One of the key roles of any leader or executive is to teach, coach, develop our people.  Our people are all too eager to learn from our experience, to learn what we did to be successful, as well as to learn what mistakes we may have made, so they can avoid them.

“Teaching,” whether formally or through coaching or mentoring is a privilege for any executive.  It’s a powerful way, not only to work on specific skills development, but to pass along values, to build the culture, to provide our people a broader context in which to position their contributions.  In growing our people, it’s our number one responsibility.

But often, we forget another key component of teaching/coaching/mentoring our people.  We forget the tremendous value we get in learning from them.

Today, I’ve been carrying on a couple of email conversations.  One with a sales manager in the Far East, another with a sales person in the Midwest.  With each, it became clear a telephone conversation would be valuable.  But each was reluctant to ask me to invest some time in it–not sure if there was a “business outcome” for me.  While I appreciate their sensitivity to my revenue generation, I told each, that I really value these conversations and learn a lot from them.  Each was overly humble in replying, “I can’t possibly imagine what you can learn from me.”

Learning–whether it is formal or through coaching or mentoring is really two ways.  I know what I can share as a sales executive or consultant — what people, whether they are sales people in my organization or clients, can learn from me.  But the value we get from them teaching us can never be over-stated.

It’s an opportunity for any executive to learn what’s really happening in the organization and the world.  We get the privilege to talk to people who are struggling to implement our strategies, to achieve the goals we have set, and who help make us successful.  We get an unfiltered view of what’s really happening–not the sterile numbers or text that may be in a report, but the context, emotions, and color commentary on what’s really happening.

We get much more than that.  For example, in the email conversations I was having with these two individuals, they were asking questions differently than had been posed before.  Each was asking about prospecting, demand generation, and sales process, but they expressed the questions a little differently–the questions were challenging and caused me to really think about my response.  They gave me the opportunity to look at what I thought I already knew, but to look at it a little differently.

The questions didn’t cause me to change my mind or point of view.  They didn’t create an “A-HA” moment, but they caused me to reflect and think about the appropriate response.  They forced me to consider something I thought I knew, but from a slightly different point of view.  It was something I could learn from.

Often, it’s the naive questions we may get from our subordinates.  We tend to think everyone understands things the same way we do, that just because it’s something we “get,” that everyone else does as well.  Then you encounter a sincere, but naive question, that causes you to sit back and realize you’ve been alone, that others simply may not get it.

Or, like any human being, we beome blind.  We don’t see what everyone else sees, we become a little disconnected from what’s really happening.  The questions and discussions with our subordinates or people deep in our organization are often a giant wake up call–but only if we are open to learning.

I, along with others, write often about how critical it is for executives and leaders to teach, coach, and mentor their people.  Almost always, we focus on the importance of it in developing our people and helping them perform at the highest levels.

One of the greatest values of teaching, coaching, and mentoring is what we learn from the person we are coaching.  It helps us grow and to perform at even higher levels.  When you are coaching, don’t cheat yourself of the opportunity to learn from those who you are coaching—that may be where the greatest value lies.

I sit in hundreds of review sessions every year.  Pipeline reviews, territory reviews, account reviews, opportunity reviews, call reviews.  An odd thing happens in about 90% of the reviews, they all become deal reviews.

Think about the last pipeline review you participated in.  It starts out with a review of the pipeline, pretty soon, someone–perhaps the manager, perhaps a participant, perhaps the sales person doing the review, focuses on a particular deal.  All of a sudden the conversation shifts and becomes a deal review.  Seldom do we get back to reviewing the pipeline, if we do, it’s only for a moment.  Soon another deal is highlighted and we get into another deal review.

The same thing happens in account or territory reviews.  We start talking about the account or territory plan, and within a few minutes, a deal pops up and we shift our focus to a deal.

I see this in review session after review session.  We start with one type of review and soon the review shifts to talking about deals.  It’s no wonder, as sales people or managers we’re continually focused on doing deals–chasing opportunities.  It’s natural that we shift, almost unconsciously into deal reviews.  We end up never completing the review we had intended.

Deal reviews are important–we want to look at what it takes to win, how we can maximize the deal profitability, how we can reduce the sales cycle.  We all gravitate to talking about deals.

But we can’t overlook territory, pipeline, account, and call reviews.  These are important–each serves a different function, each important to achieving our goals.

Reviews serve two important purposes–both for the manager and sales person.  First, they help us manage the business.  They help us understand what’s happening, whether we are going to achieve our goals, or to identify problems or obstacles.  The review process is a powerful coaching opportunity.  Managers need to leverage these reviews to help develop their people, sales people need the coaching, help, insight to help improve their performance.

Each review has a different focus and objective.

Deal reviews:  We spend a lot of time on deal reviews–rightfully so, this is where we spend most of our time.  The objectives of a deal review are to determine how we maximize our probability of winning, how we compress the cycle, how we maximize deal profitability.  As managers or sales people, we want to make sure we are positioned to win, that we are aligned with our customers, creating the greatest value possible.

Pipeline reviews:  Funnel or pipeline reviews are critical.  They enable us to look at all the all the deals we are pursuing.  Do we have enough deals to achieve our quotas?  Do we have good flow through the funnel?  Is anything getting stuck?  Are we feeding enough new deals into the top of the funnel?  Are there systemic things that impact our effectiveness.  A pipeline review looks at the overall state of the business, not at specific deals.

Account review:  In any account, we may have many things going on.  Lot of deals, projects, extending our relationships into new parts of the account.  An account review focuses on all aspects of the account.  In some cases, it is similar to a pipeline review–we may want to look at the number and quality of deals we are pursuing.  The account review also represents an a prospecting plan.  What are we doing to expand our relationships in the account, how do we leverage these activities to identify more opportunities to pursue.  An account review allows us to focus on the quality of our relationship—are we maximizing our value to the customer, are we important to the customer?  It allows us to look at is the customer good for us, are we maximizing the profitability of the customer.  It allows us to look at the strategic relationship we want to have with the customer.

Territory reviews:  Territory reviews are similar to account reviews, but rather than focusing on a particular account, we look at the territory.  Are we maximizing our penetration of the territory?  Where are there new opportunities?  What can we do to maximize our share of the territory.

Call reviews:  Call reviews are very closely tied to deal reviews.  We execute our deal strategy by making calls.  In a call review, we want to debrief a particular call.  In addition to the “to-dos” and next steps in the sales process, we want to take the time to assess our effectiveness in the call.  Did we accomplish everything we had planned?  Could we have accomplished more?  Is there anything we would have changes?  What did we learn and how do we apply it to future calls.  The problem with call reviews is usually we focus on the “to-dos” and miss the opportunity to discuss our impact and effectiveness.

Each of the types of reviews is very important to managing our effectiveness, performance, and impact.  We need to do each–generally we do deal and call reviews quite frequently, every week.  Pipeline/funnel reviews–unless you have very short sales cycles, don’t need to be conducted as frequently.  Territory and Account reviews–unless there’s a lot of change, usually need to be done once a quarter, sometimes even less.

To maximize the value of each review–keep focused on what you are trying to achieve in the review.  The temptation is always to talk about deals, but unless you are doing opportunity reviews, you need to focus on what you are trying to achieve in the review process.

Virtually everything we do can be recovered.  We make a bad call, we can fix it and recover from it, we lose a deal, we can learn from it and win the next ten deals.  The one thing we can’t recover is time–once we’ve spent it, it’s lost, we can’t re-do it, we can’t recover it.  So it’s critical we manage our time to maximize our impact and effectiveness.

If our job is to sell—to acquire new business, orders, and revenue; then clearly we want to maximize the time available to sell (as well as maximize our effectiveness for the time spent–but that’s a different post).  This seems obvious, you might be asking, “tell me something I don’t know.”

However, when we start looking at how sales people spend their time, increasingly we find more time is spent in non-selling related activities than in selling related activities.  Surveys show time spent in sales related activities at a little more than 40%.  In surveys we’ve done with a number of organizations recently, we are seeing sales related time significantly lower, sometimes south of 20%.

We’ll never be able to spend 100% of our time selling, there are things we have to do as sales people that aren’t sales related.  But we want to do everything we can to maximize the time we have available to sell.

Generally, we find two categories impacting time available for selling:

• How we, individually, manage our time.
• Organizational impacts on our time.

In maximizing time available for selling, we have to look at both.

Managing our time available for selling:  We are responsible for setting our daily schedules and priorities.  Too often we don’t manage our time–we let interruptions manage us, our time is consumed with reacting or responding.  Or we get into an avoidance mode.  We know we have to prospect, we find all sorts of excuses to avoid prospecting.  Or we just don’t have a plan at all.  Soon our time available for selling disappears.  Vicious prioritization of our time, focusing on where we invest our time, blocking time focusing on the activities that enable us to achieve our goals is critical.

Track how you spend your time.  Look at how much time you spend in selling, look at the other time drains.  Block your time, schedule yourself, make sure that you are conscious about how you invest your time–invest it in activities that enable you to achieve your goals.

Organizational impacts on time:  Sometimes our ability to manage our time is out of our control, people in our company start consuming time.  Most of the time it’s unconscious, it’s people, our colleagues doing their jobs.  They may have questions, they want to understand what’s happening with customers.  Sometimes, roles and responsibilities are unclear, as things start falling through the cracks, in order to serve our customers, sales people step in to take up the slack.  Sometimes, our organizations just impose a lot of bureaucracy.  We have to work with our colleagues.  We have responsibilities within our own organizations, but too often–and inadvertently, the internal meetings or requests can start to consume our time.

We see systemic issues impacting selling time within organizations.  Often it is the result of poorly defined roles and responsibilities, sometimes it is poor mechanisms for managing communications in the organization.  It’s important to understand where the time drains are.  It’s important eliminate those that you can.  For the others, it’s important to see how you can minimize the impact.  For example, often product managers want feedback from sales on new features they may be considering.  They may survey 100% of the sales force.  Get a few product managers surveying 100% of the sales force, all of a sudden you have a huge time impact.  If each surveyed only a portion of the sales force, the impact on each sales person could be significantly less.  Usually, there are pretty simple solutions, but first we have to know we have a problem.

Organizations and systemic impacts on selling time are difficult for sales people to deal with.  Typically, a sales person cannot refuse to comply.  Managers need to be attentive to these organizational and systemic time drains, seeking to eliminate or reduce their impact.

One of the easiest ways to improve sales productivity is to simply make more time available for selling.  Moving from 20% time available to 30% time available can improve results by 50%.

• Are you using your time as effectively as possible–maximizing the time you have for selling?
• Are you looking for the time drains on your schedule, seeking to eliminate or minimize them?

As sales professionals and sales leaders, we are constantly focused on achieving the highest levels of performance.  We have to constantly improve–performance that was outstanding five years ago is deficient now.  What is outstanding today will become uncompetitive in the future.

Implementing performance improvement initiatives, continuing to improve and innovate is very difficult.  Sometimes, in looking at sales performance improvement, it’s important to break it into a couple of components:

• Are we being as effective as possible?
• Are we being as efficient as possible?

Sales effectiveness generally focuses on are we doing thing in the best possible way?  Are we doing things right?  We look at things like our sales process–is our sales process maximizing our ability to connect with our customers, to create value in their buying process and to maximize our ability to win?  Or we may look at our account/territory strategies—are we maximizing our contribution to the customer(s), are we aligned with their goals, helping them to achieve them, are we maximizing our share within the account or territory, are we identifying and pursuing every opportunity and maximizing our ability to win them?

Sales efficiency has a slightly different focus than sales effectiveness.  Typically it focuses on speed, time, resource.  Are we achieving our goals in the shortest time possible?  Can we reduce the time or resource required to execute our strategies and goals?  Can we reduce or compress sales cycles?

Effectiveness and efficiency go hand in hand when we are looking to achieve the highest levels of sales performance.  Doing things right–but at the wrong tempo doesn’t allow us to perform as well as possible.  Executing bad  processes in the shortest time possible doesn’t improve performance.

But sometimes, it’s very difficult to achieve both simultaneously.  Too often I see performance improvement initiatives fail because people are trying to change too many things at the same time.  People generally have the capacity to focus and execute 1-3 things very well, the more we pile on, the more difficult it is to excel.  People get confused, priorities are blurry, understanding what works and what doesn’t is impossible.

Often, it’s important to separate the performance improvement initiatives, focusing first on one area of improvement, then the next, then the next…..  Ideally, taking small, but very rapid steps.

As we look at sales effectiveness and efficiency initiatives, generally we have the greatest impact in performance improvement by focusing first on effectiveness—doing things right.  For example, making sure people understand the sales process and are executing it well–improving their deal strategies, creating great value with the customer, maximizing our ability to win.

As we as individuals or as our teams start maximizing their effectiveness or impact, then we can start working on efficiency–how to we achieve the same goals more quickly, how do we achieve the same outcomes with a smaller resource investment?

If you are struggling in making your sales performance improvement initiatives work, consider separating them–focus first on effectiveness, then focus on efficiency.  You’ll find you are accomplishing much more–faster.

As sales professionals, we’re all very goal directed and measurement oriented.  Managers leverage numbers heavily in managing and coaching performance.  But there’s a fine line in using the numbers appropriately in coaching.  Too often, coaching becomes about the numbers and not about what they mean.  The real secret to effective coaching is understanding is causing the results, getting underneath the numbers.

Most of the time the number are just symptoms of something else–an underlying problem of challenge..  None of us would feel comfortable if a doctor just treated our symptoms, rather than examining and trying to understand what creates those symptoms.  Yet too often, we totally ignore this in coaching our people.

The numbers are just symptoms or alerts.  They tell us that something’s happening, they draw our attention to a potential issue.  As managers and coaches, it’s our responsibility, with our people, to drill down understanding what they mean—what underlies them and what do we need to do about it.

Too often, the coaching goes something like this:

Manager:  “You aren’t hitting you numbers for prospecting calls, what are you going to do to fix that?”

Sales person:  “Make more calls????”

Manager:  “Absolutely, you need to hit your numbers!  Make sure you are making the calls!”

What an enormous waste of time!  What has the sales manager learned in this exchange? What has the sales person learned?  Absolutely nothing, yet the manager can “check the box,” having coached the person.  Too many coaching sessions look like this, with the discussion focusing on the wrong issues.  The manager takes no time to understand what’s going on, why the sales person might not be achieving the goals, what it means, or how to improve the ability of the sales person to meet the goal.  There’s no problem solving with the sales person, no conversation about what might be done, no skills building.  It ends up being a lost opportunity.

It is worse, the manager may not understand why the goal, in this case a certain number prospecting calls, was established in the first place.  The number was established for a reason, presumably a certain number of calls result in a certain number of qualified leads which result in more opportunities in the pipeline, which ……….  But too often,managers and sales people lose this connection, so the number becomes an end in itself, disconnected from why it was established in the first place.

Soon we have sales people and sales managers going through the motions, with no idea about what they mean and why there were established in the first place.

Metrics are important, they help us understand whether we are on target to achieve our goals or not.  For the most part, the numbers aren’t the end–they are indicators of whether we are likely to achieve our goals or not.

For managers, make sure you understand what you are trying to achieve with each metric that you are putting in place.  Understand how they contribute to the numbers that do count, understand how they link and impact each other.  Make sure you can explain explain all of this to your team.  Give them a context to understand what it means and how it fits into the attainment of their overall goals.  Make sure you can understand and diagnose the problems your people might be having in achieving the goals.  It’s important that sales people understand how everything they do contributes to achieving their goals.

In coaching, think of the actual attainment of the metric as in and indicator or alert.  If a person isn’t achieving the metric, it alerts you to looking at what’s happening and why.  You may need to take corrective action.  All of this is a terrific opportunity for coaching and problem solving with your sales people.  Engage the sales person in looking at the issues and diagnosing them.  Make them a part of the process so they understand and own their role in taking the corrective actions.

This process is very powerful–it not only enables you to identify performance issues with your sales people, developing strategies to improve performance, but the process of working with your people in understanding what the numbers mean, gives sales people greater ability to diagnoze and address issues by themselves.

Do you know what the numbers mean?  Are you managing to the number or are you leveraging these alerts in identifying performance issues and working with your people to develop solutions.

My post yesterday stirred some discussion, Stop Spending So Much Time Coaching The Bottom Of The Funnel.  I thought I’d expand on it to clarify my comments. 

Annually, I sit in hundreds of deal reviews.  Too often, the focus is at the end of the cycle–we’ve put our offer forward, we’re doing everything we can to win (Funny how we seldom spend a lot of time doing reviews on opportunities that we believe we have won).  In reality, there’s probably not much we can do at this point.  We’ve failed to convince the customer and last minute tactics or shifts in strategy seldom change the outcome.

Everyone comes up with ideas, perhaps we should “parachute some executives in.”  The thought being our senior executives might meet with the customer’s senior executives (who they probably have never met), and convince them to overrule their people to decide in our favor.  I’ve been the senior executive on both sides of those calls, trust me it’s uncomfortable for both and seldom works.

Most often, the discussion centers around the “D-word,”  that being discount.  Here’s where we try to buy the business–sometimes, perhaps a lot of times, that does work.  Or it’s used as ammunition to try to negotiate the preferred supplier down.  This does work, but is this really the way to win the business?

Too often, managers are just interested in reviewing opportunities at the bottom of the funnel.  They are interested in:  What’s it take to win the business now?  How do we change our positioning?  Too often our options are really limited–it’s virtually impossible to correct poor strategies at the last minute.  Too often most of these last ditch efforts are tantamount to “Pissing On The Ashes.”  (Forgive my colorful portrayal, but this is what I used to call these meetings when sales people in my organization asked me to call on an exec as a last ditch effort.)

I’m also struck by how casuallly we, both sales people and managers, take the strategy development process early in the sales cycle.  I see few reviews, little coaching.  The reviews usually start mid way through the process and increase in intensity toward the end.  But it’s early in the process where we really have the opportunity to shape our strategy, to help shape the customer’s approach to making a buying decision.

We serve both our and our customer’s interests best by spending time thinking and discussing our strategy early in the sales/buying process–usually just after we’ve qualified the opportunity.  It’s the time to consider:

• What’s the customer’s buying process and how do we make sure we are aligned with it, and creating value in the process?
• What do we need to learn about what the customer is trying to achieve?
• Who do we need to be working with, and who from our team are we going to have to working on the customer team?
• How are we going to create value–not just in our solution, but in the way we work with the customer?
• Who is the competition?  How are we going to position ourselves?
• How will the customer make a decision?  How will we position ourselves to maximize our ability to influence the decision?
• How do we maintain a high sense of urgency to make a decision, to help the customer to move through their buying process quickly and efficiently?  After-all, the real value is in implementing a solution, not pondering it.

These are critical issues that shape what we do and how we pursue the opportunity.  They are things we need to do to maximze our ability to win.  They are only meaningful early in the sales cycle–trying to retrofit these late in the sales cycle is too little too late. 

Don’t get me wrong.  We do have to do reviews of opportunities throughout the sales cycle.  We do have to look at our closing strategies and make sure we are positioned to win.  My only argument is the greatest impact we can have is by developing the strongest strategy early on and executing it with vigor.

As a sales person, how much time do you spend early in the cycle developing your strategy?  Who do you get involved in helping you to develop the highest impact strategy?

As a sales manager, are you biasing your time and reviews to helping your people develop the strongest strategies possible–early in the cycle?

It’s approaching the end of the month and quarter.  Everywhere I turn, people are focused on closing deals– focused on making the quarterly numbers.  I sit in lot of reviews, managers and sales people are focused on deals at the bottom of the funnel.  “How do we close this deal, what do we have to do to win, how do we get it this month?”  The focus seems to be exclusively at the bottom of the funnel.  It’s as though no other opportunity exists.

This month will pass, we’ll enter a new month.  Guess what happens—you’ve got it, the focus is on, “How do we close these deals this month?”  Again, the focus is at the bottom of the funnel–those last ditch things we have to do to close.

I see so many organizations going through this monthly and quarterly struggle—always focused on the deals for this month, always coming from behind, trying to make their numbers.  The problem is, this isn’t where you really win the deals.  We’re at the very end of the sales process–there’s not a whole lot we can do to adjust our strategies to win.  The time we spend trying to figure out how to win the deal in these last phases is almost too little too late.

Deals are won and lost in the discovery phase of the sales/buying process.  This is both where we understand what the customer is trying to achieve, how they will make a decision and what their buying process is.  This is also where we have the greatest ability to shape our strategies for the deal–early in the process we can really look at, “What are all the things we need to do, with who?”  We get to look at what we can do to align with the customer, how to deal with competition, and all sort of other things. The objective is building a strategy that both maximizes the value we create, our differentiation, our ability to win, and compresses the sales cycle.

In coaching deals, we have the greatest impact when we get ahead of things—just after qualification through the discovery cycle, we have lots of flexibility in what we can to to maximizes our impact in helping our people win.   Managers should be biasing their time toward coaching deals in these parts of the sales cycle, yet in most cases, they spend their time where they can have the least impact.

Where are you spending the bulk of your time coaching deals?

Coaching is critical to improving performance–regardless the role we are in.  Professional athletes rely on coaches to improve their performance, to help them achieve things they hadn’t been able to do before.  Musicians, actors, speakers all rely on coaches.  Listen to their conversations, though.  They are different than we might imagine.  These are people who are top performers, they aren’t looking for “the answer.”  At their level of performance, the answers don’t exist–the coaching ends up being a process of discovery–both on the part of the coachee and the coach.  They learn and grow together.

We talk about coaching in business as though it’s a natural thing—but good coaching is really pretty rare.  Most coaching ends up being disguised giving/seeking answers.

In a deal review, a manager listens impatiently—knowing what needs to be done to get the deal done.  After the sales person finishes, the manager says–”You need to do this and that.  Call on these people and present this….”  In a pipeline review, it’s “Some deals are stalling, you should look at this and that.  You need to get more into your pipeline, you should increase your prospecting activities……” 

Managers have all the answers.  We are so used to this kind of coaching, we come to think of this as the norm.  We do what our managers tell us, then we go back, review the outcomes, go back and do it all over again.  Pretty soon, we come to rely on our managers to help us come up with the next steps.  Our managers feel good, needed, and important. 

But this isn’t effective coaching.  Effective coaching is about growth–it’s about discovery.  Effective coaching challenges each of us to look at things differently, to think about new approaches.  Effective coaching increases our independence–we develop new capabilities to assess our strategies, to determine next steps.  We no longer need to go back to our managers for instructions on next steps.  We have the tools and capabilities to think about what we should be doing.

Effective coaching stretches the manager–it requires growth and discovery for the manager.  As we develop the capabilities of our people, as they become increasingly independent, we need to step up our own game.  How do we stretch our people (and ourselves) even further?  What’s the next step in their development?

Effective coaching is not about giving the answers–there’s no growth in that.  Effective coaching is about discovery and growth for both the coach and the coachee.

• As a coach, are you looking to help your people think, discover, and grow?  Or are you giving them the “answers?”
• As a coachee, are you looking to develop your capabilities?  To move your game to a higher level?  Or are you looking for the “answers?”

The difference is important–for both the coach and the coachee.

Follow-Up, a simple concept, but one which too many managers fail to execute.   Yet is is probably one of the most important elements of successful coaching.

When we coach our people, one of the critical elements is establishing the next steps and actions to be taken.  They may be tactical–about a deal, they may be improving the person’s capabilities or performance.  We want to see progress and change. 

But it’s insufficient to drop it there, we need to follow up, both to see  the outcome and to leverage the outcome to reinforce the coaching discussions.  Coaching is an ongoing dialog, we want to continue to reinforce and build on our discussions.  We miss a tremendous opportunity by neglecting to follow up.  Rather than having an ongoing dialog, our coaching becomes a series of isolated discussions, often missing the progress that may or may not have been made.

Too often, managers simply neglect to follow up, more often, they just forget.  Follow up can be easy.  After each meeting, schedule a “To-Do” in your calendar — write a note to your self, schedule the follow – up.  If it’s something tactical, for example, checking the outcome of a meeting or some other activity, write an email to the person, copying yourself, and schedule it for advance delivery.  For example, if there is an important meeting in 10 days, schedule a follow up email for the 11th day–”How did it go?  Let’s talk about what happened.”

Follow up can be simple and easy if we schedule them immediately when we agree upon them with our people.  Follow ups improve the results we get from coaching, they improve our own personal effectiveness.

I’m amazed by many of the discussions I read about sales performance management.  At some point the “bell curve” is introduced, it’s sliced into “A’s, B’s, and C’s.”  Then the discussion focuses on how you shift or bias things to the right (the high performance side) of the bell curve.  There are endless debates about what you do, who you coach, how to hire, where you spend your time, how to maximize performance.  Taken to an extreme, the focus is “get all A’s, then everything is perfect.”

These discussions are good discussions, but the present a relatively static view of the organization, of sales strategies, and of performance management.   In reality, top executives must continue to shift the curve to the right, continuing to raise the bar on performance.  We have to look constantly at improving sales performance, effectiveness, and efficiency.  We must look at constantly improving and innovating, enabling each sales person to continue to grow in their abilities and in their contributions to the business.

Whether it’s “shifting the curve to the right,” or “raising the bar,”  it’s critical for sales executives to focus on this.   Nothing stays the same–what we do must continue to evovle and change.  It’s critical to have a clear picture of where we are moving the organization, and how we will achieve it.  It’s critical to have a establish and execute a plan to “move performance to the right.”  Our goals, strategies, structures, and sales deployment strategies will shift and change.  Our processes, systems, tools need to change to support our goals.  Our hiring profiles, our performance expectations, our metrics, our compensation and incentive systems will change. 

Outstanding performance today, may be just OK tomorrow, and unacceptable the day after.  Today’s “A’s,” may become tomorrow’s “B’s” unless we are coaching them and developing them to support our future needs.  Likewise for “B’s and C’s.”  We can’t afford not to address these performance issues today, because they will become bigger challenges in the future.

• What are you doing to shift the curve to the right?
• What does this mean for your strategies, organizational models, priorities, and programs?
• What does this mean for the skills and capabilities of your people?  Do you have the right people?  Do you need different people?  Have you changed your recruiting profiles?  What are you doing to prepare your people to shift to the right?
• Do you have the right processes, systems, and tools to support this shift and your people? 
• Do you have the right performance expectations, metrics, and incentives?
• Do your people understand the “shift?”  Do they understand their role?  Do they understand your expectations? Have they bought into it?
• What are you doing to coach and develop your people do drive the shift?  What are you doing with those that can’t?

Life and business never stands still.  We must constantly change and improve.  Are you shifting your curve to the right?