The big snooze?

The other night one of them started beeping under a pile of socks. I was forced to ask myself: "What the hell are all these gadgets for?" I've been buying them for years; they are part of the landscape. Axiomatically they are a good thing.

Of course, gadgets are not as expensive as sales conferences, nor does one usually invest them with so much misplaced aspiration. In an attempt to encourage reflection on the paradox of taking every sales person off the road in the name of sales, I would like to offer the following seven principles (seven being the mystic number blessed by the commerce of self-help titles).

It is not about information

Don't kid yourself that sales conferences are about conveying product knowledge to the reps. They will have forgotten 99% of it by the time they reach the first roundabout. It is too much.

And before you tell yourself that your reps have memories like safety deposit boxes, try this test. What was on the cover of last week's Bookseller? The human brain can only take in so much. Days spent listening to the names of titles being reeled off, trapped in some great beige bowel of a room will leave only a few goodies standing proud, like lighthouses in an ocean of headaches.

Give the reps a sense of what's important. Where are you going to put your resources? And why? Update them on what's going on in the company—and if there isn't much, tell them that too. The industry works in a debauch of gossip and rumour. Tell them what you can before some apocalyptic version reaches their antennae via the M4 service station grapevine. But don't depress them (see principle six).

Give them as much documentation as they can carry, and listen carefully to any reforms that they suggest to the existing information flow.

Whatever you do, editors, don't synopsise. The author is not being short changed if you're quick, amusing and leave one sales hook lodged in the collective memory. I have seen wonderful books assassinated by a bum-numbing presentation.



It is not about location either

Don't go anywhere. Frankly, if the schedule is so packed that all you have got time to do is sit in an auditorium until it's time to race upstairs to change for dinner, don't bother to go anywhere special.

Conferences, in my experience, take place in one of four places. There are melancholy off-season seaside resorts (Eastbourne and Bournemouth spring to mind); handsome northern spa towns living off the conference trade (Buxton, Harrogate); Holiday Inns and their ilk on traffic islands (anywhere); and country club hotels with vast dormitory extensions attached to over-decorated converted houses.

The latter have spread across the face of the countryside anywhere within 40 minutes' drive of a conurbation. They can be agreeable, but there is always the risk of running into middle managers from Shell banging on about the quality of life. You may also have to share the facilities with a convention of photocopier salesmen who whoop and holler like a revivalist meeting at every half point gain.

There are also overseas venues, but I've been to Palm Beach and it could have been Buxton with jet lag thrown in.

If you do go somewhere fun, for goodness sake leave the troops some time to enjoy it. One afternoon spent playing anxious golf with the management does not hack it as a treat. Freebie gambling always goes down well.



Go easy on the technology

You may have lots of kit which the financial director is yearning to use. Steering the capital expenditure through the approval process was such agony that he or she is damned if the equipment is going to depreciate in some cupboard. Or perhaps you always hire the same simpatico audio-visual company staffed by people who by now understand your business.

Either way, use that fallible and expensive equipment sparingly. It's not going to be there at the point of sale. Publishing, after all, is about the word, so it is a smidge compromising if you cannot utter a memorable sentence about why a particular book is worth publishing. And save that great video clip of the H-bomb test at Bikini Atoll for punctuation—an exclamation mark to wake everybody up.

Another factor to bear in mind is this: back projection and lavish use of video require a darkened auditorium. Many reps have come a long way, and it's not unknown for a cer- tain amount of alcohol to be consumed during an evening—indeed some say that that boozy esprit de corps is the main point of a sales conference. Group size and weather permitting, daylight and balmy breezes make for the liveliest sessions. Low light inhibits feedback and promotes torpor.

Every author is a star

Don't mix authors. Even if they are on for only 10 minutes, they are stars who command your exclusive and total adoration. Your publicity director may be back and forth like a fiddler's elbow to the nearest station or airport, but get each author off the scene with fulsome thanks (it's hard to overdo it) before bringing on the next one.

You may think that the author of an interesting little title in your genre list would be thrilled to stay for dinner and hear your big fiction writer's well-practised speech. They won't be. The urbane smile of the lesser writer is a rictus of anguish by the end of the evening.

It might work if all the authors had exactly the same status (a "new voices" session perhaps), but that too is often fraught with danger. The best performer may not have written the most saleable book; and authors, being what they are, will compare notes about their advances. These are bound to reveal disparities that will become burning coals in the hearts of the less well paid.

Be careful to give authors a very specific brief. Don't be embarrassed about hearing it in advance, and be very explicit about time. Fifteen minutes is fine unless you're publishing Sir Peter Ustinov. Discretion inhibits me, but I once sat through a lecture by a distinguished scientist who had written a book about his time at Bletchley Park, the Second World War code-breaking facility. As the first hour of his talk slipped into the mists of my recollection, I distinctly heard a Midlands rep say in a stage whisper: "So that's how we won the war; we bored them to death."



Bigger is not better

Keep the conference short. Quite apart from the paranormal expense, a week is a marathon. The bubbliest, keenest young thing is a jaded roué after three or four days. (And if there is a certain amount of, ahem, flirtation it's not the management's business.)

Don't always trespass on the weekend; once a year for the biggie may be fine, but not as a matter of course. The troops dislike being taken for granted unless it's a condition specifically written into the terms of employment (and probably not even then).

Try to keep the presentations intimate. If you've got 10 reps, three export people, a key customer manager, the spieling editor and the sales director, there should be 16 people around a large table. The layout can enhance freedom of speech. Fifty people in ranks looking up at head office household deities on a raised dais is a different matter. Only the fearless extroverts will speak up.

By the way, remember that there are fragile egos in the room. One of the impressive things about US sales conferences is the way the reps have mastered corporate speak. They do not say: "That's the worst cover I have ever sat still for. Give us a break. What can you be thinking?" They say: "Hmm. That's a really interesting cover, and personally I like it a lot, but there's a danger that my accounts in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, may misunderstand its subtlety. What do my colleagues in other territories think?"

Whoever controls the schedule runs the show

The schedule is of the essence. Be ruthless about chucking stuff out. The running order will change many times before evolving into its final state. Collect all the previous versions from the participants, seal them in concrete and dump them. It is surprising how much noise the legions of the lost can make surreptitiously leafing through the wrong agenda.

There is a rhythm to a sales conference that is easily destroyed—sometimes by the very last item. You must end on a high. If the chief executive treats the conference as an opportunity for assembling an audience to whom the plan (sorry, the vision) of the future of the company and the industry must be presented, he or she should think carefully about placement.

I once attended a conference in which the c.e.o. opened proceedings by speculating on the digital revolution. Only half of those present would be with the company in three to five years' time, he pointed out. Our spirits plunged; the whole conference never recovered any zing.

If there is bad news, don't deliver it at the conference. People are entitled to know, but they usually appreciate being informed individually and not addressed at a public meeting.

The same applies to those sessions to which editors and senior management are not invited. I have always wondered what goes on in these. Are the reps saying that their cars stink, the targets are absurd, the subsistence allowance Dickensian, the commission derisory, the distribution sucks, the credit controller is off his or her rocker?

Are the sales managers saying that the targets are achievable, but no more scams like selling books to yourself, calling it car stock, and then stuffing them back as returns? Or do they sit around, suffused with fatigue, telling bad jokes?

It's one of those mysteries up there with the rustless pillar and the heads on Easter Island. But whatever happens in these closed meetings, take care to fine-tune the schedule so that the sales force does not go home cheesed off and mutinous.



It's all about morale

There's only one justification for this huge expense of spirit and money, and that's sending everyone home on a great whoosh of warm air, like coming out of a really enjoyable movie. If that means quarantining bad news and keeping it for regional meetings, so be it. Staff should leave the conference feeling good about themselves and the company.

The question is whether the sales conference is the best way of achieving that goal—or would it be worth experimenting?

Here's an off-the-top-of-my-head alternative: a fun dinner in a castle; a warm and short speech of thanks; a tax-paid wad of tenners in an envelope; a first-class entertainer or speaker (not from publishing); a sufficiency of booze; overnight accommodation with no sharing. Oh, and no title presentations but ace info packs placed in boots of cars or couriered to homes. And the following day off for all. Would the publisher sell the same number of books? More? Less?

I don't know, but why continue to spend huge sums on an institution that is often a torment for all the participants without at least mulling the idea over?



Nick Webb was formerly managing director of Simon & Schuster UK. He is currently writing a thriller.