Sales Lessons From the Election
Some problems must be solved early by Steve Waterhouse
We are watching a very fundamental sales management problem
played out in the Florida elections (this is not political!).
It's called BLAME and it can destroy our sales organization from
within.
When we affix the blame, we immediately stop the progress. We
can often look at our job descriptions to see the problem. In an
election, the job of the elections supervisor is to observe the
rules and protect the rule of law. As a result, when they find
tens of thousands of bad ballots, they don't see it as a
problem. In fact, they see it as a success. Their job was to set
aside bad ballots. It says so in their job description! As a
result, finding bad ballots equals doing their job.
But what if the job description was changed. What if their job
was to ensure that the elections accurately reflected the will
of the voters? In that case, bad ballots would be seen as a bad
situation and any system that created too many bad ballots would
immediately be fixed. In that case, Palm Beach County would have
replaced their voting system four years ago when 14,000 bad
ballots were discovered.
Look at some of the metrics we use in the job descriptions for
our sales staffs. They can include making more calls, sending
out more literature, giving more product presentations,
submitting more proposals and even updating the mailing list.
Unfortunately, all of these can be successfully accomplished
without ever getting to a single sale. Sales people can point to
the required task list and justify a very busy day with very
little progress. They can blame everyone except themselves.
Before you dismiss this by saying, "My people are team oriented
and performance focused," take a few minutes to ask your sales
staff how they describe their job responsibilities. See the job
through their eyes for a minute and confirm for yourself that
the vision they have is the one that says, "My job is to
aggressively grow sales and develop long term client
relationships." Make sure that they don't see anything to blame
between themselves and a sale. Properly focused sales teams are
happier, easier to manage and far more productive than those who
play the Blame Game.
For a free copy of "The 5 Steps to Keeping Your Sales Team
Focused", email article3@waterhousegroup.com and ask for #3.
Stephen Waterhouse is Principal and Founder of Waterhouse Group
(www.waterhousegroup.com). They specialize in helping companies
increase their sales and profits. He can be reached at
1-800-57-LEARN or steve@waterhousegroup.com.
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