Help! My Manager is Spying On Me!!
A reader writes:
Your posts are definitely must-reads for me. I have one question regarding cold calls. Do you think there's any good recording them so CEOs can listen to them and course-correct you? I've had this experience and it felt rather strange. I kind of feel my potential and enthusiasm melted on the thought of my conversations being taped and listed to by others. I just couldn't be natural and focus the way I should have. Look forward to your reply!There are two things going on here. One has to do with coaching, and the other had to do with ethics.
Let's talk about the coaching part first.
Getting another experiencd sales professional (either peer or manager) to listen to your cold calls and provide inputs is one of the best ways to improve. The problem that you're experiencing is one that's common in experimental science, which is that the act of observing something changes the thing being observed.
In your case, you can't get a real reading of your cold calling ability when you know you're being recorded because that knowledge changes your behavior. The traditional way to deal with this is to make the recording random, so that you're never sure that you're being recorded. If only 1 out of 20 call are being taped, and you don't know which, you'll probably behave more naturally.
Unfortunately, that leads us to the other issue, which is the ethics of recording employees. To my mind, coaching is one thing, but spying is another.
For the past few years, I've been alarmed at the increasing intrusiveness of sales management into the lives of their employees. Many companies monitor employee e-mail and Internet usage, and some companies are using company-issued cell phones to track the physical location of their sales reps 24/7. (I wrote about this in the post "Kiss Your Freedom Goodbye.")
It's my fear that if you ask your manager to monitor random cold calls, it's opening the door to management spying. And that's profoundly discouraging in my view.
One of the best things about a career is Sales is the supposed to be ability to control your own time. But when managers use technology to micromanage? Who wants to live like that?
I'm curious what you guys think, so here's a poll: