I was reading this excellent post the other day from Todd Youngblood, “Too Many Sales People Are Wimps”, and it really drives home well a concept that is essential for sales and business success:
You must be completely committed to Continuous Improvement!
So what does this really mean and how is it achieved?
1. 100% honesty required
The top reason that sales people, sales teams, and business fail to improve fast enough is they refuse to be honest with themselves and their staff. Managers and executives who refuse to be honest have a ton of excuses readily available:
- not all employees are a top performer
- we have to stay positive with our employees
- its not fair to compare them to the top performers
But there is nothing wrong with expecting everyone in your organization to show the desire for continuous improvement. First step – start practicing honest assessment of what has worked and what hasn’t. It’s not a blame game, it’s about figuring out what works so you can repeat what does and minimize (or eliminate) things that don’t work.
2. Use real data derived from fast feedback loops
Be honest, and make sure to use real results that are from customer / market facing departments as well as from direct customer feedback. The tricky part here is that you need to be as pessimistic as possible while looking at this data. The goal is to find the red flags and points of failure and only accept that you have conquered them when direct customer / market feedback proves that you have. If you are trying to massage data to cover your bacon you are not going to find the issues early, only when it is too late.
And whatever you do, do it fast! Sometimes that means you need to trust your instincts to infer and project. This is really important for things like messaging and features. If you wait until you know everything its too late. Trust your instinct when evaluating limited data points – if you think it’s not working well you are probably right! It’s better to kill a program that might succeed early than to let one that is failing go on too long…
3. Be open to new ideas, demand accountability but allow people the freedom to execute
This manifests itself best when management & leaders set the direction, along with measurable objectives, then let others contribute the exact steps to execute the plan for achieving the desired outcome.
When I first started managing sales teams and sales people this was one of the hardest lessons I had to learn – allow people to work using their methods. What I learned over time (and after managing many different types of sales teams and sales people) was that when you open yourself up other means and methods you grow as well AND achieve better results faster!
People need to be personally “invested” to truly care about the results. The easiest way to get someone invested is to allow them to create and implement a plan. Then they truly care about whether it fails or succeeds.
It all sounds so easy doesn’t it?
In practice though it takes strong individuals, strong management, and a strong company to consistently do the items above without “wimping” out.
Be strong – be honest – be fast – be data-driven – and be tough – that’s the only way to rock!
Let SHV know how you “rock” your Continuous Improvement by leaving a comment!
