Ok. A confession. I'm in the tool business, yet I generally hate business tools. For the most part, I've found over the course of my career that they're generally over-hyped in terms of their contribution to my productivity and way more time consuming to learn how to use than anyone ever led me to believe at the outset. In fact, even in instances where the tools had great potential to improve my productivity, my inability to use them effectively often impeded the contributions business tools could make.
Les McKeown's views on how firms achieve Predictable Success are an important reminder of what it really takes. McKeown notes that in business we're often "given the tools for success and an expectation of success, but no dependable way of combining the two to consistently achieve success".
In McKeown's view, 'getting the numbers right' doesn't deliver predictable success. It takes more. It takes an ability to make decisions. Goal setting + achievement. Alignment of people + processes. Self-accountability for results + accountability to others. Personal ownership of actions + outcomes.
I agree. Get the right numbers to the right people with the right tools and they'll astonish you with how personally accountable they become for the impacts they're able to have. Success becomes both achievable + predictable when self-accountable people are aligned in their efforts to produce results, and equipped to see + understand the success with which they're doing so.
 Our approach to doing so is seeded by the Return-on-Effort metrics produced by our sales productivity tool. These metrics give users a clear picture of what they’re achieving from what they’re doing. Such metrics are real-time and automatically generated and establish the cause and effect relationships between what sales reps are doing and what they’re achieving. Reps’ achievements are all based on the real-time buyer actions triggered from sales conversations; this makes Return-on-Effort metrics fast, precise, and comparable.
In this case, Amacus’ metrics revealed an on-boarding performance issue then shrank the time it took for a new hire to hit peak performance. In the new hire's first six weeks, their conversion rate from first sales conversation to first sales appointment was lower than the conversion rate of the top-performing rep. As expected. Then, around week four, the new hire's conversion rates began to plummet. Not expected.
A sales meeting was convened. The new hire and the top performer participated. Their comparative results were reviewed. Everyone agreed the numbers were clean, comparison was fair, and the situation was clear. Many questions were asked. Turns out the new hire was hitting objections and wasn't clear on how to handle them. The top-performer gave clear instructions on how to do so. The meeting adjourned.
Within 2 weeks, the new hire reached all time highs in their conversion rate, and their rate began to approximate that of the top-performer. Six weeks in, the new hire was a winner. So was the sales team.
Amacus’ metrics opened a dialogue that enabled improvements, and provoked the behavior changes needed to achieve those improvements. The user saw that what she was doing mattered. She owned the outcomes and saw that she could affect them by her actions. She took action. She reaped the rewards.
When the picture of what’s being ACHIEVED from what’s being DONE in B2B sales is crystal clear, learning is enabled, change is provoked, and success becomes predictable. In today’s markets, it’s a great state.
| John Cousineau - |
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John Cousineau is CEO, innovativeinfo.com. Makers of Amacus, the ONLY tool triggering B2B sales productivity by revealing Return-on-Effort from sales activities. Read More >> |
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