Effectiveness And Efficiency Are Not Natural, But They Are Learnable

Every organization continues to focus on how to drive the highest levels of performance.  Broadly, there are two primary areas that drive performance:  Effectiveness And Efficiency.

Effectiveness focuses on “Are we doing the right things with the right people at the right time?” A lot of sales training focuses on improving our effectiveness.  For example, are we engaging our customers in a way that’s relevant and impactful?  Are we chasing the right opportunities, qualifying them, executing our sales process well, are we maximizing our impact in each interaction with the customer, are we maximizing our share of account, are we creating value in every interaction with our customers?

Efficiency focuses on getting the most done in the least amount of time.  As we get more experience, we refine our approaches, understanding the things that are essential, eliminating a lot that’s not.  We leverage systems, tools, and technology to drive our efficiency.  We focus on velocity, sales cycle times, activity levels.  As we get more efficient, we ramp quantity to drive growth.

It’s important to recognize effectiveness must precede efficiency.  Efficiency doesn’t discriminate between great and bad execution, it just focuses on helping us do what we do in far less time.  As a result, if we have the potential of creating crap at the speed of light.

As we look at being more effective and efficient, we have to recognize these are not natural things.  They are actually the result of analysis, purposeful practice, and continued learning.

I think, at times, we make mistakes when we look at high performers, thinking their success comes naturally.  Every high performer I’ve met or studied has achieved their success as a result of constant learning, experimentation, and continued improvement.  All have experienced failures of varying degrees, learning from those failures and improving.

Effectiveness, efficiency, high performance are not natural.  Being effective and efficient, achieving the highest levels of performance are the result of constant learning, execution, and improvement.