My gym has a “fun” tradition.
On your Birthday, they give you or the entire class extra work. Notice the “quotes” around “fun?” It’s usually pretty brutal. And if you try and skip the gym on your Birthday, they’ll wait, and next time you’re in, they’ll get you.
Tomorrow, it will be my turn.
This past weekend we celebrated my daughter’s Birthday, my Birthday, and those ritualized holidays treats have started magically appearing in the kitchen.
While the extra workout is bound to be extra challenging, It will allow me to pay down some of my dieting debts from the weekend.
One of the things I’ve done well with over the past few months is measuring and tracking everything I eat. My gym recently ran a 6-week challenge, and I managed to finish third out of over 50 people.
That’s not to say there isn’t a weekend here or there where things go awry (this past weekend comes to mind) but working with the coaches at the gym, I’ve done a great job of measuring what I eat, and they’ve done a fabulous job holding me accountable.
I’m working with a client to help them bring that same kind of accountability to their sales teams.
We’ve spent a lot of time working together to build their sales process and, more importantly, how it would be measured and monitored.
I can’t help but continue to harp on this from a business point of view. I continue to work with clients – very successful companies – where many things they know should be measured aren’t measured. These companies have no way of knowing if they’re being done.
Let’s use the sales division as an example. Sales are the beating heart of a great company. Not only are companies expected to keep our customers healthy and lively, but most companies are also dependent on sales to keep the blood of new customers flowing.
You need to be measuring the activity happening every day. Otherwise, you’ll end up bloated, overweight, and out of shape. It would help if you held yourself and your people accountable.
We need to be measuring the activity and NOT just the result after a slow, lazy weekend of pizza, cookies, and birthday cake.
- How many calls were made?
- How many new contacts were added to your CEM?
- Has the team followed up on all outstanding quotes and proposals?
- How many new appointments have been set?
- How many new deals closed?
- What about deal lost?
- New opportunities found?
- Referral requests?
- Testimonials gathered?
If you’re relying on individual reporting and overall stats from your sales team to determine their performance, then you’re robbing both the company and your people of the ability to identify what is working and what is not at a company-wide level.
This also leaves you without the evidence to better train, coach, and mentor your people (either as a group or individually) in areas where they may need help.
To make any change, it’s not enough to know what needs to be done. The gap between “knowing” and “doing” could easily swallow the Grand Canyon.
None of the clients I work with are suffering from not knowing what to do – instead, what’s missing is the ability to pick the suitable projects and to be relentless in their execution, day in and day out.
In other words – don’t tell yourself you should eat better – actually track everything that goes into your mouth for two weeks.
Don’t say, “I need to be better at reaching out to my clients.” Instead, track every outbound contact that you make and look at that number every day.
More importantly, make sure your sales managers are working with their salespeople to be tracking this and providing the help and coaching they need to identify the areas that will have the most significant impact on sales
Your challenge for this week:
Where could you do a better job measuring?
Are you only tracking and rewarding outputs when you could be rewarding your people for the right inputs/activity?
Pick one area that you’re going to measure more fully, and be consistent with it for at least one week.
Please send me an email at [email protected] and let me know what you’re working on.
Best,
Noah
