A team of academic researchers once asked Bear Bryant why Alabama football was so successful under his tenure.
Bear Bryant’s response: “Because I love my players, and they love me.”
The researchers were skeptical.
Alabama football, like any team, was measured on the basis of wins and losses. The researchers theorized that the team’s win-loss history (or the amount of love they had for their coach) might not be the most useful measure or motivator for individual players. How, for example, is the effectiveness of the punter or the second string tight end measured?
Investigators who followed Bear Bryant, his coaching staff and his players for one season. Here’s what they found:
For each position on the team, Bear Bryant and his staff had broken down the most important skills into their simplest steps. Each role had a hierarchy of skills. A lineman, for example, would have to execute a series of steps in a pass blocking scheme to get it in the right position with the proper leverage. The number, size and speed of the steps were measured. Once a player mastered the basic skills, they would be given a more advanced set of moves to master. If, after an adequate amount of practice time, a player was still unable to execute a series of movements correctly, the coaching staff would videotape it. The staff then showed the player their own video and a video of a player executing the steps smoothly. The player’s focus, for as long as it took, was to master that set of moves.
Bear Bryant and his coaches had dozens of very specific skills for each position on a soccer team. And they used those specific skills as metrics to make sure each player had something to work on. Each player knew what he had to master to improve.
Everyone outside of the Alabama soccer locker room defined success by the number of games won. And you might believe that the reason Alabama football was so successful was because Bear Bryant loved his players and they loved him.
The researchers came to a different conclusion. Bear Bryant and his staff had great soccer teams because each player could achieve success throughout the day or week by mastering the next set of moves needed to improve. Profits and losses aside, they were able to see their own progress, and that’s what motivated them to keep working. Individually, those improvements likely had little to do with Alabama winning or losing a game. But collectively, they made the team better every week. And when the team did not perform well, instead of guessing (and firing the bettor), the coaching staff had a better idea of the correct specific corrective actions to take.
For most marketers, measuring sales volume on a monthly basis is like evaluating an individual player by the team’s win-loss history.
Selling is a noisy process with many external factors over which you may have little control, such as price, the strength of your customer-competitor relationships, the personalities of the individual customers you work with, and how well your products deliver. with a main customer need.
We pay attention to what we measure. And when we pay attention, we notice what makes the metric better and what makes it worse. We get ideas to improve what we are measuring.
So what do you measure?
Sales volume, of course, is an appropriate measure for the company as a whole, and ultimately for a salesperson, over time. The amount of time depends on the industry you are in and what you sell. If the life cycle of a sale in a business is nine months, the noise and static that influence the outcome of a sale make annual volume a poor measure of a seller’s performance. Don’t confuse what you need to measure in your sales process with what you measure. A good sales director, like a good coaching staff, should measure the performance of a salesperson using different and more specific metrics than for the organization as a whole. If you determine that the leverage in your sales process is having face-to-face meetings with new leads, then measure that. Measuring is a form of reinforcement. Find out the small steps a salesperson must master to be more effective in their business and measure them. We get more than we reinforce.
Here are a series of questions to help you determine where the leverage is in your process:
1. what is my sales process? How can I define all the steps in which I participate?
2. What are the levers and log jams in my sales process? What are the key things that are most likely to generate sales? (For example, do a demo, get a face-to-face meeting, qualify a potential customer, get an application signed. Or conversely, what are the key things that derail or stop a sale or customer relationship? ?)
3. What can I do better specifically to influence those levers? (Or loosen log jams?)
4. What can I measure to track my progress in doing those things better?
If you don’t figure out the leverage points in your sales process, you don’t know what to measure in order to improve. Ah, but don’t worry, when things go wrong and you’re 0-8, you can always fire the punter.
The ideas for this post come from Tim’s book Never Be Closing. We hope you have found them useful.