I wanted to share with the wider world a really simple and at times eye opening exercise that I use with a lot of the businesses and teams that I work with. Touch wood, it’s usually really helpful for illustrating the fact that if we commit ourselves to reasonable activity levels, what we can actually achieve.
Let me explain a little further…. I tend to work in Quarters, I think it gives people time to perform, regardless of whether it’s broken down into monthly targets so let’s take a look at some examples based on a 60 working day quarter.
If I commit to making 25 good Cold Calls each day I will engage 1500 decision makers each quarter
If I commit to sending 25 messages on Linkedin each day I will contact another 1500 businesses each quarter
If I commit to attending 15 sales meetings per week I will get my product in front of 180 buying authorities each quarter
If I commit to……..
So 2 questions for you really:
1) Looking at the amount of current activity you do, what would your examples look like?
2) What could you commit yourself to in order to really push yourself?
From a sales management point of view, I really like allowing people to choose their own activity commitments and as part of allowing them to choose, I’d also expect them to at least meet or exceed them. What’s also great about this stuff is that it really helps with producing performance metrics.
We’re mad about metrics. They’re invaluable to any sales organisation.
For example, we could tell how many cold calls each person needs to make to create an opportunity and how many opportunities we need to create to close a deal. Not only does this provide insights into performance/skill levels/ training requirements and a multitude of other things, it also provides individual accountability within the business.
This is always a good thing. But I digress, so…
Remember, it doesn’t matter how good your sales skills are, if you don’t put in the activity, you won’t reap the rewards that are easily within your reach.
Obviously, it IS behavior (or activity) that counts, rather than things that actually interfere with taking action.
But I have a caution. In an article I wrote a long time ago, Effectiveness & Activity – Focus On The “E”! (http://work911.com/articles/acte.htm) I focus on the risk of mistaking activity for effectiveness.
Originally wrote the thing about government where there’s a lot of confusing the two. The basic point here is that it isn’t activity that’s important as much as the RIGHT activities at the right time, where the latter is directly related to results, or outcomes, or effectiveness.
Just my additional take on this.
I agree with you there Robert, as long as the activity we are doing is actually progressing us forward we have no issues.
We’ve actually found that the best way to do this is by simply focusing on metrics and analysis – I’ll refer back to the start of year meeting I had with the team, which after number crunching and consideration we realised that one activity was actually a massive drain on resources whilst another wasn’t being optimised for it’s full potential.
I’ll check out your article!
The trouble is with activity, you can’t really tell how effective it is until you’ve spent some time actioning it – otherwise its a case of guessing and predicting, which let’s face it is never going to be as efficient as actually testing it.