Get your FREE 30-day trial.
Please complete all fields.
When poor sales performance persists, and everything you’ve tried hasn’t worked, it’s tempting to sit back and say, "That’s just the way it is." It’s probably the number one reason sales performance problems DO persist. Skepticism.
The Power of Positive Deviance is a generalized look at how unlikely innovators solve the world’s toughest problems. It offers several clues on how to conquer skepticism about sales performance. It is an approach to problem solving that combines the hunt for best practices with participatory methods. Best suited to situations (like B2B sales) where the complexity and ‘fixes’ may have unintended consequences, it enables adaptive change with many small experiments found in nature. It’s a way of incrementally executing your way into a new way of performing.
From its lessons, here are five things you can do to solve performance problems on your front lines of sales execution:
Mistakes that go undetected are doomed to be repeated. Get out your flashlight and go looking in the dark for metrics that reveal the effectiveness of your existing sales practices. When you have metrics that let you (and everyone else) see instances in which sales effort’s being invested with little, if any, buyer impact you’ve accomplished an important first step to the epiphany. Now that you can see, therefore you can act. Once you’ve got hard proof of what everyone is accomplishing today, you’ll be able to spot the exceptional, successful, bits.
Front-line folks, when empowered to learn from their practices, will exhibit extraordinary ingenuity and achieve extraordinary results. When they discover useful tricks of the trade that had been invisible, better habits have a chance to flourish. They’ll discover exceptions amongst themselves. Teams can witness what others ‘just like me’ are doing to get better results. The ability to measure progress achieved from new practices reinforces the value of behavior changes. Reps get to see they can move their own meter. Once reps have tasted self-generated success, a foundation for continuous learning is laid. Such personalized learning is huge. Empowered reps (so motivated and so measured) will prove their value to you with their persistence and skill in developing better habits. They’ll improve on their own.
One of the reasons sales performance can be such a struggle to improve is it takes so long to see how today’s efforts might impact this quarter’s results. Use real-time metrics on how practices are affecting your outcomes. When you can see, day-to-day, how you’re doing, you speed up the learning from what you’re doing. When a mistake costs you a few days effort, reps are much less concerned about trying something that doesn’t work. You’ve made "outside the comfort zone" a much safer place than before. This helps reps persist, with enduring courage and curiousity, even if the early returns on their efforts aren’t home runs. Don’t ask what’s wrong or what’s missing. Ask what works against all odds. It’ll be a breath of fresh air.
Sales is a social craft. It involves people interacting with other people. We’re all human. We know how chaotic such interactions can be. There’s a risk that, in its detail, your new metrics will seem like an avalanche of confusing noise. When the nature of what’s going on seems chaotic, look for patterns. Use data visualizations to turn obvious struggles into crystal clear motivators. It’s from such patterns that the need for better practices, and the path to getting there, can become obvious for all to see.
Changing habits is hard. It’s much easier as a group exercise than an individual one. Make it aspirational. Let everyone participating see their participation is critical to success. Organize your efforts in ways that let the group look in the mirror, decide what makes sense, and determine what to do about it. Let participating reps own the outcomes, both individually and collectively. When they do, they’ll bring the courage and curiosity needed to get outside their comfort zones and try new things they might not have otherwise tried.
John Cousineau is the founder and CEO of innovative information inc., makers of Amacus, a solution that improves B2B sales productivity by letting sales teams discover and improve the buyer value of sales practices.@jcousineau.
Learn more sales performance best practices with the free Salesforce ebook below.
