Since I'm on the road every week commuting back and forth from the NH beach either to the Boston office or to Tufts, when I'm not making calls, I'm listening to Bloomberg: solid news, believable and crisply delivered. On any given morning, I hear the words, "inflation" and "the economy" dozens of times, and I always push myself to understand what those words actually mean to me personally since I have zero "control" over either inflation or the economy.    

"Inflation" for me is the fact that a round trip to Boston used to cost me $27 in gas way back in March, and it now costs $56.  I can't control the price of gas, but I can shift my travel schedules, combine other meetings or simply switch to zoom also saving me four hours of gut-wrenching bumper-to-bumper traffic.  On the other hand, by opting out of a morning networking meeting yesterday that I had signed up for, I potentially missed out on an opportunity for new business.  Since I also have a bit of a cold, easy decision. 

The bottom line is that, more and more this year than ever before, I'm making these small decisions related directly to both our business costs and also my personal expenses simply because of "inflation", which I have zero control over in terms of the price of a gallon of gas, but I have 100% control over in taking an action in how much I am going to drive.

Let's shift to this concept of control to the world of Sales. 

Results-Objectives-Activities
 

Results: All of us both as salespeople and managers have grown up in a world of focusing on results:  revenue, profits, market share, number of contacts, retention percentages, new compared to existing, numbers of daily and weekly calls and on and on.  The reality is that no one of us can manage any of these!

This is exactly the same as saying that you can manage inflation!

What is critical for this quarter is for you to narrow down results to your top 3 that you must pull off in the next three months of 60ish actual selling days.

Objectives:  These are not results; they are guideposts that affect results and are aligned with your activities.  They include numbers of new customer leads that become SQLs, sales funnel velocity, step conversion rates, process opt outs and a variety of soft, but important measurements if you want to understand why you're winning or losing velocity.  As you're going through this exercise with me, you should also add here to deliver an updated Q4 Sales Playbook by October 1.    

Activities:  The only thing that counts during these 60ish selling days that you and we have total control over are our own Activities:  sales calls per day, F2F meetings per month, or specific items such as "Business Use Cases" presented per month.

For us the "Business-Use-Case" has been extraordinarily powerful in moving a sales team away from just delivering a proposal since the prospect insisted on wanting "the price". 

For the deals we want, we never send a price!

What we do is provide a very tight process that engages management right at the point of Discovery and results in providing a Business-Use-Case complete with a detailed ROI using their definitions, their delivery timetables, their detailed implementation plans and specifying the requirements from both of us as partners...and of course...a price, but that price is always delivered in the context of a financial ROI, and a very specific timeline.  

A few things to think through this weekend during the storm!