By Chuck Barker, President & Founder, Impact Marketing & Consulting Group

Build it and they will come…

Sales Team development in many dealerships across the country still strains the boundaries of obsessive research, unveiling the drastic need for individual salesperson development. With attrition, sales lagging, and hard-to-find quality sales professionals, many still think advertising dollars are the fix. Sure, ‘strategically placed’ advertising is very important, but your greatest asset is your people. And oftentimes, dealership investment in individual development is non-existent. 

Some sit back, pour money into advertising to get customers into their store, and then wonder why their numbers are not climbing. Many just aren’t aware of the importance of new techniques for holding gross and negotiations, relationship development, and richly-anointed phone skill strategies.

I love this time of year. The World Series is back, thus I feel the urge to use the following spin to enlighten you into a clear understanding of how vitally important it is to focus on individual employee development. As you continue reading, take notice of the words, and apply them to your team and how you operate. Few things have greater impact on corporate performance than organizational design (which literally is how a company is put together) does.

“The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.”
– Babe Ruth

To understand design options, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of each, we need concrete models, and none are better than sports teams. Not only is a sports team a concrete example, but it is one that’s accessible to everyone and deeply meaningful to many. It helps to reduce the complex issue of organizational design in business, to this simple question: What kind of teamwork is required? 

Every company is a lot like a baseball, football or basketball team. The automobile dealership happens is like a baseball team, whereby the players use their own initiative, pretty much independently of each other and the manager. Baseball is a highly individualistic sport that calls for only occasional or situational teamwork. Scoring plays are not hierarchically planned, and players interact only minimally. Coordination is achieved through the design of the game. Football demands systematic teamwork… plays are crafted ahead of time, and players interact according to the script. Basketball requires spontaneous teamwork with a lot of passing and set-ups.

In baseball, team-member contributions are relatively independent of each other. In the words of Pete Rose, “Baseball is a team game, but nine men who reach their individual goals make a nice team.”  Player interaction is minimal. When it does occur, usually only two or three players (on the same team) are involved–for example, pitcher-catcher, short-stop–second baseman–first baseman, batter–base runner. Rarely are more than a few of the players on the field involved directly in a given play– outside of making adjustments in fielding positions in anticipation of a play (or to back up a play).

Baseball is also the least dense of the three sports; the players are widely dispersed. Nine (defensive) players are spread across a wide playing area, especially the three outfielders. Defense and offense are totally separate. The contest stops while one team leaves the field, and the other takes over. Of the three sports, only baseball is without a game clock. In the words of Yogi Berra: “The game’s not over until it’s over.”

The basic important unit in baseball is the individual. 

Overall performance in baseball approximates the summation of the team member’s performances. This is vividly demonstrated by the way offense works: Player comes up to bat one at a time. In this respect, baseball is the only sport where players “take turns.” Although runs can get scored using various combinations–hits, walks, errors, steals, and sacrifices, the most crucial method is the HOME RUN. This is the supreme individual act; one powerful hitter does it alone. We all have at least one of these players in the dealership. The home run underlines the importance of individual offensive contribution in this sport, just as pitching does with respect to defense.

Coordination in baseball is achieved through the design of the sport itself. Because the sport is so deliberately paced–take turns at-bat, and take turns playing offense and defense–there isn’t a whole lot of coordination left for the manager to do. His primary game task is to “fill out the lineup card,” that is, to determine who will play when and where, and make sure they are trained and prepared to play. 

Building a baseball team is like building a house. You look for the best architects, the best builders – and then you let them do their jobs.
– Pat Gillick

One of the most familiar examples of a baseball-like organization in business is the dealership’s sales force made up of high-performing soloists who require basic direction and only occasionally need to work together. The individuals comprising this force pursue their own lines of inquiry independently. The players are independent operators. But regardless of size or nature, all organizations that resemble baseball teams have this common feature: Their players enjoy considerable autonomy with respect both to supervision and to their relations with each other.

Every player is directly involved in every play as does the game of football. In football, a team is not guaranteed a certain number of offensive tries. And offense can become defense and vice versa at any time as a result of turnover as in basketball. Not the same in baseball. In baseball, team outcome – a win or a loss – is the aggregate of individual efforts. It is predominantly the sum of individual versus individual (pitcher versus batter or sales professional vs. customer) confrontations. In football and basketball, team outcome is a function of large and small group performances. Team vs. team.

Another way to summarize the differences between baseball, football, and basketball is to contrast scoring patterns. Scoring in baseball is concentrated; scoring in football is sequential; scoring in basketball is continuous. The individual player in baseball can have a more significant offensive impact at any point in the game than his/her counterparts in either football or basketball because he/she can produce more than one run at a time, given the proper training. The most dramatic example of this is the grand-slam home run, which is worth four runs or four grand gross. In the other sports, a player can score only one goal – a touchdown, a field goal, or a basket– at a time.

“The formula for success is simple: practice and concentration then more practice and more concentration.”
– Babe Didrikson Zaharias

On top of this, scoring in baseball does not have to stop once it has started. In football and basketball, after a team has scored, it surrenders the ball to its opponent and goes on the defensive. Only in baseball can a team continue to score – until it accumulates three outs. It is for both these reasons – individual leverage and the opportunity to score in cluster – that the Big Bang theory of scoring makes sense for baseball. This theory argues that concentrated burst of scoring are critical because in most cases, the winning team scores more runs in one inning than the loser does in the entire nine-inning contest.

In baseball, the name of the offensive game is power through individual sluggers. Why do teams with high batting averages do poorly in World Series play? Because it takes them too many hits to score. To get a three-run inning, it might take five or six hits. Every one of those hits gets harder to come by. If each one of them becomes 10 percent more difficult to get, how much more difficult to get are, all five of them? You’ve got five chances to stop that inning.

Baseball is less controllable by the manager. The defense puts the ball into play, and probability of a hit is roughly one in four to one in three. Extended sequences cannot be counted on, much less scripted, under such conditions.

“Every day is a new opportunity. You can build on yesterday’s success or put its failures behind and start over again. That’s the way life is, with a new game every day, and that’s the way baseball is.” 

– Bob Feller

To succeed in any game, a team must effectively carry out three related sets of tasks: staffing, planning, and operating. Staffing is deciding who will play on the team and in the game; planning is specifying, in advance, how the game should get played; and operating has to do with influencing the processes or flow of the game.

Of course, all these challenges are important in each of the sports, but the number-one priority differs. The best teams understand their dominant challenge and organize to meet it. Using this baseball model really tells us one very important thing; make sure your players are “individually” well trained and prepared to take advantage of every somewhat diminishing sales opportunity. 

“There may be people that have more talent than you, but there is no excuse for anyone to work harder than you do.” 

– Derek Jeter

The individual will bat alone at the plate, attempting to get a hit or in some cases a home run, so get him/her into the batting cage, and work on solid mechanics. You must recognize that every individual on the team has his or her own learning requirements and needs different batting instructions. 

We as leaders must identify where they require our help and then spend time developing their skill sets. For strategies to identify strengths and weaknesses of your team, along with a few tips of batting mechanics, email [email protected]. Root, root, root for your home team.

About the Author

Chuck Barker is president and founder of Impact Marketing & Consulting Group in Virginia. EMAIL: [email protected]