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. 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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