When you teach or preach ‘a better way’ you better be doing it yourself. Phrases like eating your own dog food, drinking your own champagne, or walking the talk, spring to mind.
I don’t know if you sell products or services, but being your own customer is often the hardest thing to do. You’d better get it right or you should question the value your customer receives. When you are your own customer, you can be more demanding, more hesitant, more ambivalent than even your most demanding real customer. You also get to flavor what your dog food tastes like.
At The TAS Group we run our own business using Dealmaker. It helps us to sell smarter and manage better, because the sales methodology, intelligence, knowledge and analytics are delivered in context to the sales person as they work their deals. Frankly, I don’t know how I’d do my job if I didn’t have it. But that’s my biased opinion – and when we acquired InfoMentis a few weeks ago, our new team members challenged us. “Well show me,” they said, “Prove it. How does this help us perform better?“
Our Global Sales Meeting is next week. We will have about 60 people in the room. It’s going to be a blast – but that’s not what it’s all about.
Over the past few weeks we’ve delivered methodology learning through DVLS – the Dealmaker Virtual Learning System. Everyone will come to Atlanta having self-assessed and self-certified on the methodology concepts. During the GSM the new (and old) sales team will apply the methodology in Dealmaker on their live deals. Dealmaker will coach them through how to win the deal. Later during the event, I will work live in our own Dealmaker account using Performance Coach to show how, as an exec, I use it to monitor, measure, manage and help deal planning.
All this has been happening during the busiest quarter of the year for us, which closed on January 31st. It’s a frantic time. But we’re doing this because we have to. We have to eat our own dog food. According to independent research by the Aberdeen Group, customers of The TAS Group enjoyed 21% higher team quota attainment than all other customers put together. So, it would be brain dead not to do this for our own team.
If you’re interested, I’ll report back and let you know how the dog food tastes. I expect it to be a culinary delight!
