt little or no ownership in the restaurant. I did, however, learn the ameliorative power of the sales contest.

The steakhouse ran a monthly competition to see which waiter or bartender could get the most customer-information cards filled out, which we later entered into the computer system for future marketing purposes. The monthly prize for most cards entered? A spiffy new iPod.

These contests provided the restaurant with information for attracting a more loyal clientele, and they revved up the staff. Ardent waiters asked about the state of the competition throughout the month, wanting to know who was topping their numbers. Most of the servers and bussers disliked our owner, but they were eager to work for a prize and forgot to gripe about their lack of tables, needy customers, or irritating coworkers, at least for a few minutes. The contests were repetitive and dominated by the same four or five waiters every month--David Cichelli lists better methods in The Corner Office--but the contests were a two-fold achievement nonetheless. The owner painlessly got waiters to fill his customer database, and employees got excited to work in the rush for the prize.

Even in a less-than-ideal working environment, a small incentive and a dose of competitive spirit can improve employees' morale. At least until they quit.