At SMT’s conference last week in Orlando, Laurie Weed, Western Region Sales Development Manager at Ricoh, presented her company’s approach to ride-alongs (at Ricoh they’re called field rides) with sales reps.

We’ve seen different approaches to this critical reinforcement process at ESR. I really like Ricoh’s for several reasons. First, they actually do it.  Second, they have a process. Third, it’s a good one.

Ricoh has very specific and measurable objectives for field rides:

  • Decrease days to first sale;
  • Reinforcement of skills learned in formal training;
  • Evaluation of the degree to which skills are applied.

Eligible for field rides are new hires, those who are performance-challenged, those without a current manager, and even veteran sales people needing a tune-up.

Teresa Hiatt is the Director of Sales Education at Ricoh. Teresa’s staff includes Laurie and her sales development manager colleagues in other regions. The ride-alongs performed by this team are in addition to those (hopefully) done by sales management.

In order to have an effective ride-along program, knowledge of the sales cycle as well as training and development practices are critical. Laurie described other important competencies including listening (not leading), communication, and patience.

The sales development manager team members expect briefing information to be prepared in advance for each of the two to three sales calls for that ride-along day. There is also a checklist to increase the odds of the calls going as planned, including leave-behind collateral, business cards(!), pen/paper for notes, and a GPS or printed maps. You’d think no salesperson would miss any of those, but that’s evidently not the case.

Laurie shared with us two forms which Ricoh uses for reporting on and measuring the impact of these ride-alongs.

When we assess ride-alongs for our clients we often find these issues:

  • Manager takes over the sales call, leaving the rep embarrassed and demoralized;
  • Salesrep is judged, rather than coached;
  • Salesrep isn’t coached to a call process, since there often isn’t one.  They are told to do what the manager believes is the right approach for the situation based upon their experience;
  • There is no ride-along process, so each sales manager handles each call with each rep differently;
  • Sales managers don’t have the time for ride-alongs, since they have significant personal (in addition to team) quota responsibility.

Let me know of any successes you’ve had with ride-alongs, and any aspects of this important process that I didn’t include in this post.

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