Boss Life (21 page)

I've managed to stay away from AdWords for almost a month. Hopefully that's long enough to see a pattern in response to increased spending. Whatever Google's data shows, I know that the number of inquiries was worse than it was a year ago and worse than the beginning of the year. Looking at my spreadsheets, I can see that between January 1 and April 1, we averaged 16.23 inquiries per week. Between April 1 and May 20, when I bumped up the budget, that number had dropped to 12.38 per week. And after shoveling more money at Google? Over the past month it declined again, to 10.8 inquiries per week.

I log in to AdWords and see what Google thinks is happening. Since the beginning of the year, they have shown my ads 978,202 times. That's a huge number. Unfortunately, the viewers of those ads were largely indifferent to my messaging. We got 15,286 clicks—still a very large number of interested parties, but just 1.56 percent of the impressions. I hope that the people who clicked did so because they are eager to buy a table, since each click cost me $3.78, for a total of $57,781. But maybe they were just curious, or clicked by accident. How many of those clickers took the trouble to complete an inquiry through our Web site? Just sixty-five. How many of those sixty-five people actually bought something? I don't know, because some people just call us instead of submitting an inquiry through our site, and we don't know which of our buyers did which. I do know how many of my buyers reported finding us on the Web: forty-seven, whose orders total up to $668,816. That's 80.4 percent of our total sales, $831,777. All my other efforts to drum up work have not amounted to much. I really, really need AdWords to come through for me.

After an hour, I stumble upon a graph that appears to answer my questions. I am looking at the pattern of daily spend and daily clicks from January 1 to June 18. Since I don't buy ads on the weekends, the graph looks like a long line of haystacks in a flat field:

On the day I increased the budget, toward the right side of the graph, the number of impressions jumped up sharply from about six thousand to ten thousand. The highest totals come each Monday, and the highest total of all happened on the Monday after I increased the budget: 18,626 impressions. It's weird that the impressions drop off each week after Monday, with an occasional reversal, but always declining from a peak at the start of the week. That's not what I see in my records of incoming calls, which average 2.58 per day on Mondays, rise to 3.65 on Tuesday and 3.54 on Wednesday, and then drop back to 2.50 on Thursday and 2.55 on Friday. Hmmm. I rejigger the interface to show cost versus clicks:

It's the same pattern: more spend leads to more clicks, but those clicks decline throughout each week. I look at one last combination, costs versus the number of people who e-mail us an inquiry. These are called conversions:

This view corresponds to our reality. The increased spend didn't change the number of conversions, and the total for the past two months has been lower than it was at the beginning of the year. The increased spending hasn't done anything for us, yet. But why not? Google has delivered what it promised to do: more impressions, more clicks. But that isn't translating into calls and sales. What is happening? I'm stumped.

I hear a happy clap of hands from Nick. He has just closed a deal, worth $11,599, to a biotech company in Texas. Maybe this will be the start of a turnaround. At the end of the afternoon, he closes another deal, worth $8,063, to a school in New York City.

On Tuesday morning, Dan starts off with a small deal worth $3,380, for refinishing a table we built before the crash.

My first task is to deal with the Eurofurn prototype. I take Nigel's list of twenty-two changes to Andy Stahl. Leaving out my feelings of anger and humiliation, I tell him what happened on Saturday and ask him to make a revised set of shop drawings with all twenty-two changes. He completes them by mid-afternoon and sends them off.

As soon as Milosz approves the new design, which is almost identical to the old one, I take the drawings out to Ron Dedrick and go over them. He greets me with a wry smile. “Didn't go so smooth?” I sigh. He'll start the new table in the morning.

Later that day, Emma drops a thick envelope on my desk. It's the results from the sales aptitude tests. The package contains two items: a slim folder and a very thick binder, titled “Impact Analysis: Paul Downs Cabinetmakers.” Inside the folder are two reports written by an outfit called Objective Management Group. The first is titled “Sales Manager's Self-Assessment for Paul Downs”; the second is called “Extended DiSC Personal Analysis Report: Downs, Paul.” Thirty-nine pages devoted to sales management, and thirty-six pages all about me.

I riffle through both. Lots of colorful charts and graphs, a fair amount of text. Then I pick up the binder. It's divided into seven sections, totaling 284 pages. Charts, graphs, text, footnotes. I quickly page through it. My reaction is a mix of skepticism and fascination. Skepticism: this is just boilerplate ginned up to make a bulky pile that looks like it's worth the eight grand I've spent. Fascination: this is about me. Paul Downs. Hopefully, this is all focused on my business and my problems. It will be different from the coaching I've been getting from Ed Curry and my Vistage group, because it's objective, just based on our answers to the tests. My sessions with Ed are conversations, with all the limitations of any dialogue between two people. There's lots of stuff I don't want to talk about with him, and there's probably a lot in his mind that he wouldn't say to my face. This report is supposed to jump over those social boundaries and give me the truth.

I start reading the sales manager booklet. Its opening is in the form of a letter, with a bold-faced heading: “The Dave Kurlan Sales Force Profile™.” “Dear Paul,” it begins. “Blah de blah de blah blah blah.” I read paragraphs of what purports to be a personal letter to me, complete with Dave's signature. There's a heaviness to the prose, an inclusion of extra words, sentences, and paragraphs that extend the size and length of the document without adding much extra useful actionable information of any worth or impact at this time. And he keeps referring to me as the “sales manager.” I'm not the sales manager. I'm the boss.

After finishing this letter, I'm drooping inside. I have to wade through hundreds of pages of this sewage? Did I just shell out all that dough for boilerplate? I answer my own question: you're in no position to reject advice. There's got to be something of value in this report. Now plant your butt in a chair and find it.

This doesn't happen while I'm at work—my day is swallowed by picayune administrative tasks. So I take the reports home. By midnight, I've read it all.

The first section, assessing my prowess as sales manager, bears bad news. I stink at this job. The long list of the things I'm doing wrong falls into two groups. First, we make a large number of tactical errors trying to close deals, beginning with my basic procedure of sending a proposal in response to every inquiry. And second, I don't manage my sales staff the way I should. Here the deficiencies are many and troubling: I am not constantly looking for new sales staff. I don't have a written sales plan. I don't ask my guys to keep records on each prospect. I don't make them document what they do all day, so I don't really know if they are being productive. I accept their excuses when deals disappear. I don't hold them accountable. I let them get away with failure, even though it's slowly killing us. I need to set standards and enforce them, and get rid of the people who can't cut it.

The sales manager assessment does nothing to bolster my confidence. But rather than weep in my beer, I move on. The next section is my personality profile. The premise of the DiSC assessment is that every person's personality is a mix of four different tendencies. “D” is for Dominance, a confident, competitive person who wants to get results and focuses on the bottom line in every situation. “I” is for Influence, a person who is concerned with persuading other people to go along with his plans, who values openness and maintains relationships well. “S” is for steadiness, a person who places emphasis on dependability, sincerity, and cooperation. And “C” is for Conscientiousness, a person who focuses on quality and accuracy, expertise and competence. It might as well be C for “Craftsman.” In every person, one tendency will be primary and the others subordinate to a greater or lesser degree.

In each category, the report has given me a positive or negative score, ranging from +100 to -100. As you might expect, my Dominance score is highest, and I have positive Influence and Conscientiousness scores as well. My Steadiness score is negative 100. Yup, they pretty much nailed me. I do like to be in charge, and I don't like to work alone. And look at the work that I have chosen: a woodworker, who cannot be anything but Conscientious. A Craftsman. The test is correct about my weakness as well. I am not Steady. I don't enjoy routines or being part of a system. I am not a rule follower. I'd rather write them myself and get other people to follow my plan. And that is what being a boss is all about.

There are lots of detail about how my personality plays out in my business life. Specifics about things that I will enjoy doing and things that I will find difficult, and warnings about how my interactions might be perceived. I should listen carefully and explain my decisions to people. I can be inspiring if I want to be, but I can also leave others frustrated if they don't understand why I am doing what I am doing. Because I dislike routine, I might avoid creating systems for my business that will allow it to operate without my constant intervention.

The executive summary shows how my company's sales organization ranks compared to the typical company. Again, my sales management skills are non-existent and our selling skills are terrible. But I get a little encouragement—my salesmen have serious problems and it would be reasonable to fire them both, but they might also respond to training and succeed. The thing we do best is gathering leads. Our Internet efforts consistently bring in new inquiries. But the report is based, in part, on Dan's and Nick's perceptions of how our operation works, and I don't think that they understand that our AdWords campaign has stopped functioning.

The next section is stuffed with confusing charts and graphs, and points out Dan's, Nick's, and my failings in detail and at length. It boils down to: none of us knows what he is doing, and I don't hold them accountable when they fail. The next three sections detail those assertions and close with a summary of our strengths and weaknesses. My profile tells me that I am a good decision maker, have a strong self-image, control my emotions, don't give up, want to succeed, and have a realistic attitude toward money and buying. My weaknesses fall under two headings, my failures as a salesman and as a manager. As a manager, I accept mediocrity from my salespeople, I don't know how to hire, I don't replace my worst performers, I don't spend any time managing them, I jump in to salvage a sale instead of letting them learn from their mistakes, I don't have any idea what motivates them, I don't have any regular meetings to track progress, I don't coach them, and I don't do follow-ups to find out what happened when they fail. I'm still spending a lot of my day as a salesman, and here's how I'm screwing up that job: I don't follow any consistent sales process; I don't have any idea who I'm dealing with and whether they have the power to make a decision; I talk too much and listen too little; I'm vulnerable to lies my customers tell me; I don't know why my prospects want to buy; I don't try to get the prospects to agree to make a decision; I don't try to form a relationship with my prospects; I send proposals too soon; and even when I make a sale, I don't follow up or ask for referrals.