Becoming Efficiently Ineffective

Selling has an obsession with efficiency! We want to eliminate any wasted time. We want to eliminate wasted efforts. We want to automate as much as we can. All this done in service of freeing up time to focus on the tasks that cannot be automated.

We have been doing this for years, leveraging new processes and methodologies, segmenting and specializing jobs, providing layers of technology (which, inadvertently, provide huge diversions from our core responsibilities). We are embracing AI, mostly not because it can help us be better, but because it helps us become more efficient.

And in all this push to efficiency, we are becoming far less effective. Results, based on any measure are plummeting. Percent of sellers achieving quota is on a sharp decline–and not because of the economy. Employee engagement/satisfaction has plummeted. Burnout is rampant. All this time we have been freeing up to engage customers more impactfully, has had the opposite effect; buyers prefer a rep-free environment–largely because sellers aren’t helping them where they most need help. Cost per order dollar is skyrocketing

Yet, our headlong rush in embracing efficiency as priority number 1 continues, unabated, accelerating with each new trick, technology, gimmick.

Yesterday, I was listening to a webinar led by a number of CROs. Since it was sponsored by a vendor, one would expect much of the focus would be on how the vendor’s tools help improve results. One CRO outlined something I hear too often, “Now our sales people don’t have to waste 30 minutes a day entering data in CRM, it’s done automatically for us!”

But I think this argument and example is very illustrative of the misguided thinking we have about efficiency and effectiveness. One would conclude the primary goal of this activity is a data entry activity. While that’s important, most of these CROs never think about, the primary goal of this activity is the opportunity it gives us to reflect, think, analyze, learn, and determine next steps.

I would never give up that 30 minutes, because as I capture that information in our CRM, the act of doing this forces me to think about what has happened, what progress has been made, where there are challenges, and what I might do to help my customers move forward.

Likewise, I have many tools that automatically generate “to-do” lists for me. But the most valuable 20-30 minutes of every morning is the time I spend handwriting my priorities for the day. Again, the goal is less the list, but the thinking that went behind generating the list. “What am I trying to achieve, why is it important, what is the best way to go about getting it done, what happens if I don’t get it done, what might stand in the way of my ability to get it done, what are the 3 most important things that I must absolutely get done first?”

All the tools and list generators don’t provide me those insights or that thought process. They just provide lists with no context. The activity of checking the boxes of completed tasks, becomes the goal.

We have endless tools to make us more efficient. They provide us scripts, they provide alerts, they provide summaries of what’s happened to a customer, and so forth. But they don’t provide us the insight about, “What does this mean, how do we learn and take action?”

So while we are very efficient in entering data into CRM, with out to-dos, with our research and data, we are increasingly ineffective in leveraging these because we don’t know what it means and we lack the ability to figure out what to do about it.

For the past couple of decades, we have, increasingly, sought to mechanize selling. We have have leveraged manufacturing principles as models for selling efficiency. Yet we have not learned the lessons that highly effective manufacturer’s learned at least 70-80 years ago. In the face of high variability, we need deeply knowledgeable people who can apply critical thinking and problem solving skills to maximize the quality and volume produced.

Sadly, we seem to have lost our way. We have lost sight of why we seek to free up seller time and make them more efficient. The goal is not efficiency, the goal is to help them become more effective. And in a highly variable environment–where each situation, each customer, each individual in the buying group is different. And each of these change very dynamically, we are failing to respond to these.

We are not developing our people’s capabilities to better understand–not just the data, but the dynamics of the human beings making the decision. Our people don’t have the ability to figure things out, to adapt as things change, to think critically and to help our customers and each other solve problems.

In our quest for efficiency, we’ve lost the understanding of how people learn, how people adapt, how people understand and change. We adopt tools and efficiency mantras to save time, yet people don’t understand the underlying meaning.

We’ve ignored decades of research about how people learn, grow, and adapt. We’ve lost sight of the purpose of many of the tools and technologies we have (for example, the purpose of CRM is not to make sure we have all the data, but it’s to help people become much more effective in thinking about what they are doing, how they are setting their priorities, how they are navigating they buying/selling process, etc. The icing on the cake, if people do this, is that we also have great data about our customers and activities.

I’ve long said, one of the dangers we have with many of our efforts in efficiency is that we have the ability to create crap at the speed of light. In that, it appears we are succeeding beyond our wildest dreams.