How to win a BESMA Award

POWER, PERFORMANCE AND ETHICS turning a disintegrated sales organisation around, delivering a beyond-expectation sales growth in shifting markets, and creating a meritorious and ethical sales culture”. In 2016, GARY PICKERING won the UK’s leading individual sales award. TOM NASH finds out why SSE is the UK’s second-largest energy supplier and a member of the FTSE 100. As well as providing power to millions of customers, the company also has a foothold in boiler installation On the evening of 9 March, 2016, at a glittering ceremony at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel, Gary Pickering won the biggest accolade of his career – and the most and maintenance, and in broadband, both growing businesses with sales teams led by Pickering. As he explains, “Over the last three years we have looked to diversify, while also maintaining our core energy base. By exploiting SSE’s award-winning customer service, developing compelling propositions, winning prestigious award in UK sales. The 44 year-old partnership distribution contracts, and crosssales director for energy company SSE (pictured selling to existing customers, we have grown sales above with his award) was named Sales Director by more than 100% and increased our market of the Year at the British Excellence in Sales share of broadband substantially.” Management Awards (BESMA). As a major supplier, SSE’s businesses are

In the words of the judges, Pickering’s success highly regulated by Ofgem, Ofcom, and the that night was for “his exceptional results in FCA. “This environment is supported by a sales

through service culture focused on delivering positive outcomes for customers,” says Pickering. “As well as winning many customer service awards over the years, our ethical sales strategies were a key factor in our BESMA award.”

In recent years, SSE has been challenged by competition from many small new entrants to the gas and electricity market. “I welcome the competition as it encourages us to be more innovative, more efficient and provide even better service to our customers,” he says. “In contrast, we are a ‘challenger brand’ in the retail broadband market.”

Back in February 2014, Pickering had been recruited by SSE (previously Scottish and Southern Energy) to tackle the company’s deteriorating domestic energy sales, which had halved during the previous financial year. His decision to enter an industry with discredited sales strategies, during a period of intense change, was a bold one. “It’s easy to build on strong foundations, but when many sales channels underperform, things are more problematic,” he observes. “In the energy industry, where historically salespeople let themselves down, sales has had a bad name, arguably rightly so.”

His task was to create a sales strategy and team to deliver profitable, sustainable growth in a sales environment under significant public, political and regulatory scrutiny. Initially, he had virtually no operational sales management team and minimal supporting infrastructure.

DEVELOPING A SALES STRATEGY Pickering continues, “As a sales director it is important that I can assess the competitive environment, identify value pools in existing and new markets and develop strategies to exploit these growth opportunities.”

Grasping the significant challenges facing him, he proposed far-reaching, radical changes. He developed a three-year sales plan based on year-on-year incremental growth. To maximise profits and strengthen customer loyalty, he sought to venture beyond the core energy proposition, introducing cross-selling of supplementary services that customers wanted and needed. And, to deliver the plan, he proposed to invest in – and demonstrate a return from – his salespeople.

The main steps he took to regenerate sales and overcome poor public perceptions were to: l Highlight key markets (besides the domestic consumer, he identified partners through which energy for domestic properties could be sold) l Develop and re-integrate sales channels (the historic main sales channel of door-to-door selling had been discontinued) l Design a sales organisation to deliver sales growth, while also focusing on regulatory compliance and customers’ needs and wants. A critical aspect of the sales strategy was to prioritise emerging channels, such as Internet comparison sites and collective switching, to tap into increasingly digital customer interactions and deliver an improved customer journey. By appointing and fully supporting “His decision to enter an experts in this area, Pickering enabled them to deliver rapid industry with discredited results. Between April and June sales strategies, during a 2015, cross-functional teams period of intense change, successfully delivered a pilot was a bold one” market-leading tariff to strict assurance, regulatory, and fairness criteria. Sales targets were achieved 12 days into a three-week sales window, during which time the digital channel gained over 32,000 accounts, achieving over 40% of its annual target. To deliver what he felt customers required, he promoted portfolio diversification. Managing energy and non-energy sales across the UK, he achieved huge growth in SSE’s new phone

GETTING STARTED IN SALES

Gary Pickering was just 18 years old, a student with plans to be a lawyer, when he and his girlfriend ran away to get married. This year, the couple celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary, along with their 18-year-old son and 12-yearold daughter.

“As a married man with new responsibilities, I felt I needed to be earning money, so I went for a job at TSB Bank,” he says. “I started as a cashier in the Hounslow branch in West London. I wasn’t very good at it and made frequent errors, but fortunately Hounslow was the bank’s regional office, and the regional sales manager felt that I would have more success in sales.”

His first sales job was as a branch adviser, selling mortgages, savings accounts and insurance. He has been in sales and business development ever since.

“TSB’s customer-centric sales through service training was excellent and I proved to be a much more successful branch adviser than I was a cashier,” he continues. “A branch manager of mine went to work for Chelsea Building Society and offered me a job there developing intermediary mortgage business. Over the following 12 years, I worked hard, learnt from my many mistakes, and was promoted several times, until I was made sales director in 2008 – just as the financial crash was hitting...”

In February 2014, he joined SSE as sales director and in 2016 he was promoted to director of sales and retention at the energy giant.

In the wake of his BESMA win, Pickering reflects, “I’ve been fortunate to work with many brilliant people in my career. What I’ve learnt from them is that there is no recipe for success, no silver bullet.”

His concluding advice is: “Love what you do, or change it; remember that, whatever industry you’re in, you’re in the people business; and constantly ask yourself how you can improve.”

and broadband offering, as well as delivering coaching culture. This means that most 17% growth in home services such as boiler conversations are in a coaching style, led by our installation and maintenance. At the same time, salespeople, empowering them to make choices his focus on traditional channels remained about what they’ll do to continually improve strong with marketing budgets and training their performance.” programmes designed to improve outputs. For He adds, “When it comes to specific customerexample, he introduced a fully compliant method centric signature practices, I expect all of my of outbound telephone sales calls, recognised by sales managers to be able to demonstrate what Which? as best practice, to reach more customers good looks like by showing their salespeople in with compelling propositions. live customer-facing situations – we don’t expect PUTTING PEOPLE FIRST do ourselves.” Beyond his strengths in strategy, Pickering regards himself as “first “It is vital that I constantly REAPING REWARDS and foremost a people person”. He continues, “It is vital that I constantly focus on people, by focus on people, by which I mean both our customers In 20 months, Pickering delivered the kind of results that the BESMA judges could not ignore: l Strong sales growth, exceeding targets which I mean both our customers and our colleagues” l An industry-low number of customer and our colleagues. I love complaints delivering for our business l Management team expansion from one to partners and our customers. And as a qualified eight reports and around 700 sales colleagues business coach and mentor I love developing our l An increase in the Great Place to Work score sales managers and salespeople so they can from 65% to 84% achieve their business and personal goals.” l Absenteeism reduced from an average of 12

When recruiting, he prioritised people with days per employee to 1.19 the right customer-centric attitudes and powerful l Extremely low staff attrition. leadership skills. When embedding his teams, he As BESMA’s judges observed, he “not only promoted team building through learning succeeded in re-opening sales channels on the programmes. For example, each manager was strong foundations of integrity and compliance, encouraged and financially supported to but he used his personal authenticity to engender complete Tom Rath’s Strengths Finder 2.0 the culture where ‘doing the right thing’ is the questionnaire to identify their strengths. The only option”. results were shared in order to help teams Pickering describes last year’s BESMA win as integrate more efficiently, increase self-awareness “both a surprise and career highlight”. He adds, and work better together. “It was recognition for the high performing team

His next step was building resilience and I’d assembled, and not just the results they’d maintaining “sales happiness”. He wanted his achieved, but the ethical and professional way teams to know what they needed to achieve, and they had achieved them.” how. His decisions and initiatives included: He concludes, “You don’t get to become sales l Adopting a visible leadership style, helping to director without the fundamental ability to fix niggles fast through an approachable attitude deliver results. Throughout my career, I’ve been l Continually honing leadership management fortunate enough to build and develop sales skills and, through mentoring, improving the teams that have achieved or exceeded their standard of each customer interaction targets most of the time. It’s all about the l Promoting rapport through semi-formal team strength of the team – and that’s why my team meetings to share successes, create positive has been shortlisted as a finalist for the Sales shared memories, and build a sense of belonging Team of the Year award at BESMA 2017.” l Empowering teams to collaborate through a well-defined multi-way communication schedule l Driving meaningful objectives and personal BESMA – RECOGNISING EXCELLENCE development plans aligned to the sales strategy. BESMA honours the UK’s finest sales professionals. It represents the

Pickering continues to use regular team country’s “Oscars” for sales leaders, salespeople and sales teams, meetings as a platform to deliver ongoing culminating in a glittering awards ceremony attended by hundreds of training. Periodically, he also conducts a team finalists, sponsors, guests, and the media. “BESMAs” are awarded by the 360o feedback exercise for each of his senior sales ISM after a rigorous judging process by experienced sales experts, leaders. “All of our sales managers are ensuring that they reward the efforts of sales professionals in driving accomplished coaches,” he says. “While we do company performance and creating a thriving UK economy. have pre-arranged coaching sessions with our For more information on BESMA 2017, visit www.besma2017.co.uk salespeople, we focus more on an ‘always on’ our salespeople to do anything we can’t or don’t