With the first half of the year in the rearview mirror, it’s healthy and necessary for an organization to reflect on performance, ensuring the ability to evolve with the changing needs of the market and adjust strategy as required. Now, you may be thinking…”We are hitting our performance goals and seem to be in tune with the direction of our customers. With our economy humming along, and business seemingly moving in a positive direction, any modifications could be inviting a poor future outcome.”
That argument can certainly be made, but knowing that nothing is permanent, what will you do when the economy does in fact turn? What steps can you take to ensure sustainable growth in spite of variables outside of your control?
While most things in business are not binary, we certainly know that it is better to constantly challenge status quo for improved or accelerated results. Companies with whom we work are averaging 4X market growth because we help them focus on continued and balanced improvement in 3 main areas.
STRATEGY, ACTIVITY AND SKILL
Let’s look more deeply at the questions you should be asking yourselves and your teams to ensure alignment with your performance objectives.
Strategy
Have specific parameters around the organizational go-to-market strategy been developed? Determine what industries are best suited to your solutions, and maybe more importantly, the DNA of the best types of customers within each of those industries. Analyze your best current clients and identify what factors make them such a perfect fit. Then make sure your team is creating a target list of prospects that match as closely as possible to that DNA. Ask your sales team to communicate back to you the strategy to ensure they completely understand the requirements.
Is the team then prioritizing their efforts accordingly? Focus the entire team on cultivating relationships with those organizations that support the overarching strategy and do not waste time on opportunities that are not in alignment.
Do they have the tools/training to deliver on the strategy? Have we invested in initial onboarding and training tools for our teams to ensure they are positioned to execute our strategy at the highest levels? If you are familiar with “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs”, providing the tools and training to be successful fulfills the very basics of the pyramid, and is required for successful execution in business.
Activity
Are they providing the proper effort on the right activities? Focus your attention on the level of effort required and the yield received from specific activities. So an important follow up question to this is:
Have defined activity standards been established with a minimum quantity and success rate of each determined? You want to execute on best practices related to activity types and patterns, so make sure you have an understanding of what types of actions (emails, phone calls, field visits, LinkedIn networking, etc.) drive the desired performance outcomes and measure, measure, measure.
Skill
Are your leaders consistently identifying opportunities to help their team grow their skills? If the organization has a clearly defined strategy that is being executed and the activities have been defined, the only area that would prevent you from accelerating or transforming results is skills building.
Ask yourself this question…when was the last time the organization put together skills development training for their sales team? Whether a newer or more tenured salesperson, everyone benefits from continuous improvement, and research shows that those companies that invest in learning and development experience a higher percentage of high performers. Why is this important? High performing employees outperform average performers and provide their organizations with significant competitive advantages:
At Bain & Company, the difference is 4x
GE experiences a 10x multiplier
Apple a 25x differential
Google dominates with a whopping 300x productivity advantage with high-performers over employees with average levels of productivity
By focusing attention on these 3 key areas, you will put both your organization and the team members that represent the brand in a much better position to support the outperformance of your market. If the answer to any of the above questions is no, Butler Street will help you and your team transform the way you are viewed by your customers and prospects alike. If interested in learning more about how we help our customers accomplish such remarkable results, contact us.