The answers were that the painting could not wait, but the trip to the Winhall General Store was put off for multiple days. It must be something in the Vermont air because the entire state of Vermont...along with Bernie Sanders... operates at its own pace and nothing a flatlander does or says is going to make any difference in terms of political or financial impact. Even with 7 generations of Vermonters surrounding me, I always remember "my place" since I was born on the south side of Chicago and grew up in Boston's suburbs even through 5 generations before me were "true' Vermonters".
After a week in Vermont, operating at a speed of no more than 25mph, this past Monday, I was suddenly dropped into the fast lane of the reality of returning to work in Boston quickly accelerating to 95mph with all of the normal thoughts of any sales manager that come with planning out a new quarter while at the same time already jumping ahead to figure out what it takes to get to 125% of quota by December. What I brought with me from the quiet of the hills of Vermont is my resulting theme for these next six months of :
In an time of ever-increasing domestic political and geo-political friction, divisiveness and, just abject violence, I'm doubling...probably tripling...down on absolute focusing on what I can personally control...and quite frankly that's a lot. Although I'm not going to have any impact on reducing the vitriol and non-sensical suppositions coming out of Washington, I can have immediate impact with my own sales team and with the teams of our customers on one thing, and that's productivity. What people have found in thousands of studies, and basically without exception, the more productive businesses are simply much more likely to survive and grow faster. If you want to be a successful business, you simply need to be a highly productive business, and there is nowhere in any company that has a more immediate impact than in Sales. Productivity from Marketing takes months. The impact in productivity from Engineering takes years. Increasing productivity from Sales can make an impact next Friday!
Very simply, the measure of productivity is how much output, how much GDP, is generated for every hour of work. The easiest concept would be to imagine an old-school, pre-robot, manufacturing line of assemblers. If the speed of the assembly line could be increased by 10%, theoretically, output, therefore, productivity would increase by 10%. Old school thinking which in the mid 1900's worked for a while.
Let's take that concept, update it to the reality of actively engaging an incentivized team of bright, professional salespeople who want to achieve more productivity, and let's provide simple management practices and easy-to-use productivity tools that enable and increase the actual selling time betwen salespeople and prospects:
1. Completely take down the walls between Marketing & Sales
Anyone who gets in the way and wants to point fingers and assess blame to protect their own turf, you need to simply put them on warning with notice that any violation of not being a proactive and fully engaged member of the team, they get terminated immediately. Zero tolerance! Let the game of divisive politics play out in Washington, but not in your company. Marketing's job is very simple: provide salespeople with qualified leads. The wonderful complexity in marketing comes through today's access to highly capable talent and extraordinary technology tools and platforms. Zero tolerance! You have enough to do with your own time like working with new prospects and existing customers.
2. Count the hours
If you want to to go faster in finding and closing on more new customers and selling more to existing customers, then that simply is not going to happen by having what I too often hear is "a kinda sales process".
Just like any other profession (think auto mechanics, accountants, surgeons, pilots, and electricians), salespeople need to have the ease of one formal process structure embedded in an easy-to-use CRM populated with graded selling tools supplied by Marketing (slide decks, videos, value proposition messaging and templates) that allow them to measure their own productivity and most importantly to transparently share best practices with one another.
Enough for this morning! What started out as a simple thought or two I had about lessons from a week of downtime in Vermont, has now extended into taking too much time away from your own sales productivity this Friday AM. Do think about these ideas for a bit of tomorrow during what's unfortunately going to be total washout. Most importantly, plan on focusing only on what you personally can control as we launch full force into the second half of this year.
Have a great day selling today!
www.derbymanagement.com
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts.